Their anonymity, coupled with the slightly disturbing inscrutability of the whole thing really add to its mystique. That being said, I hope we never find out who did this. Bryce, the engineer behind these adverts, uses the wonderful line, 'I only invent the bomb, I dont drop it. They were advertisements that make old people watching them explode. The $100,000 fine and year in prison they would have incurred are well past the statute of limitations, so our hackers would face no ill consequences for coming forward all these years later. These were part of the fictional subject matter of the first Max Headroom TV Show. To this day, the perpetrators have never been brought to justice, if we can call it that. This one was longer and included soundbites that could be made out and even ended with a butt shot. Two hours later, it happened again on PBS during a showing of Doctor Who. After a little over a minute of rambling, the broadcast cut to our host getting spanked with a fly swatter by someone off-camera, in tastefully safe-for-work fashion, I might add. During the sports portion of the news on WGN that evening, the signal suddenly switched to a person wearing a Max Headroom mask with a swiveling panel behind the figure and distorted audio. The first intrusion occurred during the sports segment of Chicago's WGN-TV newscast and lasted for about 25 seconds. And the more you read about the hack, the stranger it gets. Our masked bandit of the airwaves proceeded to make cryptic and borderline unintelligible pronouncements referencing pop culture and Chicago broadcasting while someone in the background rotated a corrugated metal sheet back and forth to imitate Max Headroom's signature digital backdrop. From a modern perspective, the Max Headroom hack looks like a scene from a hacker flick like Mr.

For just a couple of minutes, the odd TV character Max Headroom appeared. It was a simpler time, I suppose (Image credit: User Gia Luchiano on Youtube) In 1987, a very strange broadcast intrusion occurred in the city of Chicago.

Max headroom intrusion