Collusion

Collusion Corp. was a multinational computer software company. Originally founded in Greyson City, [REDACTED] in the United States in 1989, the company moved its operations to Colerain, Centralia in 1992. The company was best known for the Collective software suite, which was composed of its lineup of productivity and creative tools.

Most notably, it was also intent on using its software as a means of gaining power in the industry, and was expressly specified as such in its advertising. Farley Frederick Fairchild, the company's founder, was feared among his contemporaries in the software business for his frequent business meetings with a coven of hacker goblins on the outskirts of Colerain; additionally, dozens of reports of Collusion-branded software replacing competing products from vendors like Polyphemus and Pueblo on users' computers without warning were published in newspapers like The Greyson Gazette and The Havensborough Herald, among others.

Despite its reputation, the undeniable quality of Collusion's products made the company profitable throughout the early and mid 1990s, both in Centralia and the United States; upon the close of the decade, however, the fortunes of the company had crumbled. The discovery of stolen code within multiple products in the Collective suite by reporter Isaac Fortesque for the Gazette in February 1997 would bring about the company's downfall; elements of software from Polyphemus and Soothsayer products led the competitors to file a CTD $32 billion lawsuit, which was ruled in their favor by March 1998. News of the lawsuit incited a mass exodus of users to Pueblo's equivalent Fortress suite, which by then had achieved a level of parity in software and features that allowed many to make a lateral move.

As part of the terms of the suit, Collusion would discontinue the entirety of the Collective in May 1998; without its flagship products to offer and with an irreparably hurt brand, the company's attempts at further products saw adoption rates far too low to keep the organization afloat, leading to hundreds of layoffs. Combined with the company's failure to pay taxes to the Centralian government and revelations of fraudulent practices within the organization, the firm filed for bankruptcy in November 1998. By September 1999 all of the company's viable assets had been sold to its competitors; Collusion as a whole was defunct by December. Many ex-Collusion software engineers would go on to form the software company Chromatica Corp. in August 1998; Chromatica became the software subsidiary of Omnivius Industries in 2001, and has been entirely integrated into the Omnivius brand since then.

Products

• The Collective:
  • Enigma: a raster-based photo editing and digital art application.
  • Conundrum: a vectoring application, used largely for the creation of digital art.
  • Secret: a desktop publishing application.
  • Magic: a professional video editor.
  • Aftershock: an animation and game development application.

• LeprechaunMail: A mail server intended for use by leprechauns. Currently developed by AlicornSystems.

• ChirpChirp: An instant messaging client. Currently developed by Alicorn.

• Tuney: a music player and media management app. Purchased by Chromatica in 1999; currently developed as "Boxey" by Omnivius.
• Sense: a digital audio workstation, initially intended for inclusion in the Collective but removed after its initial release. Currently developed by Pueblo.

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