5 ms·

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 u

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.
  - notkaiho 7y ago
    With all due respect, I disagree with this statement. The demoscene was largely teenagers. Teenagers who were afforded the chance to have a personal computer through pervasive decent living standards, with enough free time to experiment on things for the sake of experimentation and learning. They (we) were making art and impressing each other, not looking to cash in to make mad loot. The only way I see taxes as having contributed to the development of the demo scene and the subsequent high-level tech companies founded or staffed by demoscene veterans is that a high-enough level of taxation permitted these kids fo "just play around" and make art for art's sake.
    - arexxbifs 7y ago
      I think there's a point to the statement. A lot of them surely dreamt of working with software development, but they weren't interested in "cashing in" because it wasn't part of the overall mindset. Economic policymaking was geared at keeping old, massive manufacturing companies happy and the public sector was immense. Starting a small company in Scandinavia in the 1980s was much harder than it is today, but it was easy to find a job and very hard to get fired once you did, with unemployment kept (somewhat artificially) around 2%. I'm not interested in a debate about what society is better, but it's an interesting distinction.
      - erikbye 7y ago
        > A lot of them surely dreamt of working with software development The sceners, who were mostly teenagers, most certainly did not have any ambitions working in software, at that time. At least, very few, and it would never have been the main drive. You have to understand that the whole scene was rooted in breaking copy protection. The pirate groups started making "cracktros" to include in the release of the pirated software, a visual 'demo' saying, "we cracked this software; this is who we are." The demoscene, eventually, highly intertwined with the BBS scene. Crackers, hackers, phreakers, and gfx coders were all ingredients in the same stew. It was a culture of show-offs, attempting to outdo each other. Fun and careless. There were anarchists and anti-government tendencies — a lot of illegalities and arrests.
- scandinavegan 7y ago
  I agree with everything you said. I have a couple of theories from a Swedish perspective. First, and the most vague, is the idea of competent children in Sweden. I read an article recently (in the Swedish newspaper DN[1]) that traced a line through the author Ellen Key -> Astrid Lindgren and Rune Andréasson -> Pippi Longstocking and Bamse (comic book bear), and the idea that just because you're young doesn't mean that you're not competent. Both Pippi and Bamse talk directly to children (and the parents who read them to their children) and tell them about injustices and the idea that even a child can do things on an adult level. This idea has been involved in the creation of preschools throughout the whole 20th century in Sweden. The newspaper article says that's why it's not surprising that Greta Thunberg is from Sweden, because you can't discount what someone does or says just because they're a child. Also part of the preschool movement in Sweden was the idea that play is important for children. The DN article quotes the sisters Moberg who started the first Swedish preschool in 1904 as saying: "The child that plays a lot and with intensity, will surely become a competent human." So children are expected to play and be children, but when they do and say things, they have been taught that it carries equal weight as what an adult does. It's a powerful idea that when children play (and I include teenagers playing video games or programming here, because a lot of parents would view it as playing), they're not just wasting time, but actively engaging in activities that will be useful for them in later life. My idea is that young people in Sweden, as in many places, in the 80s and early 90s had a lot of unstructured free time. You weren't expected to have a lot of extra-curricular activities in Sweden, it was school, than do what you want. (As an aside, unstructured free time has shrunk and is shrinking rapidly for children in Sweden, as well as elsewhere in the world. We now have organized play dates, soccer practice and swimming lessons and piano lessons, and so on. We had that in the 80s too, but the intensity is way up. What used to be one or two driven kids per school class is now the norm, so as a parent you have to fight to keep your kid's schedule free.) What a lot of Swedish kids had was home computers! Here's where the earlier idea about competent children comes in, because a lot of parents would buy this machine and expect the kids to figure them out. Contrasting the C64 and Amiga 500 with ROM based systems like Atari 2600 and NES (NES was also huge in Sweden), the home computers required you to get more involved in how things worked when starting or copying games. They also came with Basic programming books, and taught you how to do a bouncing ball on screen, change the color of the ball, and so on. Pretty much a very basic demoscene tutorial. It's hard to find exact sales number, but some articles say that the Commodore 64 sold 100 000 units in Sweden, and another article says that the Amiga 500 sold a lot better than the C64, and that the Amiga sold 100 000 units. Another article said that in the US, the Amiga 500 only sold 50 000 units in the first year, which was a disappointment. Comparing the populations of the US and Sweden in 1985 directly, without taking into account GDP, poverty levels, and so on, the US should sell 30 times the number of units as Sweden, all else being equal. So per capita, a lot more young people would have a C64 and later an Amiga 500 in Sweden, both being primary computers used by the demoscene. The graphic and sound capabilities of the C64 and Amiga 500 made the demos possible. Games for both computers were distributed on cheap cassettes and floppy disks. Pirated, because hardly any kids could afford to buy games at the store. So people had hundreds of pirated games on cassette and floppy disk, and usually the team that cracked it would put a short animation in the beginning bragging about cracking the game. This was the start of the demoscene, and they obviously had a lot of viewers. Everyone I knew either had a C64 or Amiga or knew someone first hand who did. It was easy for anyone interested to follow a friend home after school to play games. And we all saw the cracker team demos, and were impressed by the star fields, rotating text, and chiptune music, so it's easy to see how someone could have become interested in doing that themselves, and started their own demo group. I think that your final side note on the difference between the UK and Scandinavia is correct as well. I don't remember at all being worried about law enforcement getting involved with C64 and Amiga piracy in Sweden. This may have been because I was a kid and didn't read the news, but I think that the distance from the game producers, as you say, was involved. I don't even know if most of the teams who cracked the games were based in Sweden, or Germany or the UK, but I know that a lot of kids saw the cracker group intros in Sweden and went on to do full-length demos. Personally, I still vividly remember the awe I felt when an older cousin showed me the State of the Art demo[2] on Amiga on my grandmother's TV in mid 90s. A bit later I saw the first Doom and thought that it was totally photo realistic. [1] https://www.dn.se/kultur-noje/ingen-greta-utan-pippi-och-bamse/ https://www.dn.se/kultur-noje/ingen-greta-utan-pippi-och-bam... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89wq5EoXy-0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89wq5EoXy-0 (edit: I looked up now that the demo group Spaceballs was from Norway)
- SiempreViernes 7y ago
  Right... Maybe you are overstating things a bit here when you say that nobody was had the means for creative activity in Sweden before the arrival of the computer? Writing isn't very costly you know, neither is music, at least not compared to getting a computer in the 90's. Also, please define your time frame, 1991-1993 was not exactly a period of economic growth. The only part I think is relevant is the long tradition, even among school children, of forming associations. These provides the organisational mechanisms to form social groups large and persistent enough to support a scene for something as niche as computers. Because to have a demo scene you need both a supply of computers in the hands of people with no particular purpose for them, and that these people decide to do things together with them.
  - arexxbifs 7y ago
    > you say that nobody was had the means for creative activity in Sweden before the arrival of the computer That's reading a bit much into my post, I think. My main point was that popular culture and youth entertainment wasn't as readily available as in, for example, the US, and that it was controlled by the government to a much higher extent. This might've been a factor in spurring creativity rather than inviting to pure passive consumption. Of course there were outlets for creativity before home computers. A computer, however, provided means to try your hand in pretty much everything: writing, music, graphics, animation, programming - and the ability to tie it all together and redistribute it cheaply in perfect digital copies.

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.
- notkaiho 7y ago
  With all due respect, I disagree with this statement. The demoscene was largely teenagers. Teenagers who were afforded the chance to have a personal computer through pervasive decent living standards, with enough free time to experiment on things for the sake of experimentation and learning. They (we) were making art and impressing each other, not looking to cash in to make mad loot. The only way I see taxes as having contributed to the development of the demo scene and the subsequent high-level tech companies founded or staffed by demoscene veterans is that a high-enough level of taxation permitted these kids fo "just play around" and make art for art's sake.
  - arexxbifs 7y ago
    I think there's a point to the statement. A lot of them surely dreamt of working with software development, but they weren't interested in "cashing in" because it wasn't part of the overall mindset. Economic policymaking was geared at keeping old, massive manufacturing companies happy and the public sector was immense. Starting a small company in Scandinavia in the 1980s was much harder than it is today, but it was easy to find a job and very hard to get fired once you did, with unemployment kept (somewhat artificially) around 2%. I'm not interested in a debate about what society is better, but it's an interesting distinction.
    - erikbye 7y ago
      > A lot of them surely dreamt of working with software development The sceners, who were mostly teenagers, most certainly did not have any ambitions working in software, at that time. At least, very few, and it would never have been the main drive. You have to understand that the whole scene was rooted in breaking copy protection. The pirate groups started making "cracktros" to include in the release of the pirated software, a visual 'demo' saying, "we cracked this software; this is who we are." The demoscene, eventually, highly intertwined with the BBS scene. Crackers, hackers, phreakers, and gfx coders were all ingredients in the same stew. It was a culture of show-offs, attempting to outdo each other. Fun and careless. There were anarchists and anti-government tendencies — a lot of illegalities and arrests.
scandinavegan 7y ago
I agree with everything you said. I have a couple of theories from a Swedish perspective. First, and the most vague, is the idea of competent children in Sweden. I read an article recently (in the Swedish newspaper DN[1]) that traced a line through the author Ellen Key -> Astrid Lindgren and Rune Andréasson -> Pippi Longstocking and Bamse (comic book bear), and the idea that just because you're young doesn't mean that you're not competent. Both Pippi and Bamse talk directly to children (and the parents who read them to their children) and tell them about injustices and the idea that even a child can do things on an adult level. This idea has been involved in the creation of preschools throughout the whole 20th century in Sweden. The newspaper article says that's why it's not surprising that Greta Thunberg is from Sweden, because you can't discount what someone does or says just because they're a child. Also part of the preschool movement in Sweden was the idea that play is important for children. The DN article quotes the sisters Moberg who started the first Swedish preschool in 1904 as saying: "The child that plays a lot and with intensity, will surely become a competent human." So children are expected to play and be children, but when they do and say things, they have been taught that it carries equal weight as what an adult does. It's a powerful idea that when children play (and I include teenagers playing video games or programming here, because a lot of parents would view it as playing), they're not just wasting time, but actively engaging in activities that will be useful for them in later life. My idea is that young people in Sweden, as in many places, in the 80s and early 90s had a lot of unstructured free time. You weren't expected to have a lot of extra-curricular activities in Sweden, it was school, than do what you want. (As an aside, unstructured free time has shrunk and is shrinking rapidly for children in Sweden, as well as elsewhere in the world. We now have organized play dates, soccer practice and swimming lessons and piano lessons, and so on. We had that in the 80s too, but the intensity is way up. What used to be one or two driven kids per school class is now the norm, so as a parent you have to fight to keep your kid's schedule free.) What a lot of Swedish kids had was home computers! Here's where the earlier idea about competent children comes in, because a lot of parents would buy this machine and expect the kids to figure them out. Contrasting the C64 and Amiga 500 with ROM based systems like Atari 2600 and NES (NES was also huge in Sweden), the home computers required you to get more involved in how things worked when starting or copying games. They also came with Basic programming books, and taught you how to do a bouncing ball on screen, change the color of the ball, and so on. Pretty much a very basic demoscene tutorial. It's hard to find exact sales number, but some articles say that the Commodore 64 sold 100 000 units in Sweden, and another article says that the Amiga 500 sold a lot better than the C64, and that the Amiga sold 100 000 units. Another article said that in the US, the Amiga 500 only sold 50 000 units in the first year, which was a disappointment. Comparing the populations of the US and Sweden in 1985 directly, without taking into account GDP, poverty levels, and so on, the US should sell 30 times the number of units as Sweden, all else being equal. So per capita, a lot more young people would have a C64 and later an Amiga 500 in Sweden, both being primary computers used by the demoscene. The graphic and sound capabilities of the C64 and Amiga 500 made the demos possible. Games for both computers were distributed on cheap cassettes and floppy disks. Pirated, because hardly any kids could afford to buy games at the store. So people had hundreds of pirated games on cassette and floppy disk, and usually the team that cracked it would put a short animation in the beginning bragging about cracking the game. This was the start of the demoscene, and they obviously had a lot of viewers. Everyone I knew either had a C64 or Amiga or knew someone first hand who did. It was easy for anyone interested to follow a friend home after school to play games. And we all saw the cracker team demos, and were impressed by the star fields, rotating text, and chiptune music, so it's easy to see how someone could have become interested in doing that themselves, and started their own demo group. I think that your final side note on the difference between the UK and Scandinavia is correct as well. I don't remember at all being worried about law enforcement getting involved with C64 and Amiga piracy in Sweden. This may have been because I was a kid and didn't read the news, but I think that the distance from the game producers, as you say, was involved. I don't even know if most of the teams who cracked the games were based in Sweden, or Germany or the UK, but I know that a lot of kids saw the cracker group intros in Sweden and went on to do full-length demos. Personally, I still vividly remember the awe I felt when an older cousin showed me the State of the Art demo[2] on Amiga on my grandmother's TV in mid 90s. A bit later I saw the first Doom and thought that it was totally photo realistic. [1] https://www.dn.se/kultur-noje/ingen-greta-utan-pippi-och-bamse/ https://www.dn.se/kultur-noje/ingen-greta-utan-pippi-och-bam... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89wq5EoXy-0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89wq5EoXy-0 (edit: I looked up now that the demo group Spaceballs was from Norway)
SiempreViernes 7y ago
Right... Maybe you are overstating things a bit here when you say that nobody was had the means for creative activity in Sweden before the arrival of the computer? Writing isn't very costly you know, neither is music, at least not compared to getting a computer in the 90's. Also, please define your time frame, 1991-1993 was not exactly a period of economic growth. The only part I think is relevant is the long tradition, even among school children, of forming associations. These provides the organisational mechanisms to form social groups large and persistent enough to support a scene for something as niche as computers. Because to have a demo scene you need both a supply of computers in the hands of people with no particular purpose for them, and that these people decide to do things together with them.
- arexxbifs 7y ago
  > you say that nobody was had the means for creative activity in Sweden before the arrival of the computer That's reading a bit much into my post, I think. My main point was that popular culture and youth entertainment wasn't as readily available as in, for example, the US, and that it was controlled by the government to a much higher extent. This might've been a factor in spurring creativity rather than inviting to pure passive consumption. Of course there were outlets for creativity before home computers. A computer, however, provided means to try your hand in pretty much everything: writing, music, graphics, animation, programming - and the ability to tie it all together and redistribute it cheaply in perfect digital copies.