Quartex
Top of the charts, and on the radar
Quartex were a top-ranked Amiga cracking group of the late 1980s — and a reminder of the scene's real stakes, with members caught up in police busts on two continents.
Overview
Quartex formed in the summer of 1988 and quickly reached the top of the Amiga cracking scene, voted the number-one group in the first Eurochart at the end of 1989. Like their rivals, they fronted releases with cracktros and competed ferociously for the first crack of each new game.
Quartex also illustrate why the scene lived behind handles. Cracking was piracy, and Quartex felt the consequences: the group’s US figures were reported caught by police in 1989, and several French members were swept up in a 1991 bust. The line of people moving between Quartex, Paradox, Crystal, and the breakaway Nemesis shows how fluid — and how precarious — the top of the scene could be.
Fast facts
- Founded: summer 1988.
- Platform: Amiga (later handhelds).
- Peak: Voted #1 in the first Eurochart (1989).
- Reality check: Members caught in police busts in the US and France.
The stakes behind the handle
Quartex’s run is a useful counterweight to the romance of the scene. The cracktros and chart placings were real, but so were the raids. The anonymity that looks like style in a scrolltext was, for groups like Quartex, also a thin and sometimes inadequate shield — context for why so many sceners never put a real name to their handle.