Crack Attack! — Back From The Stack

Swap blocks, chain clears, bury your opponent under garbage.
The classic puzzle game, rewritten in Rust, with music that follows the pressure on your stack.
In the tradition of Nintendo's Panel de Pon, Tetris Attack and Pokémon Puzzle League.

A fast puzzle game: swap blocks, line up three or more of the same color, chain clears together and bury your opponent under garbage. This is a Rust rewrite of Crack Attack! (Daniel R. Nelson, 2000–2006), with a WebGPU renderer and SDL3. During a game, the music adapts to the pressure on your stack.

• Three ways to play: solo, versus the computer (three difficulty levels) and versus another player on your local network (automatic discovery or manual address), with a network ranking.
• Keyboard and gamepad: fully navigable menus, rebindable controls.
• Eleven languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Russian, Turkish, Simplified Chinese, Japanese and Korean (all but English and French are new in this beta: corrections are welcome).

Download

Ready-to-run packages for Windows, macOS and Linux are on the Releases page, each as an installer and as a plain archive (unpack it anywhere and run it). Both contain the game and all its data.

• Windows — crackattack-<version>-windows-x86_64-setup.exe installs the game for your user (no administrator rights), with a Start menu entry and an uninstaller; or unpack crackattack-<version>-windows-x86_64.zip and run crackattack.exe. Requires a graphics card and driver that support DirectX 12 or Vulkan. Windows SmartScreen may warn the first time, as the program is not signed: click More info, then Run anyway.

• macOS — crackattack-<version>-macos-arm64.dmg: open it and drag Crack Attack into Applications (or unpack the .zip), or install it with Homebrew: brew install --cask thiosaur/tap/crackattack. Apple Silicon, macOS 11 or later. The application is not signed by Apple, so macOS blocks it the first time:

  • macOS 15 or later: open Crack Attack.app once, then go to System Settings → Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway;
  • macOS 14 or earlier: right-click (or Control-click) Crack Attack.app, choose Open, then confirm;
  • or, from a terminal (adjust the path if the app is elsewhere): xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/Crack Attack.app"

  Afterwards it opens normally.

• Linux — crackattack-<version>-linux-x86_64.AppImage: make it executable (chmod +x, or in the file properties) and run it; or unpack crackattack-<version>-linux-x86_64.tar.gz and run ./crackattack. Uses the usual desktop libraries (ALSA, X11 or Wayland) already present on most distributions.

To update, just download the new package: your settings, scores and network ranking live in your user folder, not in the package (see Your data).

How to play

• Move the cursor with the arrow keys (gamepad: D-pad or left stick).
• Swap the two blocks under the cursor with Space (gamepad: bottom face button, A / Cross).
• Line up 3 or more blocks of the same color, horizontally or vertically, to clear them.
• Clears that cascade make chains; several lines at once make combos. Both send garbage to your opponent.
• Hold Enter (gamepad: left face button, X / Square) to raise the stack faster.
• If the stack reaches the top, you lose.

P (gamepad: Start) pauses, Escape goes back, F12 saves a screenshot. All gameplay controls can be changed in Options → Keyboard and Options → Gamepad.

Network play

VS Network finds other players on the same local network automatically (mDNS) and lets you invite them; you can also connect to an address directly. The game listens on TCP port 45678 (or the next free one): allow it in your firewall if invitations do not arrive. Both players need compatible versions; the game tells you if they are not.

Update check

Packages downloaded from the Releases page check once a day whether a newer version has been published. The check is a single HTTPS request to the GitHub API (api.github.com/repos/…/releases/latest) sent with the user agent crackattack/<version>; only the version number in the reply is used. Nothing is ever downloaded or installed: when a newer version exists, a line in the menu links to the download page.

• About → Updates (the ⓘ entry of the main menu) shows the installed version and the result of the last check; Check now checks on demand, and unticking Check for updates turns the daily check off.
• Builds from source, and packages made by distributions or stores, do not check at all.

Your data

Settings, scores and controls are stored in state.json, the network ranking in ladder.json, and the log of the last two sessions in crackattack.log (send it when you report a problem). They are in:

System	Folder
Linux	~/.config/crack-attack/
macOS	~/Library/Application Support/crack-attack/
Windows	%APPDATA%\crack-attack\

Building from source

Requirements: Rust through rustup (it installs the compiler version pinned in rust-toolchain.toml; the minimum supported version is 1.85), CMake and a C compiler (SDL3 is built from source and linked statically).

• macOS — Xcode Command Line Tools (xcode-select --install) and CMake (brew install cmake).
• Windows — Visual Studio Build Tools (MSVC) and CMake.
• Linux (Debian/Ubuntu) — sudo apt install cmake build-essential pkg-config libasound2-dev libx11-dev libxext-dev libxrandr-dev libxcursor-dev libxfixes-dev libxi-dev libxss-dev libxtst-dev libxkbcommon-dev libwayland-dev wayland-protocols libdecor-0-dev libegl1-mesa-dev libgles2-mesa-dev libdrm-dev libgbm-dev libdbus-1-dev libudev-dev

cargo run --release -p crackattack-webgpu

Run it from the repository root (or next to an assets/ folder) so that the game finds its data. cargo test --workspace runs the test suite. To build without the update check: cargo build --release -p crackattack-webgpu --no-default-features --features native.

The workspace also contains crackattack-terminal, a text renderer that plays in a terminal (cargo run -p crackattack-terminal).

Feedback

Found a bug? Open an issue. Feedback, questions, ideas or memories of the original game are welcome in Discussions.

Credits

• The original Crack Attack! (2000–2006): created by Daniel R. Nelson (@AluminumAngel); developed and maintained by R. Andrew Sayman (@gnu-lorien), with Kevin Webb. Its C++ source code is at gnu-lorien/crack-attack. The full list of copyright holders is in AUTHORS.
• This edition — Back From The Stack: Rust / WebGPU rewrite (2.x) by Thiosaur.
• Images, sound effects, music and fonts: origin and license of every file in crackattack-webgpu/assets/CREDITS.md. The music is based on "Les Crapauds" (Victor Meusy, 1897, public domain).
• Libraries: wgpu, SDL3, egui, rodio and the other crates listed in Cargo.lock. Their licenses are collected in THIRD-PARTY-LICENSES.html, shipped with every release.

License

Crack Attack! is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. See LICENSE.

The original Crack Attack! 1.1.14 is licensed under the GPL version 2 or later, which allows this derivative work to use version 3. The source code of each release is the tagged commit of this repository, with its Cargo.lock.