The devastation wrought in the year 2038 is a distant memory, but the changes in liability laws for software defects remain. When the astroid mining station Apate suffers an inexplicable airlock failure, it falls to the neutral arbiter (you) to determine whether it was gross negligence, an act of god, or murder.
Fatal Core Dump is an interactive mystery where you must debug a real binary application to reconstruct why it failed.
Solving this mystery requires a knowledge of:
Don't know all of these things? No problem! Some assistance is available to get you started learning what you'll need to know. You can even use a web VM to avoid needing to install any tools on your PC: WebVM instructions.
While some of the details may be contrived, this project uses real code compiled for a real system (gcc (Ubuntu 11.4.0-1ubuntu1~22.04.2) 11.4.0).
No important information is hidden in the HTML. The answers can be trivially found by looking at the page source, so don't look unless you want spoilers.
If you want to skip some of the set dressing and get straight to the code and debug artifacts:
For a spoiler filled walk through the process of making this game, see:
https://www.robopenguins.com/core-dump-game/