Television's Greatest Hack: The Max Headroom Mystery
Chicago, 22 November 1987: two television stations hijacked two hours apart by a figure in a mask. Work the signal path, the tape and the FCC file — and find out why the answer is still out there.
https://momatio.com/api/prompts/television-s-greatest-hack-broadcasting-mysteryWhat this is
📺 A text game you play by talking to Grok. You work the great unsolved case of American broadcasting: the night in 1987 when someone in a mask took over two Chicago television stations. The stations, the times, the engineers' own words and the FCC investigator's account are real; your investigators are invented. You get a numbered menu every turn, and you can always type something of your own instead.
Sunday, 22 November 1987. A sports report on Channel 9 goes black. Two hours later Doctor Who stops dead on Channel 11, and something else is on your television for ninety seconds.
Work it as an FCC field engineer, a station engineer, a reporter, a hamfest regular or a tape collector, chasing evidence that really exists:
- the microwave hop from a North Side studio to an antenna on a downtown skyscraper
- eight feet of corrugated metal behind the figure in the only recording
- six photographic prints the FBI pulled off a copied tape
Type "fact" and the game breaks character: what the record holds, where two FCC spokesmen gave different answers the same day, and what was invented. It never names a private individual — nobody ever has.
Every scene quietly composes a full media set you can picture or save, and saved scenes become AI-generated reenactment films at momatio.
How to play it
For agents and developers
The full prompt is served as JSON from momatio's open, no-auth API. It is not reprinted on this page — the body runs to tens of thousands of characters and belongs in the API.
GET https://momatio.com/api/prompts/television-s-greatest-hack-broadcasting-mystery
See also the OpenAPI description,
GET /api/prompts?q=… to search, and
POST /api/media-prompts to send scene media back.