Vision Factory – ChessGrid Cracktro

sorry, dunno if he was active on c64

Sure looks like it: https://csdb.dk/scener/?id=11141

ya,same Eurosoft , our Euro-dude came from Lightforce 😉

May I ask why a supreme group – obviously voluntarily – calls itself Skid Row? Self-irony?

name comes more after the Music group, has nothing to do with the ghetto in LA. besides this it sounded cool back then (and nowadays), you wont hear the alternative names we have had back then.. lol

ya well metallica and the hellion were hardrock addicted, me not really ….

I always wondered if the name came from the ghetto in Los Angeles. I’m just learning the answers to questions I’ve been wondering about for decades… You guys need to open up some, in spite of being so famous, Skid Row is still one of the groups shrouded in mystery…

Yo ROG, how did you get in touch with Skid Row? Coding intros for Vision Factory? Did you get access to their zero day wares in return?

I have never been in contact with SR. I just wondered about their name. And I did not get or demanded anything from VF. I thought the bargain was I am coding intros and in return I am becoming a member; that was actually all I wanted. But shortly after that I had a strange encounter at the AmiExpo in Cologne (91 or 92?). I wore a nice t-shirt onto which a former and good friend of mine (thank you Sven aka Rat) had airbrushed in nice letters “ROG – Vision Factory”. But after a while a certain Zzzzzz of… Read more »

i would like to know what arse that was back then, surely not me….i guess that was later , when rakim did run the group for a short time(dynablaster era).

That is horrible how you were treated, all the more so since because of your intro, Vision Factory became even more famous. You certainly did not deserve to be treated that way. I am so sorry. You’ll always be one of my favorite intro coders, Vision Factory hin oder her.

Well, I did some digging and according to http://janeway.exotica.org.uk/author.php?id=1285#members you actually did make it into Vision Factory, and this Zzzzzz was a member of some no-name group called “Tech” and in there he was just a graphics artist. History recorded you ROG as a legend, while I had to go dig around who this other guy was. Says it all.

Oops, I only used the “Zzzzzz” as a kind of placeholder. Did not know that a guy was active with that name. Believe me, it was a member of VF I had this odd conversation with.

Oi, ROG! What’s up with accusations?
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Sorry, could not resist. :))
-TStorm

Thanks for the heart attack. 😉

Haha, I still remember the phone call with Metallica when he wanted to name the group Skid Row and asked me to be a part of it. It was all because of the US Band. They were very popular at the time. Honestly, I though it was a bit hokey, but he didn’t ask my opinion and he was the Boss. Remember his handle was Metallica so he obviously liked metal groups.

Oliver sure is Metal addicted… haha

Oliver S.?
Surely, Skid Row sounds great to German ears but its meaning isn’t cool at cool. What is that supposed to say about the attitude of the group?! I would have chosen – though the meaning is a bit questionable as well – something cool like Obituary, Napalm Death or Annihilator 😉

well i dont care what other People mean and think about “our” Name. and has nothing to do what the attitude of the group is….back in the 90s we couldnt know what people 30 yrs later think and mean… and as mentioned, didnt cared back then and today… but always have a laugh when people mixing real life with computer nonsense.

Don’t be mad and take my last comment too seriously. It was rather meant ironically and in a winking manner and was more about to lead over to the other names since Obituary, Napalm Death and Annihilator are metal bands, too.
Skid Row forever 🙂

How come Skid Row had a particular penchant for cracking SSI’s games?

Well that’s the kicker Galahad, as Subzero was in Germany back in the day, and SSI was a company in the United States, California if I am not mistaken…

ssi stuff came from the us members, who got an inside contact 😉

That was one of the things I found so cool about Skid Row back in the day and even now: you were one of the rare groups which had members in Europe and in the United States. The leading force.

wrong, every good group had members and bbs’s in the states…

That’s exactly what I mean: most groups had BBS’s in the States since we in Europe had greedy state telcos and toll telephone usage, rather than flat fee local area calling. Very few of those groups which had BBS’s in the States actually had U. S. members who actually did something (like cracking or NTSC fixing). You can literally count the number of such groups on fingers of your both hands.

The WHQ’s were in the US because the Europeans wanted it that way so that they could use illegal calling cards to call them. That’s the reason why I quit the scene. I was only 15-16 and had AT&T threaten me that they had people that took care of these sort of fraud issues. I obviously couldn’t control how people called the BBS. But I had already been busted for hacking. Amiga wasn’t that popular in the US. The Europeans really made the Amiga scene. And you’re doing a much better job at preserving it. I can’t find any of… Read more »

Amiga wasn’t that popular in the US. That is what I find ironic to this day, that an American company was far more popular in Europe than on its own home turf, with the Amiga being obviously far superior to the IBM PC and its clones back in the day. My hypothesis is that the overall computer literacy in the United States at that time must have been quite low, which is an even greater irony considering that most important computer scientists were in and from the United States, who with many important innovations laid the groundwork around which an… Read more »

Honest to goodness I hope they haven’t and that they never do! <3
Fairlight is already raising the next generation of real crackers from their own offspring, I can only hope Skid Row does the same so the glory of Skid Row continues for generations to come…

Honestly, I was involved in those things back then because I was a stupid kid with a modem. I wish I would have tried to learn more productive things such as programming on the Amiga at the time. Anyone can run a BBS. I wouldn’t pirate anything today as software developers deserve to be paid for their work.