History of the Hairy Hackers Haunt!

Hairy Hacker coding bright,
In the darkness of the night,
As thou peer, deep to see
Magic pokes in disassembly.

Not a squat orange vacuum cleaner and not a minicomputer from DEC, Vax was the enigmatic and eponymous entity nominally in charge of The Hairy Hacker's Haunt, the ever so slightly eccentric monthly game cheats section in Amstrad Computer User (ACU) magazine. The column ran from May 1986 until the magazine's closure in May 1992 and appeared in all but three issues during that time. Each month Vax would present cheats and hacks for the latest and greatest CPC games sent in by enterprising readers, along with stories about his cats and one-liners like "Don't eat yellow snow". HHH, as it became to be known, was a little bit weird, but I thought it was fun!

My first ever successful hack was a tape-to-disq transfer program for the game Spindizzy, which, impressively enough, was written without the aid of an assembler or disassembler by writing machine code directly in hexadecimal - hardcore! Unfortunately this program also removed the copy protection from the game and therefore could not be published for "legal reasons", so it was banished to the "Black Folder for after the Revolution". Sadly, we're still waiting for that revolution. My first publishable hack came in October 1988: Gothik from Firebird got infinite magic thingies.
 
I was now one of the small bunch of people who could do this sort of thing, and it was a proud day when I bought that copy of ACU with the first of my pokes published in the hallowed Hairy Hacker's Haunt for the world to see.

Over the next couple of years I improved and refined my CPC hacking skills and became a regular contributor to the Hairy Hacker's Haunt. In fact, I became a very regular contributor and, more than once, the entire HHH section was taken up by my pokes alone! The height of my fame, however, had got to be when the March 1990 column was actually titled "Groovin' with Girvin"...