A few years ago, I wrote about how much I liked crack (the word). The basic reason why was that it has a wide range of definitions that cover a lot of seemingly unrelated territory, without many clear indicators of how the different definitions might be connected to one another.
In that post, I listed off many such definitions, from "crack" as in "fissure" to "crack" as in "a joke". But one slangier usage I didn't talk about is "cracked" in gamer-speak, where it means something like "awesome" or "unbeatable" ("That strategy is totally cracked!").
In fairness, I did talk about "crack" is in "elite" -- "crack troops guarded the valley" -- which is pretty close to the slang usage.
But I would bet significant money that, despite their similarity, "cracked" in gamer lingo doesn't derive from this adjacent "crack" dictionary definition.
Rather, my guess is that the gamer meaning comes from "cracked" as in "unlocked", possibly as in saying that the awesome player "solved the puzzle of the game", but more likely from an older hacker usage: a game is "cracked" when a pirate successfully removes the DRM and distributes it. Doing this successfully was considered quite a praiseworthy achievement in some gaming circles, and it seems likely that it migrated from there to the slang usage today.
But isn't that interesting? A contemporary slang usage of a word, that is at least adjacent if not identical to a "regular" dictionary definition of that same word, but whose entrance into the lexicon probably has nothing to do with this parallel definition.
That's cracked!
