Six Feet Under is an underrated and quite obscure game made in 1994 by EnQue Software for Windows 3.1 and up which I've known since my childhood. My dad probably got it from one of those shareware compilation CDs and I played the hell out of it. It's a nice Boulderdash clone with 256 color graphics and MIDI music that not many people know and for me it holds a high sentimental value well beyond its simple gameplay.

Back in the mid 90s I was discovering the wonders of computing on my dad's PC, trying out every piece of software I could get my hands on, especially video games. When this game came along I found out that it's assets were stored in easily accessible formats - MIDI music, WAV sound effects, BMP graphics, and the levels were stored in plain text files containing the level's parameters and the layout using two letter codes for the objects. I studied the code, came up with an item table and spent countless afternoons designing and making my own levels in MS-DOS EDIT by manually typing the codes. I would also modify the graphics in MSPaint and swap the music/sound effects to create my own version of the game which I would then show off to friends and family. Most of them were quite impressed by the fact that I modified the game in a way that it was not meant to, I had a great time designing and playing my own levels and I think that those little things got me interested more and more into technology and made me who I am today. 😁

Unfortunately my only accessible backup media as a kid were low quality 3.5" floppies which became unreadable in the early 2000s when I got my own computer. I sketched my level designs on the very last pages of my school notebooks, which got thrown away as I grew up. 😢

Back to the present, the game is shareware and it came with 25 levels, with the promise of 25 more levels by registering and entering the "Gold Key", those extra levels are included with the shareware version but they seem to be encrypted. Thing is, this game is pretty unknown. I've never knew of anybody who played or knew of this game without me introducing it to them, so I was never able to see the registered version back then. Throughout the 2000s I've been looking for more information about it but the death metal band and the TV show with the same name have made the quest of finding stuff about this underdog a real nightmare.

Every couple of years I get the bug back and I start searching the web in hopes of finding more information. This time I was focused on getting the registered version so I started to look for EnQue Software to see if I could still buy it from them, and I came up with this:

From the Artist's formerly known as EnQue Software

Their long-forgotten website, apparently they went out of business in 1997 and they decided to sell the rights to their software.

To all the PC gaming enthusiasts around here, have you ever played this game? Did you know of anyone who had the registered version? Any other experiences you might share with a fellow gamer?
Has anyone had contact with EnQue software in the past? To me it's sad that they went out of business so long ago and I've never been able to see the full game anywhere, let alone get it, and now I have no way to thank/reward its creator. I wonder if they ever managed to sell the rights to their software titles to anyone. Also what are your thoughts on situations like these, where the publisher disappears and the game is so little known that it's essentially lost forever?