★ QUADEE ENTERTAINMENT ★

Quadee Entertainment — Company History

[ SOURCE: company_history.doc — recovered 2023-08-14 — partial corruption noted ]

The Beginning (1994)

Dennis Quadee was 24 and working at a copy shop when he wrote the first 400 lines of what would become Void Racer on a borrowed 486DX. His younger brother Carl, still in high school, designed the sprites on graph paper. They shipped the game on floppy disk through a mail-order catalog. It sold 312 copies. Dennis called this a “massive success.”

By spring of 1994, they had incorporated as Quadee Entertainment Inc., rented a two-room office in Sacramento, and hired one contractor: a sound designer named Margot Ellis, who composed the entire Void Racer soundtrack on a Casio MT-500.

The Catalog (1994–1998)

The Downfall (1999)

In early 1999, Dennis became convinced that Y2K would render all consumer computers non-functional. He liquidated the company's assets, donated the office equipment to a Sacramento middle school, and moved to a cabin outside of Placerville with a generator and 400 cans of soup. Carl, who did not share this view, moved to Portland and became an accountant.

The company's final internal memo, dated December 28, 1999, reads in its entirety:

“If you are reading this, it means the computers still work. Good for you.”
— Dennis Quadee

Recovery Effort

The disks were found in 2023. Most of the source code was unrecoverable. However, two playable executables survived. Their locations within this archive are... known to those who look carefully.

[ ARCHIVIST NOTE: The footer copyright year on the home page is incorrect. It reflects an internal build date, not the public release year. Cross-reference with /1994/ for context. ]