Today's Public Domain Character: Nick Vrenna
[ID: image of a bionic looking person with claws and a big gun body is green with some armoring and a brown helmet with one big slit. he seems to be posing in a sci looking corridor thats currently on fire END ID]
Rarer case of a video game character who is public domain. The game Abuse is a run n gun 2d platformer published by EA for MS-DOS. The game featured the character Nick Vrenna fighting through hordes of monsters who are former inmates of a prison he was wrongfully sent to. Some expirment goes haywire that turned everyone into monsters except Nick who is immune now he's trying to stop the local water supply from being infected in the same manner.
Abuse was developed by Crackdotcom, who in 1997 released the game into the public domain along with releasing the source code. The only thing not public domain was the sound effect as they did not own those.
Crackdotcom would go out of business around the same time and likely what prompted the release of Abuse into the public domain.They had another project that was cancelled around the same time which most likely contributed.
It's got a cult following despite having that 90s edginess to it and obviously involving abuse as like its central focus albeit it doesnt really go much further than the lab experiments from what i gather.
More info here via the wayback machine. If you wanna play the game I reccomend this fanmade port of it found on github.