Why do I call myself Mug UK?
It’s an old school nickname from when I attended Wandsworth School for Boys in Southfields, London (1981-1986). I was a late import into the first year due to failing to get into another school, so I was fresh-faced, and with my Brummie accent, the butt of quite a few jokes. Especially when my voice was recorded for a French lesson and a thick-accented “Ooo Eh Laa Booos” came out instead of the expected “Où est le bus”!
The school was closed in 1999 and all of the comprehensive buildings were demolished and the existing grammar school buildings were converted into a new school. It’s very sad to see the sites of my youth left in ruin, I can even see the walls where we used to play pat-a-ball at lunchtimes! This old building is also where I broke my wrist at the age of 14. Four years later, it was operated on to help ‘fix it properly’ at St. George’s Hospital in Tooting – and I still have a metal bar inside my left wrist since 1988.
I have gone off on a tangent somewhat but in my classroom colleagues’ eyes I was marked down as a “Northerner” and I therefore only drank tea. Which I did anyway every break time. I also, in my more energetic youth, played football every break time. Hence Mr ‘Mug O Tea’ was created, but due to me wearing Dr Maarten’s shoes whilst playing football, I was renamed ‘Mugger Boot’ and I just shortened it.
Other pseudonyms (all from the Atari ST days)
Because I was the author of a commercial piece of software at the time – The Professional Virus Killer – I had to ‘hide’ the interesting stuff in plain sight as it were.
If you look at the list of the productions that I created, or had a hand in, there are some other scene names that I went by:
a) I Wonder Who Wrote This Trash Industries (IWWWTTI) was a separate nickname that I used whenever a new executable or data file packer was released. I would rewrite the standard Trap #1 loader source that I had so that it would use the new packer’s file format and then release it on a disk via The Source menu disks.
Later on, when myself and MSD of POV reverse-engineered, and then improved, a link-filer by Orion/Fusion, each new depacker was also added.
b) Mentor of Special FX – one of my nicknames (along with Eqqyfump) when I worked on the dodgier side of things in Special FX. It made the group seem a lot bigger than it actually was. I mostly did trainer versions of games that weren’t PD 🙂
c) Structure of Adrenalin UK – another UK-based disk compilation group that specialised in Amiga .MOD disks. I had a super Amiga set-up at the time: with a 28Mhz accelerator, hard-drive and an Action Replay – so ripping/converting .MOD files was fairly easy. Especially thanks to ProWiz which handled the protected .MODs that various demo coders created to prevent their music being ripped.
After the death of The Source, I helped out when and where I could on some of their PD disks and some of their not PD disks. The trained versions of commercial games that I did were under this moniker of Structure, whereas the PD game hacks were released under Mug UK.