17 ms·

Demoscene, the secret behind Finnish game industry

254 points by velmu 7y ago

Mountain_Skies 7y ago
During that era it was interesting to see demos coming mostly from countries at far northern latitudes and wondering why the scene was so focused there. It wasn't until visiting family up around Hudson Bay and discussing winter life that the connection between demo coders and dark cold winters stuck. While the long dark winter nights still exist, what's the future for Finnish coders in an age of easy access to an entire internet of distractions combined with fast hardware? Surely there will be more in quantity, as is the case almost everywhere, but what of the quality forged on those long winter nights?
- notkaiho 7y ago
  It's either that or start a metal band...
  - rgomez 7y ago
    Or even write a kernel!
    - raverbashing 7y ago
      Oh come on, it's just a toy project, it will never be something serious as Gnu
      - bitwize 7y ago
        Not big and professional like gnu, anyway.
      - scrame 7y ago
        Hurd is just a couple months away.
    - keyle 7y ago
      Or write a little game about block building and crafting, and little monsters coming out in the night...
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
- Trombone12 7y ago
  If there is any connection, it will not be as simple as "darkness == demoscene". If there is any connection it will be that winters and bright summers get you used to just staying inside with blinds down all year.
  - arexxbifs 7y ago
    I'm very interested in the special conditions that spurred the creation of the demo scene in (northern) Europe. Hacker culture in the US seems to have mainly grown out of academia, often taking a staunch libertarian view on the freedom of information and software. In Europe, and mainly Scandinavia, things were quite boring when the home computer boom came about. In Sweden, for example, there were two TV channels, both controlled by the government, and there was movie censorship also controlled by the government. Things were pretty dreary - Disney cartoons were aired for one hour each year, on Christmas eve. Making movies was about creating high culture à la Bergman. Pure entertainment was scoffed at, if you were able to get funding for it at all. Suddenly being given the ability to create your own content, without such interference, was a great freedom. Paired with economic growth and governmental incentives for small, non-profit organizations and clubs it was fairly easy to find venues for hosting demo parties. There are other factors at play as well, such as major computer magazines regularly covering the scene, which of course meant you could get recognition and fame outside the closely-knit scene. An interesting side note is that the UK, considering its size and the fact that several successful home computers were invented and manufactured there, had a comparatively small demo scene. The scene was always closely tied to software piracy, and most major European software houses were British. This meant not only that programming games was seen as a real career path early on, but also that law enforcement struck down harder and earlier on piracy than in Germany and Scandinavia.
    - burntoutfire 7y ago
      One of key question would be the entrepreneurial nature of Americans and (to lesser degree) Brits, as well as the pressure to "succeed" (i.e. make a lot of money or have large influence via politics, nonprofit etc.) in both societies. In the US, when young bright geeks want to do something cool, starting a company is probably high on their list. In Europe it's not like that at all (now it's lightly changed, but I don't think it was the case in the 80's and 90's), as the markets are much smaller, there's barely any VC, taxes are sky high and, maybe most importantly, being a successful business owner is just not something that majority of people aspires to. Hence, people who would start companies in the US, in Europe do other things, including demoscene.
- honestoHeminway 7y ago
  The actual strange thing is - that with these conditions, russia is not a similar software superpower.
- jailbird_bd 7y ago
  Although a lot of demogroups are/were from Scandinavia, still the most active demoscene country is/was Germany where there's nothing out of ordinary regarding the weather. Poland, Netherlands, the UK, Hungary are prominent countries in the demoscene aspect as well. US had an extremely active cracking scene right from the beginning (C64 and later Amiga). Most of the scene releases definitely weren't coming from far northern lands.
bhouston 7y ago
It is also the secret behind three.js if you look at the main contributors over time. Although not the Finnish demoscene.
- skrebbel 7y ago
  The fun thing is that mrdoob, who originally wrote three.js, wasn't much of a coder during his scene years. He did graphics and direction and the likes (pretty well, I might add!). I've always been impressed at how well he managed to design a library that was, I imagine, among his earlier serious pieces of code.
  - feiss 7y ago
    That is part of the secret of the success of threejs: 1. Early launch 2. API designed by an artist/user point of view, not hardcore graphics programer. Flash API also helped
pixelpoet 7y ago
So much I'd like to write about demoscene, even though I didn't have the privilege of first-hand exposure... Studying it from afar in South Africa, it was clearly one of the strongest programming forces in the 90s. In those days, the centre of the demoscene was Finland, with its Assembly demoparty and associated acts of unparalleled programming power (e.g. Future Crew). Those Future Crew and CNCD guys later were associated with a lot of rendering tech, both on CPU (Umbra visibility middleware, which ships with many/most modern games) and GPU (anyone remember the infamous BitBoys GPU hype?); their demoscene efforts morphed into the benchmarking software company Future Mark (with demoscene parody as "Maturefurk") as well as gamedev (Remedy entertainment). These days, Nvidia created a R&D lab in Finland just for them, and is a great research effort led by Jaakko Lehtinen[1] (responsible much for the recent GAN stuff that went viral), Timo Aila, Samuli Laine and Tero Karras (responsible for the tech behind Nvidia's RTX [2], [3]). [1] https://research.nvidia.com/person/jaakko-lehtinen https://research.nvidia.com/person/jaakko-lehtinen [2] https://research.nvidia.com/publication/understanding-efficiency-ray-traversal-gpus https://research.nvidia.com/publication/understanding-effici... [3] https://research.nvidia.com/sites/default/files/publications/karras2012hpg_paper.pdf https://research.nvidia.com/sites/default/files/publications...
- jacobush 7y ago
  Funny, I thought the center was Sweden. But we generally dismiss what our eastern siblings are doing until forced to recognize them. :-)
  - richrichardsson 7y ago
    I think it's safest to say Europe was the center of the demoscene. Each country had some absolutely fantastic coders, artists and musicians, but if you wanted to narrow it down I'd say the Scandinavian countries were probably over-represented in terms of skill level.
    - lkramer 7y ago
      Just another example, IO Interactive in Denmark, famous for Hitman, also have deep roots in the local demo scene.
NKosmatos 7y ago
Nice read, always fascinating reading stories like these about the life and history of people inside the demoscene (the good old years) who then went on to work for some great game studios. Small trivia about the name: Utopos = The Good Place, The Place of Utopia But according to the web, the following explanation also exists: “In 1516 Sir Thomas More wrote the first 'Utopia'. He coined the word 'utopia' from the Greek ou-topos meaning 'no place' or 'nowhere'. But this was a pun - the almost identical Greek word eu-topos means a good place.“
scbrg 7y ago
Swedish game studio DICE (Battlefield series, among other titles) also grew out of the gaming scene. The demo group The Silents grew into Digital Illusions and later DICE. The Silents produced a couple of amazing demos in the early nineties, and I very much recommend looking them up for those interested.
- ekianjo 7y ago
  dice also made pinball illusions and fantasies on the Amiga on the early 90s. Which were excellent.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- Thaxll 7y ago
  Frostbite created by DICE is the default engine for most EA games nowdays.
- moogly 7y ago
  Also Triton -> Starbreeze
finnjohnsen2 7y ago
The finish demo "Second reality" of "future crew" blew my teenager mind and still triggers goosebumps when thinking about how we sat in awe watching this magnificent merge of art and technology
- bjornsteffanson 7y ago
  The Second Reality source code is on Github -- it is fun to poke around through the code and code comments with what seems like little in-jokes between themselves. Also interesting to note the contrast of when English and Finnish is used...you can run into gems like "pikkukuva" and "pakkaamaton formaatti" https://github.com/mtuomi/SecondReality/ https://github.com/mtuomi/SecondReality/
  - technomalogical 7y ago
    And don't miss Fabian Sanglard's review of the code. He was featured on HN recently for the reviews of the engine behind Another World/Out of this World and how it was ported to different platforms. http://fabiensanglard.net/second_reality/index.php http://fabiensanglard.net/second_reality/index.php
    - bjornsteffanson 7y ago
      I have not seen this at all, thank you for sharing!
- louhike 7y ago
  Some of the guys from Future Crew founded Remedy Entertainment. They did a lot of impressive games as Max Payne 1&2, Alan Wake, Quantum Break and Control. Control was released last year and is one the best games of this year. It's beautiful on PC,the universe is great. If you want to see great Ray Tracing, it's also the best recent game for that.
  - friendlybus 7y ago
    I had no idea they did Control despite ads for it everywhere.
kerpele 7y ago
Wow, this article made me realize I was a part of the very early generation game devs in Finland getting my first job in the industry in 2001. I was so young and naive then that I didn't understand how early it was.
maxden 7y ago
I like how he carried the bee/wasp/hornet(?) logo from the 1993 Utopos game to the ships on his current game Guntech.
- invincing 7y ago
  It's an even older Aggression logo https://demozoo.org/graphics/148490/ https://demozoo.org/graphics/148490/ (from times before Jani joined Aggression).
arminiusreturns 7y ago
If you like this, check out this recent documentary about the early day demoscene bbs ascii art: [Safe Crackers: The Art of Warez) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd-s9htpHgQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd-s9htpHgQ Or this: https://www.youtube.com/user/DemosceneArchive/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/DemosceneArchive/videos
harryf 7y ago
Would argue the demise of Nokia had a greater impact on game development in Finland, pushing people with the right skills to try something new. Some history on that here https://m.phys.org/news/2013-11-nokia-mobile-games-boom-finland.html https://m.phys.org/news/2013-11-nokia-mobile-games-boom-finl...
- trenchgun 7y ago
  Nokia had invested quite a lot for mobile gaming with their "gaming phone", N-Gage. Even though N-Gage itself was a failure it gave a big boost to mobile game development in Finland.
- tsavola 7y ago
  Is that a guess?
  - harryf 7y ago
    I heard it first anecdotally from a VC who'd done investments in Finnish game companies.
Ace17 7y ago
off topic: vimium scrolling doesn't seem to work on this page. Seems like vimium can't keep up with the creativity of nowadays web developers :D
royjacobs 7y ago
The Dutch demoscene also has a reasonably decent representation at Guerilla Games, of Killzone and Horizon Zero Dawn fame. Plenty of people working there now don't come from the demoscene originally, but still. Additionally, Alex Evans (who is working at Media Molecule and dreamt up the wonderful graphical architecture behind Dreams) did some wonderful demos in the late 90s. The scene's everywhere :)
stevefan1999 7y ago
I'm still impressed by Second Reality [0], even till this day. Rumor has it Tim Sweeney hired one of the member of the group who made that legendary demo upon seeing it. As such, the "Unreal" in Unreal Engine then should probably be referred as a recall to the name of the track of Second Reality, Unreal II [1], or is it just a coincidence? Fun fact: 3DMark is also made by remnants of Future Crew [0]: https://youtu.be/rFv7mHTf0nA https://youtu.be/rFv7mHTf0nA [1]: https://youtu.be/Dmhtc5S4atU https://youtu.be/Dmhtc5S4atU
- SyneRyder 7y ago
  The Future Crew demo before Second Reality was actually called Unreal [0], hence that track name Unreal II. The Unreal video game soundtrack was also from demoscene musicians. The one I remember most was "Mechanism Eight" [1] from Unreal Tournament, written by Andrew Sega, aka Necros in the demoscene. He's also got a couple of great non-demoscene solo albums as The Alpha Conspiracy, worth looking up on Spotify. [0] https://youtu.be/InrGJ7C9B3s https://youtu.be/InrGJ7C9B3s [1] https://youtu.be/qR9kvbXt4tk https://youtu.be/qR9kvbXt4tk
jbverschoor 7y ago
Anyone from efnet #coders or #nlcoders here? :-)
- SyneRyder 7y ago
  Not from #coders, but I remember the days of #trax...

254 points by velmu 7y ago

During that era it was interesting to see demos coming mostly from countries at far northern latitudes and wondering why the scene was so focused there. It wasn't until visiting family up around Hudson Bay and discussing winter life that the connection between demo coders and dark cold winters stuck. While the long dark winter nights still exist, what's the future for Finnish coders in an age of easy access to an entire internet of distractions combined with fast hardware? Surely there will be more in quantity, as is the case almost everywhere, but what of the quality forged on those long winter nights?

notkaiho 7y ago
It's either that or start a metal band...
- rgomez 7y ago
  Or even write a kernel!
  - raverbashing 7y ago
    Oh come on, it's just a toy project, it will never be something serious as Gnu
    - bitwize 7y ago
      Not big and professional like gnu, anyway.
    - scrame 7y ago
      Hurd is just a couple months away.
  - keyle 7y ago
    Or write a little game about block building and crafting, and little monsters coming out in the night...
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
Trombone12 7y ago
If there is any connection, it will not be as simple as "darkness == demoscene". If there is any connection it will be that winters and bright summers get you used to just staying inside with blinds down all year.
- arexxbifs 7y ago
  I'm very interested in the special conditions that spurred the creation of the demo scene in (northern) Europe. Hacker culture in the US seems to have mainly grown out of academia, often taking a staunch libertarian view on the freedom of information and software. In Europe, and mainly Scandinavia, things were quite boring when the home computer boom came about. In Sweden, for example, there were two TV channels, both controlled by the government, and there was movie censorship also controlled by the government. Things were pretty dreary - Disney cartoons were aired for one hour each year, on Christmas eve. Making movies was about creating high culture à la Bergman. Pure entertainment was scoffed at, if you were able to get funding for it at all. Suddenly being given the ability to create your own content, without such interference, was a great freedom. Paired with economic growth and governmental incentives for small, non-profit organizations and clubs it was fairly easy to find venues for hosting demo parties. There are other factors at play as well, such as major computer magazines regularly covering the scene, which of course meant you could get recognition and fame outside the closely-knit scene. An interesting side note is that the UK, considering its size and the fact that several successful home computers were invented and manufactured there, had a comparatively small demo scene. The scene was always closely tied to software piracy, and most major European software houses were British. This meant not only that programming games was seen as a real career path early on, but also that law enforcement struck down harder and earlier on piracy than in Germany and Scandinavia.
  - burntoutfire 7y ago
    One of key question would be the entrepreneurial nature of Americans and (to lesser degree) Brits, as well as the pressure to "succeed" (i.e. make a lot of money or have large influence via politics, nonprofit etc.) in both societies. In the US, when young bright geeks want to do something cool, starting a company is probably high on their list. In Europe it's not like that at all (now it's lightly changed, but I don't think it was the case in the 80's and 90's), as the markets are much smaller, there's barely any VC, taxes are sky high and, maybe most importantly, being a successful business owner is just not something that majority of people aspires to. Hence, people who would start companies in the US, in Europe do other things, including demoscene.
honestoHeminway 7y ago
The actual strange thing is - that with these conditions, russia is not a similar software superpower.
jailbird_bd 7y ago
Although a lot of demogroups are/were from Scandinavia, still the most active demoscene country is/was Germany where there's nothing out of ordinary regarding the weather. Poland, Netherlands, the UK, Hungary are prominent countries in the demoscene aspect as well. US had an extremely active cracking scene right from the beginning (C64 and later Amiga). Most of the scene releases definitely weren't coming from far northern lands.

bhouston 7y ago

It is also the secret behind three.js if you look at the main contributors over time. Although not the Finnish demoscene.

skrebbel 7y ago
The fun thing is that mrdoob, who originally wrote three.js, wasn't much of a coder during his scene years. He did graphics and direction and the likes (pretty well, I might add!). I've always been impressed at how well he managed to design a library that was, I imagine, among his earlier serious pieces of code.
- feiss 7y ago
  That is part of the secret of the success of threejs: 1. Early launch 2. API designed by an artist/user point of view, not hardcore graphics programer. Flash API also helped

pixelpoet 7y ago

So much I'd like to write about demoscene, even though I didn't have the privilege of first-hand exposure... Studying it from afar in South Africa, it was clearly one of the strongest programming forces in the 90s. In those days, the centre of the demoscene was Finland, with its Assembly demoparty and associated acts of unparalleled programming power (e.g. Future Crew). Those Future Crew and CNCD guys later were associated with a lot of rendering tech, both on CPU (Umbra visibility middleware, which ships with many/most modern games) and GPU (anyone remember the infamous BitBoys GPU hype?); their demoscene efforts morphed into the benchmarking software company Future Mark (with demoscene parody as "Maturefurk") as well as gamedev (Remedy entertainment). These days, Nvidia created a R&D lab in Finland just for them, and is a great research effort led by Jaakko Lehtinen[1] (responsible much for the recent GAN stuff that went viral), Timo Aila, Samuli Laine and Tero Karras (responsible for the tech behind Nvidia's RTX [2], [3]). [1] https://research.nvidia.com/person/jaakko-lehtinen https://research.nvidia.com/person/jaakko-lehtinen [2] https://research.nvidia.com/publication/understanding-efficiency-ray-traversal-gpus https://research.nvidia.com/publication/understanding-effici... [3] https://research.nvidia.com/sites/default/files/publications/karras2012hpg_paper.pdf https://research.nvidia.com/sites/default/files/publications...

jacobush 7y ago
Funny, I thought the center was Sweden. But we generally dismiss what our eastern siblings are doing until forced to recognize them. :-)
- richrichardsson 7y ago
  I think it's safest to say Europe was the center of the demoscene. Each country had some absolutely fantastic coders, artists and musicians, but if you wanted to narrow it down I'd say the Scandinavian countries were probably over-represented in terms of skill level.
  - lkramer 7y ago
    Just another example, IO Interactive in Denmark, famous for Hitman, also have deep roots in the local demo scene.

NKosmatos 7y ago

Nice read, always fascinating reading stories like these about the life and history of people inside the demoscene (the good old years) who then went on to work for some great game studios. Small trivia about the name: Utopos = The Good Place, The Place of Utopia But according to the web, the following explanation also exists: “In 1516 Sir Thomas More wrote the first 'Utopia'. He coined the word 'utopia' from the Greek ou-topos meaning 'no place' or 'nowhere'. But this was a pun - the almost identical Greek word eu-topos means a good place.“

scbrg 7y ago

Swedish game studio DICE (Battlefield series, among other titles) also grew out of the gaming scene. The demo group The Silents grew into Digital Illusions and later DICE. The Silents produced a couple of amazing demos in the early nineties, and I very much recommend looking them up for those interested.

ekianjo 7y ago
dice also made pinball illusions and fantasies on the Amiga on the early 90s. Which were excellent.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
Thaxll 7y ago
Frostbite created by DICE is the default engine for most EA games nowdays.
moogly 7y ago
Also Triton -> Starbreeze

finnjohnsen2 7y ago

The finish demo "Second reality" of "future crew" blew my teenager mind and still triggers goosebumps when thinking about how we sat in awe watching this magnificent merge of art and technology

bjornsteffanson 7y ago
The Second Reality source code is on Github -- it is fun to poke around through the code and code comments with what seems like little in-jokes between themselves. Also interesting to note the contrast of when English and Finnish is used...you can run into gems like "pikkukuva" and "pakkaamaton formaatti" https://github.com/mtuomi/SecondReality/ https://github.com/mtuomi/SecondReality/
- technomalogical 7y ago
  And don't miss Fabian Sanglard's review of the code. He was featured on HN recently for the reviews of the engine behind Another World/Out of this World and how it was ported to different platforms. http://fabiensanglard.net/second_reality/index.php http://fabiensanglard.net/second_reality/index.php
  - bjornsteffanson 7y ago
    I have not seen this at all, thank you for sharing!
louhike 7y ago
Some of the guys from Future Crew founded Remedy Entertainment. They did a lot of impressive games as Max Payne 1&2, Alan Wake, Quantum Break and Control. Control was released last year and is one the best games of this year. It's beautiful on PC,the universe is great. If you want to see great Ray Tracing, it's also the best recent game for that.
- friendlybus 7y ago
  I had no idea they did Control despite ads for it everywhere.

kerpele 7y ago

Wow, this article made me realize I was a part of the very early generation game devs in Finland getting my first job in the industry in 2001. I was so young and naive then that I didn't understand how early it was.

maxden 7y ago

I like how he carried the bee/wasp/hornet(?) logo from the 1993 Utopos game to the ships on his current game Guntech.

invincing 7y ago
It's an even older Aggression logo https://demozoo.org/graphics/148490/ https://demozoo.org/graphics/148490/ (from times before Jani joined Aggression).

arminiusreturns 7y ago

If you like this, check out this recent documentary about the early day demoscene bbs ascii art: [Safe Crackers: The Art of Warez) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd-s9htpHgQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd-s9htpHgQ Or this: https://www.youtube.com/user/DemosceneArchive/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/DemosceneArchive/videos

harryf 7y ago

Would argue the demise of Nokia had a greater impact on game development in Finland, pushing people with the right skills to try something new. Some history on that here https://m.phys.org/news/2013-11-nokia-mobile-games-boom-finland.html https://m.phys.org/news/2013-11-nokia-mobile-games-boom-finl...

trenchgun 7y ago
Nokia had invested quite a lot for mobile gaming with their "gaming phone", N-Gage. Even though N-Gage itself was a failure it gave a big boost to mobile game development in Finland.
tsavola 7y ago
Is that a guess?
- harryf 7y ago
  I heard it first anecdotally from a VC who'd done investments in Finnish game companies.

Ace17 7y ago

off topic: vimium scrolling doesn't seem to work on this page. Seems like vimium can't keep up with the creativity of nowadays web developers :D

royjacobs 7y ago

The Dutch demoscene also has a reasonably decent representation at Guerilla Games, of Killzone and Horizon Zero Dawn fame. Plenty of people working there now don't come from the demoscene originally, but still. Additionally, Alex Evans (who is working at Media Molecule and dreamt up the wonderful graphical architecture behind Dreams) did some wonderful demos in the late 90s. The scene's everywhere :)

stevefan1999 7y ago

I'm still impressed by Second Reality [0], even till this day. Rumor has it Tim Sweeney hired one of the member of the group who made that legendary demo upon seeing it. As such, the "Unreal" in Unreal Engine then should probably be referred as a recall to the name of the track of Second Reality, Unreal II [1], or is it just a coincidence? Fun fact: 3DMark is also made by remnants of Future Crew [0]: https://youtu.be/rFv7mHTf0nA https://youtu.be/rFv7mHTf0nA [1]: https://youtu.be/Dmhtc5S4atU https://youtu.be/Dmhtc5S4atU

SyneRyder 7y ago
The Future Crew demo before Second Reality was actually called Unreal [0], hence that track name Unreal II. The Unreal video game soundtrack was also from demoscene musicians. The one I remember most was "Mechanism Eight" [1] from Unreal Tournament, written by Andrew Sega, aka Necros in the demoscene. He's also got a couple of great non-demoscene solo albums as The Alpha Conspiracy, worth looking up on Spotify. [0] https://youtu.be/InrGJ7C9B3s https://youtu.be/InrGJ7C9B3s [1] https://youtu.be/qR9kvbXt4tk https://youtu.be/qR9kvbXt4tk

jbverschoor 7y ago

Anyone from efnet #coders or #nlcoders here? :-)

SyneRyder 7y ago
Not from #coders, but I remember the days of #trax...