There would be a single handful of people who would have used it at that time, and in 81 you could pretty much say whatever you wanted in IRC, the entire internet was Dark web at that point. It’s entirely possible that this album cover created the movement, and 1337 users adopted it in tribute, at least for much of it. Also the fact that the cover points to Egyptian Gods and far-reaching ideas WAY outside the mainstream makes it far more likely to have had more meaning to the 1337folk. Also, this is the type of music that alot of the 1337 computer creators and manipulators listened to. Also, amongst the 1337 community there has always been a very close affinity and connection with such low level sound and music programming. They’d certainly be what we’d consider 1337. However, it’s likely that the among the few people who did know, there were Sound Engineers if they were making/experimenting with computer sound creation/manipulation, which at that point was extremely low level programming. Twitter: Instagram: can almost make out Holy Horus in the cracking orb.Īlmost zero people knew about 1337 at this point. He's a writer, a podcaster, a musician, and a bureaucrat. Mark Lee is the Internet's leading authority on the Terminator movies. Perhaps only the most “elite”-or dare I say, “1337”-players could truly master this one. Yup, that’s the Journey video game based on the album Escape. Perhaps the scarab beetle is meant to be a vehicle for the band to escape from groupies and unscrupulous promoters: As for escaping, well, that one’s easy: “They took the midnight train, goin’ anywhere…” Granted, a dung beetle traveling at light speed is several steps removed from the midnight trains referred to in “Don’t Stop Believing,” but you get the idea.
Rebirth, in the case of Journey, refers to the band itself: they started out as a jazz fusion/progressive rock group, but with the addition of singer Steve Perry in 1977, were reborn as a straight pop group. The best explanation I can provide centers around the rebirth and escape elements. The solar association helps make some sense of the Departure album art–the beetle in that image is one of several heavenly bodies depicted–but that still leaves a lot to be explained for the star ship beetle on the cover of Escape. It’s a symbol of the Egyptian god, Khepri, who in turn is a symbol of rebirth, the sun, and creation. Instead, let’s examine the other thing that the dung, er, scarab beetle is notable for. So that makes Steve Perry the shitty Paul McCartney? Yet, despite my best attempts at googling, I couldn’t find a more specific date for the birth of leet speak other than “the early 80’s,” which leaves open the oh-so-slight possibility that Steve Perry was teh 0r1g1n4l h4x0rs. Obviously, it’s a stretch to think that either the band Journey or the artist responsible for this album cover invented leet speak, or was even aware of its existence at the time. Though leet speak became widespread with the proliferation of online gaming, in particular, Doom, the practice originated back the early 1980’s, when its use was limited to an actually somewhat “elite” corps of hackers and other sophisticated computer users to mask illicit activity (software piracy and porn distribution) from BBS administrators. For the uninitiated, leet speak is the substitution of letters with numbers or other symbols to create a symbolic language decipherable only be a select–or shall I say elite–or shall I say “leet”–few. Overthinking It readers are probably familiar with (and at least partially annoyed by) the prevalence of “1337” or “leet” speak across the internet.