“I probably wouldn’t say anything,” he said with a laugh, “because I don’t want them to do it again.” I asked Swirsky what he would say to the Max Headroom hackers if he had the opportunity. “People always say, ‘Hey are you the guy that’s in the Max Headroom…?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah.’ It’s rather strange. “See what’s happened is has become a cult following now,” Swirsky said. But when the Max Headroom hack was posted to YouTube, he got a new type of attention. Swirsky said that he’s used to attention from places like Saturday Night Live, which named a recurring skit about Chicago Bears fans ( “Bill Swirsky’s Super Fans”) after him. It’s not like I’m out there pontificating politically.
Even though I’m a sportscaster, I keep a very low profile. “I still to this day don’t understand why my name was used. “I was just baffled, stunned, flabbergasted,” he said. He didn’t watch the broadcast live, but family and friends started blowing up his house phone immediately after it ended. Once the interruption stopped, Swirsky told me that he was completely baffled that the persona targeted him. When I called Swirsky, we were interrupted at least three times by a broadcast announcing an evacuation drill at his hotel, which somehow felt appropriate. The FCC was not playing around back then.” “My guess was it was a couple of tech nerds that made it happen a couple times and then went underground as fast as they could. “I’ll tell you what, if some spurned applicants or disgruntled employees figured out a way to do that, they should’ve been working here in the first place,” he said.
I asked Roan if he thinks rejected applicants to Channel 9 or former employees could’ve been behind the Max Headroom hijack. “So it certainly had an impact on somebody. “To be perfectly honest, I would probably never give a second thought, beyond the fact that people email me or call me probably four, five times a year,” he said. When Roan saw the broadcast a few minutes later with his coworkers, they found it hilarious. I spoke with Roan on the phone, and he said that a voice in his earbud said the station's signal had been pirated. In 2013, Motherboard published one of the most comprehensive articles on the subject, but this week-to celebrate the anniversary of the Max Headroom hack, I caught up with Dan Roan and Chuck Swirsky-the local newscasters Max interrupted and mocked. After 30 years and an intense FCC investigation, the people behind the Headroom hack remain unknown.
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