PHALCON/SKISM vs NuKE▊

Before the word "script kiddie" existed, the two most elite DOS virus-writing crews on the planet were already panicking about them — and the panic was aimed at the mess the crews themselves had made. Phalcon/Skism, publishers of the scene bible 40Hex, shipped a point-and-click virus generator called MPC. NuKE shipped one called VCL. Both flooded the underground with thousands of near-identical, instantly-detected "viruses" written by kids who couldn't read assembler — and then 40Hex ran a furious editorial calling those same kids talentless leeches and telling them to get out of the scene. The rivalry was never really crew-versus-crew. It was the priesthood against the congregation it had accidentally ordained.

1991: if you had 80 viruses back then, you were God. Today, just one year later, if you have less than 800 you're LAME. … They're all hacks of hacks of hacks of hacks, or else all cranked out by MPC or VCL … No one (save a few) writes original code anymore.

DecimatoR, "VX: What the Hell's happened?" — 40Hex #9 (1992), File 001

WHO
Phalcon/Skism (P/S) — a merger of two NYC virus-writing groups; "SKISM" = Smart Kids Into Sick Methods, founded by the handle Hellraiser. Publishers of 40Hex. vs NuKE — the big rival crew, home of Nowhere Man and Rock Steady FACT
SCENE
The early-'90s DOS virus underground — VX boards, the Bulgarian "Virus Exchange," McAfee on the other side of the modem (see Crew Rivalries)
THE DRAMA
An elitism war over who counts as a "real" virus writer. P/S and NuKE each shipped a code generator (MPC, VCL), the scene drowned in auto-generated junk, and the elite turned on the "lamers" — while trading greets, joint McAfee prank-calls, and cross-published viruses with each other the whole time
RECORD
40Hex began June 1991; the mirrored run is 14 issues (to ~1995). P/S shipped the Mass Produced Code (MPC) generator in 1992; NuKE's Nowhere Man shipped the Virus Creation Laboratory (VCL), July 1992 FACT
STATUS
DEFUNCT — both groups long gone; the zines survive in the textfiles.com archive, and the "script-kiddie" contempt they invented outlived them by thirty years

This file is not an accusation; the virus-writing is the groups' own published record, and they signed it proudly. It is a record of the oldest fight in every subculture: the founders inventing the tools that let the newcomers flood in, then despising the newcomers for using them. The through-line is the gap between the rivalry as billed — Phalcon/Skism versus NuKE, crew against crew — and the paperwork, which shows two elite groups that greeted each other, prank-called McAfee together, and reprinted each other's code, both raging in the same breath at the code-generator "lamers" their own tools had created.

the drama timeline

ACT I — THE PRIESTHOOD (1991–1992)

Two New York crews merge, launch a magazine, and declare a standard: real virus writers hand-code in assembler. Everyone else is an anti-virus pussy.

  1. JUN 1991

    40Hex opens, sneering

    Phalcon/Skism launches 40Hex, the "most popular virus magazine in the underground," edited by Hellraiser. Issue 1's introduction sets the tone and the entry exam in one breath: "If you are an anti-virus pussy… erase these files. This aint for you." The elitism is load-bearing from line one — the zine is a members-only clubhouse that happens to publish working source code.

    40Hex #1 (1991), intro Wikipedia — Phalcon/Skism
  2. 1992

    Both crews arm the congregation

    P/S ships the Phalcon-Skism Mass Produced Code (MPC) generator. NuKE's Nowhere Man ships the Virus Creation Laboratory (VCL) in July. For the first time, anyone who can click a menu can "write" a virus. The elite crews have just handed the keys to exactly the people they'll spend the next two years despising — a script-kiddie boom manufactured, quite literally, by the priesthood.

    Wikipedia — Virus Creation Laboratory (NuKE/Nowhere Man) Wikipedia — MPC generator

ACT II — RIVALS WHO PRANK-CALL McAFEE TOGETHER (1992)

The "war" turns out to be a working relationship. P/S and NuKE run a joint conference, greet each other in print, and publish each other's code.

  1. FEB 2, 1992

    The McAfee alliance

    40Hex #5 documents a two-day "alliance" call joining members of PHALCON/SKISM, NuKE, and Ex-RABiD. They open by cold-calling anti-virus doyenne Patti Hoffman (who "had a shit fit"), then ring up John McAfee himself — "surprisingly a nice guy" — with New York Times and Computerworld reporters listening in. The rival crews aren't at war; they're co-hosting a press event.

    40Hex #5 (1992) — the McAfee alliance
  2. 1992

    Greets, and a rival's virus in P/S's own pages

    40Hex #7's opener sends "Greets to: [NuKE]," and the same issue prints "RockSteady's 666 Virus [NuKE]" — a NuKE member's code, published in the Phalcon/Skism zine. Later issues keep the courtesy up: #13 greets "Nowhere Man and the [NuKE] people." Whatever the rivalry was, it ran on mutual citation, not blood.

    40Hex #7 (1992) — NuKE greets + RockSteady's 666 40Hex #13 — greets to Nowhere Man / [NuKE]

ACT III — THE PANIC BEFORE THE WORD (1992)

40Hex #9 runs the editorial that names the enemy — and the enemy isn't NuKE. It's the code-generator kids both crews created.

  1. 1992

    "Micro-Warez"

    In #9's editorial "VX: What the Hell's happened?", DecimatoR rages that a scene where "80 viruses… you were God" now sneers at anyone with fewer than 800, all "hacks of hacks of hacks" or MPC/VCL output that's "scannable before they even get compiled." He quotes Garbageheap's coinage — "Micro-Warez": viruses "created by talentless individuals and passed around the way pirated software is," with "Micro-Warez Pups" defined as, literally, "See also: LAMERS." This is script-kiddie contempt, fully formed, years before the term "script kiddie" entered the language.

    40Hex #9 (1992), File 001 — the editorial
  2. 1992

    "Get the hell out of the scene"

    The editorial's thesis is pure gatekeeping: "the kids using MPC and VCL are basically talentless programmers who think it's cool to stick their name in a program." The verdict — "Stop acting lame and actually CREATE an ORIGINAL virus for once… if you find that's impossible, then get the hell out of the scene and let the people who CAN program do it!" Note the target: MPC is Phalcon/Skism's own generator. The zine is trashing its own product's users — and the masthead flags the split, warning the piece is "not necessarily" the view of all P/S members.

    40Hex #9 (1992) — "get the hell out of the scene"
  3. 1992

    Even the enemy sneers the same way

    The contempt cut both ways across the AV/VX line. In a note the AV researcher Vesselin Bontchev wrote about the Mutation Engine — reprinted in 40Hex #7 — he dismisses "the kids from RABID, NukE, and the other punk virus writing groups that use to write overwriting viruses in high-level languages." When the man hunting your viruses and the man editing your zine agree that NuKE writes "punk" code, "elite" has stopped meaning anything but a pecking order.

    40Hex #7 (1992), File 005 — Bontchev note (reprint)

ACT IV — PARANOIA AND ENTROPY (1994–1995)

The scene curdles into mole-hunts and background checks, then the zine winds down. The elitism outlives the crews.

  1. 1994

    The "NuKE mole" in the AV camp

    By #13 the scene has gone fully paranoid. The issue reprints a Virnet-side account alleging that a member of the anti-virus network Virnet was secretly a NuKE affiliate feeding "elite" AV traffic to the virus underground — and that Virnet's own people ran a background and credit check on her to prove it. The reprinted transcript of the AV side is uglier than anything the virus writers published. The lesson of the mole-hunt: by 1994 the VX-vs-AV border and the crew-vs-crew border had both dissolved into personal grudges.

    40Hex #13 — the Virnet mole reprint
  2. ~1995

    The zine winds down; the contempt doesn't

    The mirrored 40Hex run ends at #14. The groups fade; DOS gives way to Windows and macro viruses, and the whole hand-coded-assembler priesthood becomes a period piece. But the posture 40Hex codified — that the tool-users are "lamers," that only original coders count, that a scene is defined by who it excludes — is the exact contempt every later generation of hackers would aim at the "script kiddie." Phalcon/Skism and NuKE invented the sneer before anyone had the noun.

    textfiles.com — the full 40Hex run troll.fan — Timeline

both sides, on the record

The elitists had a point: MPC and VCL really did flood the scene with thousands of trivial, instantly-detected clones. DecimatoR's complaint — that a generator virus is "scannable before they even get compiled," that the "author" did "nothing that any Joe Blow couldn't have done using a code generator" — is technically correct. Hand-writing a working, stealthy, self-propagating virus in assembler was a genuinely harder skill, and the scene's currency was skill.

The rivalry was real enough to organize the scene: P/S and NuKE were the two poles the whole VX underground oriented around. Groups, boards, and reputations defined themselves by which crew they ran with. The competition drove the technical arms race — polymorphism, mutation engines, anti-debugging — that made the era matter.

The "war" was mostly co-opetition: the same crews that supposedly warred greeted each other in print, co-hosted a call to McAfee, and published each other's viruses. The primary texts show respect and shared enemies far more than combat — the crew-versus-crew framing is the least-supported part of the story [2] [3].

The elite created the "lamers" it despised: the flood of junk viruses came out of MPC and VCL — tools built and shipped by P/S and NuKE. The editorial rage at code-generator kids is the priesthood condemning its own converts, and the masthead's "not necessarily the view of all members" disclaimer admits even P/S wasn't unanimous [1].

It was a pecking order dressed as a standard: "if you have less than 800 you're LAME" is not a technical bar, it's status arithmetic — hoarding counts, not writing code. The same contempt the AV world aimed back at NuKE ("punk virus writing groups") shows the whole hierarchy was social, not merely technical [4].

YOU DECIDE

The technical gap was real: a hand-coded polymorphic virus and a VCL clone were not the same craft, and the elite were right that the scene was drowning in disposable junk. But the "Phalcon/Skism vs NuKE" billing oversells the feud — the crews greeted each other, prank-called McAfee side by side, and reprinted each other's code. The fight that actually defined the era wasn't crew against crew. It was the two elite crews against the code-generator kids their own tools created — a script-kiddie panic staged years before the phrase existed, by the exact people who built the machines that made script kiddies possible.

The archive does not take sides in the pecking order. The archive keeps the editorial — and the greets to NuKE on the next page over.

evidence locker

PRIMARY / THE ZINES

  1. 40Hex #9 (1992), File 001 — DecimatoR, "VX: What the Hell's happened?" PRIMARY — the elitism editorial: the "less than 800 you're LAME" line, "hacks of hacks of hacks," "cranked out by MPC or VCL," Garbageheap's "Micro-Warez" / "Pups = LAMERS," and "get the hell out of the scene." Local mirror: research/zines/textfiles/40HEX/40hex009. textfiles.com/magazines/40HEX/40hex009
  2. 40Hex #5 (1992) — the McAfee "alliance" PRIMARY — the joint PHALCON/SKISM + NuKE + Ex-RABiD conference call to Patti Hoffman and John McAfee, with NYT / Computerworld reporters. Local mirror: research/zines/textfiles/40HEX/40hex005. textfiles.com/magazines/40HEX/40hex005
  3. 40Hex #7 (1992) — greets to [NuKE] + "RockSteady's 666 Virus [NuKE]" PRIMARY — a NuKE member's virus published in the Phalcon/Skism zine, plus the reprinted Vesselin Bontchev note calling RABID/NuKE "punk virus writing groups." Local mirror: research/zines/textfiles/40HEX/40hex007. textfiles.com/magazines/40HEX/40hex007
  4. 40Hex #1 (1991) — intro; #13 (1994) — greets + the "Virnet mole" reprint PRIMARY — the founding "anti-virus pussy" gate (#1), the "Nowhere Man and the [NuKE] people" greets (#13), and the reprinted Virnet-side mole-hunt allegation (#13, real name omitted here). Local mirror: research/zines/textfiles/40HEX/40hex001, 40hex013. textfiles.com/magazines/40HEX/40hex013

REFERENCE & CROSS-LINKS

  1. Wikipedia — Phalcon/Skism ATTRIBUTED — SKISM = "Smart Kids Into Sick Methods," founded by Hellraiser; NYC merger; 40Hex from 1991; the MPC (Mass Produced Code) generator, 1992; ~12 members aged 15–23. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalcon/Skism
  2. Wikipedia — Virus Creation Laboratory ATTRIBUTED — VCL by Nowhere Man of NuKE, released July 5, 1992; the NuKE-side code generator the 40Hex editorial trashes alongside P/S's own MPC. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virus_Creation_Laboratory
  3. textfiles.com — 40Hex archive ARCHIVE — the full mirrored run, issues 1–14, as read for this file. textfiles.com/magazines/40HEX/
  4. troll.fan — Crew Rivalries CROSS-LINK — the VX elitism war in the context of the scene's other feuds (see also Phiber Optik for the LOD-vs-MOD version). troll.fan/crew-rivalries.html
The standard. Everyone here is a period handle, kept as a handle — no real-name identification is made. The virus-writing, the code generators, the editorial contempt, the greets, and the joint McAfee call are all quoted from the groups' own published zines, which they signed and distributed openly; the primary files are named and linked. The one item touching a possibly-real person — the reprinted Virnet "mole" allegation — is given as an allegation others made and reprinted, with that person's name deliberately omitted. The deflationary reading (rivalry as co-opetition; the elite creating the "lamers" it despised) rests on the zines' own greets and cross-published code. If a line here couldn't survive scrutiny, it wouldn't be on the page.