Crack intro

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A crack intro, also known as a cracktro, loader, or just intro, is a small introduction sequence added to cracked software. It aims to inform the user which "cracking crew" or individual cracker removed the software's copy protection and distributed the crack. Many people who did the actual cracking did this competitively. They even credited themselves alongside the software publisher's name in their custom cracktro screens. Warez groups began to add their own intros instead of modifying the existing loading screen. Names of the group's members would scroll as little animations. Intros became more complicated and sometimes as large as the game itself. It had to look good to impress viewers as well as peers, and sometimes the result was more impressive than the game itself. They first appeared on Apple II computer in the late 1970s or early 1980s. The early text screens in many ways resemble graffiti, although they invaded the private sphere and not the public space. In 1985 the Dutch teams The 1001 Crew, programmers from the city of Alkmaar, and The Judges started adding intro demos, challenging others to match theirs. Dozens of demo crews formed within a year to try and do just that.

These first appeared on ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC games that were distributed around the world via Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes) and floppy disk copying. Initially the intros consisted of simple messages, but they grew progressively more complex as they became a medium to demonstrate the purported superiority of a cracking group. Even the commercially available ISEPIC cartridge, which produced memory dumps of copy-protected Commodore 64 software, added a custom crack intro to the snapshots it produced.

Crack intros became more sophisticated on more advanced systems such as the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST, as well as some IBM PC clone systems with sound cards.

As a result, crack intros began to feature big colourful effects, music, and scrollers. Cracking groups would use the intros not just to gain credit for cracking, but to advertise their BBSes, greet friends, and gain themselves recognition. Messages were frequently of a vulgar nature, and on some occasions made threats of violence against software companies or the members of some rival crack-group.

Crack-intro programming eventually became an art form in its own right, and people started coding intros without attaching them to a crack just to show off how well they could program. This practice evolved into the demoscene.

Crack intros that use chiptunes live on As of 2018 in the form of background music for small programs intended to remove the software protection on commercial and shareware software that has limited or dumbed-down capabilities. Sometimes this is simply in the form of a program that generates a software package's serial number, usually referred to as a keygen. These chiptunes are now still accessible as downloadable musicdisks or musicpacks.

Video Crack intro

See also

• Demoscene
• Warez scene
• Chiptune
• Replay: The History of Video Games - The book describes the Dutch demo making as a major influence on video games in the 1980s.

Maps Crack intro

References

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Further reading

• Reunanen, Markku; Wasiak, Patryk; Botz, Daniel (2015). "Crack Intros: Piracy, Creativity and Communication". International Journal of Communication. 9: 798-817. ISSN 1932-8036. 
• Patryk Wasiak, 'Illegal Guys'. A History of Digital Subcultures in Europe during the 1980s, in: Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History, Online-Ausgabe, 9 (2012), H. 2
• Borzyskowski, George (November 1996). "The Hacker Demo Scene and Its Cultural Artifacts" (PDF). Curtin University of Technology.  Read online: http://www.scheib.net/play/demos/what/borzyskowski/.
• Hastik, Canan; Steinmetz, Arnd (2012a): Demoscene Artists and Community. In Bours, Patrick; Humm, Bernhard; Loew, Robert; Stengel, Ingo; Walsh, Paul (eds.): Proceedings of CERC 2012, pp. 43-48.
• Driscoll, Kevin; Diaz, Joshua (2009): Endless Loop: A Brief History of Chiptunes. Transformative Works and Cultures 9, 2009.
• Reunanen, Markku (2014-04-15). "How Those Crackers Became Us Demosceners". WiderScreen (1-2). 
• "Demoszene: Hollywood in 64 Kilobyte" (MP4). Elektrische Reporter (in German). 2008-12-05. 

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External links

• World of C64 Crackintros - A large collection of C64 cracktros in native "prg" file format (supported by most C64 emulators)
• Defacto2 - Hundreds of cracktros, loaders and installers for the PC
• Amiga Music Preservation - Thousands of cracktros in all tracker formats.
• Chiptune.com - A chiptune dedicated website containing thousands of chiptunes from Amiga and other formats. The website itself emulates the Amiga Workbench 1.3.
• THE AMIGA CRACKTRO MARATHRON - A large back-to-back collection of Amiga cracktros.

Source of article : Wikipedia