The term “cracker” is rather conditional. The authors themselves more often called themselves hackers — that is how they signed their work in games and presented themselves within the ZX community.

Hackers removed copy protection, added immortality, translated games into Russian, redesigned loading screens, and later moved to disks and created their own intros. Sometimes the changes were minimal; sometimes only the game itself remained from the original release.

At the same time, a hacker did not always work with the original. Often they received an already cracked version. So the same game could pass through several hands, each time gaining new modifications.