Tag: Video Game Character

Nick Vrenna

image of a bionic looking person with claws and a big gun body is green with some armoring and a brown helmet with one big slit. he seems to be posing in a sci looking corridor thats currently on fire

The game Abuse is a run n gun 2d platformer published by EA for MS-DOS. The game featured the character Nick Vrenna fighting through hordes of monsters who are former inmates of a prison he was wrongfully sent to. Some expirment goes haywire that turned everyone into monsters except Nick who is immune now he’s trying to stop the local water supply from being infected in the same manner.

Abuse was developed by Crackdotcom, who in 1997 released the game into the public domain along with releasing the source code. The only thing not public domain was the sound effect as they did not own those.

Crackdotcom would go out of business around the same time and likely what prompted the release of Abuse into the public domain.They had another project that was cancelled around the same time which most likely contributed.

It’s got a cult following despite having that 90s edginess to it and obviously involving abuse as like its central focus albeit it doesnt really go much further than the lab experiments from what i gather.

Notes

  • The sound effects are not public domain as those were not owned by Crackdotcom.
  • The original creators do retain a trademark for “Abuse” for video games and was why the game Alien Abuse on iOS caused a release of Abuse Classic by the owner of the trademark to force it to get taken down.

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MissingNo

image of a glitchy sprite composed of black,beige, purple and white squares in the shape of a key

MissingNo or Missing Number is a glitch appearing in the Pokemon franchise. First appearing in Pokemon Red & Blue in 1996. The glitch has become infamous for both its use in duplicating items in the game but also for corrupting data in the game.

The glitch occurs because the game is trying to access data that isn’t there in the buffer that would tell the game what wild pokemon to encounter and the edge of Cinnabar Island has no data for that buffer.

Its data classifies it as a “Bird” type pokemon, an unused type in the game.

Notes

  • Bugs aren’t inherently characters and not made by humans therefore are not bound by copyright. The name Missingno is in the code but it’s just short for Missing Number.
    • The UK and Hong Kong give some protection for computer generated imagery for 50 years after its creation, which in the case of MissingNo would be 2047 but that only applies to the image shown here to the right not the concept of MissingNo itself. Outside of those places it should be fine.
  • Pokemon is obviously copyrighted and trademarked so Missingno can only be used if its association with the franchise is filed off such as its cry being that of a Nidoran male.

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