"Cracking the Conspiracy" includes QuickTime on the CD.
Look in the QT folder on the CD for the QuickTime installers.
However the game uses QuickTime 2.12 which won't work on current versions of Windows outside of a Virtual machine. You'll either need an old computer with Windows 95/98 (possibly XP would work, though I've never had luck running QuickTime 2 on XP), or you'd need to play the game in a Virtual machine with Windows 95 or 98 installed (which is harder than it used to be thanks to increased computer speeds, hardware virtualization defaults, virtualization software dropping support of Windows 95/98, and Microsoft disallowing installation of VirtualPC on Windows 8 and 10).
Is there a way to tell if a game company goes out of Business.
That's actually irrelevant.
A big company won't support games for Windows 95/98 anyway.
Only a few independent developers, like MDNA games (Carol Reed) will support their older games (made for Windows 95 or 98 or even XP) on new versions of Windows.
So if a game is on disc and was published in the 1990's, you can safely assume you can't play that version on a new computer without using a virtual machine like Virtual PC or VMware Player -- or in some cases DOSBox or ScummVM (which work better when they work).
and what games not to purchase for this reason.
Games that were made for Windows 95/98 and are on CD.
Unless you can get someone to configure a Virtual machine for you, you'll never get it working on a Windows 7/8/10 computer.
Cracking the Conspiracy was a good game -- much better designed than a lot of current releases. It's too bad you're giving up on it, but unless you have someone to help you get it running in a Virtual machine, it doesn't sound like that's something you're willing or able to do yourself.