revision 1.1 - 22 September, 2005

The PTL Club was an old school PC cracking group from the early days. They didn't have dedicated suppliers, rather people would just upload uncracked titles to one of their boards and they would crack it and then release it sharing the credit.

PTL seem to have been the major player in the North Eastern USA scene during the late 80's and even teamed up with the Toronto based group Canadian Pirates Inc to co-release. They shared a number of releases but then CPI changed their name to KGB and PTL Club was back on it's own again. The group in November of 1989 joined up with a number of other localised groups and freelance crackers to form the consortium Triad.

The name is a parody of the religious TV show 'Praise The Lord Club' and it never stood for 'Pirates That Lived'


Quoted from 'Church Chat Volume 4' by The Spiker

Many people have been asking me what PTL really stands for and about the history of PTL... PTL has no special meaning whatsoever, since it is not an acronym. It is a parody off of the REAL PTL Club... PTL started out with 5 members.. The members were: Me, Bad Brains, Death Star, The Hermit, and Rambo. The Hermit and Rambo dropped out when PTL first started getting going. Mr. Transistor joined us and his first crack was Marble Madness which many people seemed to think was almost impossible to crack at the time. Death Star seemed to fade away after my last major board crash before summer or during summer. I'm not really sure exactly when since my 286 is a piece of shit and is always having Hard Drive crashes or system problems... Oh yes I almost forgot.. Somewhere along the lines, we merged with CPI [Canadian Pirates Inc.] I believe was their acronym at first.. And then they changed to KGB.. KGB released a few cracks under PTL but seemed to fade away... They cracked that I can think of [BoulderDash Construction Kit, Ultima I, and Might & Magic]. There are more I am sure but I can not think of them right now. Sometime after Death Star was lost, Specular Vision joined PTL.. He has cracked a couple things that I can think of [BattleHawks 1942, The Train, and Space Station Oblivion].. He has probably done more but I do not have the titles handy. Now, last but not least... We have just gotten Jenetic Bytemare who's cracks that I know of are listed at the beginning of this file......

I still get a lot of questions asking me about Mr. Transistor, and I thought I had cleared them up BUT I guess not. He did not die in a plane crash, he just retired from modeming.. The Grand Elusion and Mr. T are NOT the same person in anyway, shape, or form. But Mr. T did not truly die, and is glad to see that PTL is keeping up the tradition that we had when he was around.

Sites included:
Anarchy Burger II
Myth Inc
Dimension X
Swashbuckler's II [416]
The Vortex
The Cell Block
Gallifrey
Plutonium Mines [716]
The Iron Curtin

Members included:
The Spiker, Bad Brains, Death Star, The Hermit, Rambo, Mr. Transistor, Specular Vision, Jenetic Bytemare, The Grand Elusion, Claude Rains, The Prophet, Desert Foxx, The Shadow, Bad Brains, Cyfer

Group Timeline
PTL Club (1987) arrow PTL Club/CPI (1988) arrow PTL Club/KGB (1988) arrow Triad (1989)