13 ms·

What is the Demoscene? An interview

553 points by keiferski 3y ago

dr_dshiv 3y ago
Changed my life, tbh
fbnlsr 3y ago
I used to be part of the music scene back in '95 and it basically changed my life. I'm so proud to have a presence somewhere in the dark corners of the scene.org FTP.
smokel 3y ago
I have another pet theory on why the demoscene died. Up until the late 1990s it was not possible to playback full screen video on regular PC hardware, because of both CPU and storage limitations. This meant that if you wanted smooth high resolution animations, you'd have to resort to programming and a lot of tricks. As soon as full screen video became an option, the only limitation was the actual content of the pixels, and everything could be prerendered. Competing as an individual with, say, Pixar in that context would never make your stuff look nice. The same story goes for tracked music or chiptunes, compared to MP3s. This reduced the audience to those who could understand the effort that you went through. In many ways, that just never compares to the original demoscene feel. It was an amazing time to be alive, but it will never come back, because technology has moved on. I wonder what underground scene kids these days will cherish as much later in life.
- Mountain_Skies 3y ago
  For what it's worth, YouTube's compression renders many videos of demos into a mushed up mess, especially things like 10,000 item point clouds that still look crisp with each point individually rendered by the program but on YouTube comes out as a vibrating smudge.
- galangalalgol 3y ago
  I was never part of it. But it seems like it is still fairly popular. The constraints are artificial now, but other than just creating work, those constraints shape what is produced in a way that is still pleasing. Other constrained stuff like tiny wasm game competitions are fun too. I'm hoping demoscene on microcontrollers becomes a thing. Though you'd have to be selective. Many of them absolutely demolish the capabilities of an amiga1000. Constrained generative networks would be interesting too.
  - MDGeist 3y ago
    As an outsider myself this was my assumption for why the demoscene is not the same as it once was, the hardware constraints are no the same as in the 90s. That being said I kind of look at the demo reels for new versions of Unreal Engine as a sort of modern incarnation of pushing the limits.
    - leptons 3y ago
      Take a look at the 64K and lower demos that are still very much a technical challenge and show off a lot of programming skill. https://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?type%5B%5D=64k&page=1 https://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?type%5B%5D=64k&page=1 There's even a 32 byte demo category. What can someone do that's interesting in 32 bytes? Not a lot, but they still do it. 64K, 8k, and 4k compos are still alive and well on modern platforms and they are just as amazing as they used to be.
- badsectoracula 3y ago
  I was into demoscene back when i in middle school in the late 90s and people were claiming even then that the demoscene is dead. Turns out this never happend and it is alive to this day[0]. There are new productions for various platforms ranging from modern to retro and from full restricted intros (256 byte DOS intros, 4k Windows intros) to full blown demos all the time. [0] https://www.pouet.net/index.php https://www.pouet.net/index.php
  - Jare 3y ago
    The demoscene died when the PC became too powerful for hardware tricks to compete. Actually, it died when people started making demos in C and horror C++. No wait, the demoscene died when 3D cards made art/modeling the only valuable thing. No wait, let me get this right. The demoscene died when mp3 music produced in DAWs replaced mods, and photoshop and wacoms replaced deluxe paint pixelart. Hm... maybe it died when the internet made everthing available so nothing felt special anymore. Or when the web and Flash became the place to get a quick fix of visual design. Maybe it died when kids became more interested in esports and LoL than in coding. I'm sure it died when Youtube meant you didn't even need the hardware or the download to watch a demo. Maybe it was when the iPhone appstore meant the most popular device on earth couldn't run demos. I don't know, I can't decide.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- adhoc32 3y ago
  The demoscene has always been about real-time graphics. It never sought to compete with video animations. Many demosceners were, at heart, game developers who valued and appreciated real-time code, often considering animations to be "lame".
  - vidarh 3y ago
    But that's the point. Today this is a big distinction that makes it more difficult for many people to appreciate. When we saw Commodore 64 demos for example, they often impressed even relatively non-technical people. But today a demo that pushes the limits technically will often only look impressive to those who understand the technical limitations. That has significantly changed the potential audience to a diminishing subset even if relatively technical people.
    - 1000100_1000101 3y ago
      Anyone who plays AAA games knows the currently state of the art and technical limitations. Sure it's not everyone, but a large enough non-technical portion of the population will be able to appreciate it, to some degree.
      - vidarh 3y ago
        This is assuming that they'll look at a non-interactive demo and get why someone would insist on not pre-rendering everything in the first place instead of comparing it against pre-generated video. That was becoming a problem already 20+ years ago in explaining to people what made a given demo impressive, because most people aren't interested in the technical limitations.
  - smokel 3y ago
    I totally agree that this was the opinion of many demosceners. However, my point is that this would seldom be the opinion of the general public. The demoscene grew organically, and trying to define what it should be about seemed a bit silly. The artificial limits, such as 64K or 4K intros sure were fun to compete with, but they make little or no sense to the uninitiated, and were pretty much arbitrary. It was actually what put me off a bit -- I enjoyed the demoscene to learn new things and to experiment with computers in total freedom. I had no need for artificial limitations set out by competitions, and never really cared much for the gatherings of socially less developed boys who smelled pretty bad (even though I exactly matched that profile myself :). I really liked the contrarian groups who faked a lot. In Nooon's "Stars" (1995) a 3D bee is rendered with a complete wing missing, to fake a high poly count. "Transgression 2" by MFX may also be a good example of what I am trying to convey here. Obviously it was not real-time ray tracing, but what was it? It puzzled me for weeks!
- warpspin 3y ago
  > As soon as full screen video became an option, the only limitation was the actual content of the pixels, and everything could be prerendered. Competing as an individual with, say, Pixar in that context would never make your stuff look nice. Not sure that was a factor. You could already earlier prerender things, just maybe not minutes of it, but for loops it always was a thing. Back then in the late 80ies/early 90ies, at least in the C64 scene, it was a huge topic sometimes and people stressed when especially spectacular effects where "realtime", so there will be no doubts, cause prerendering carried a huge stigma with it for a long time. In fact, this was what held back the demoscene for a while, cause a lot of very stylish things just were not possible at least on C64 hardware without prerendering or at least doing the 3d calculations up front. The scene actually had to overcome their fixation on "realtime" effects before a lot of very artsy, stylish demos became possible, once people started focussing on what you see, not how you achieve it. The latter part might not apply to stronger machines, though, admittedly. On the C64 any kind of long running animation is a feat in itself, even if you trade limited CPU for limited memory.
- gnramires 3y ago
  Procedural art has a different quality to it though :) Edit: That is to say, I don't think the only value of the demoscene is to create something cool under technical limitations. I think it's to create something cool in a computational medium (the spirit lives on as procedural art, shader art, etc. as well). Every method of producing a work (done under finite time, I guess :P) will give sometimes vastly different results. Hand drawing an animation will give something completely different under similar time constraints as video editing and completely different from procedural drawing. To give some examples: you can easily render thousands of points, e.g. stars, make them twinkle, draw thousands of trees, and give them all detailed movement. That's very hard to do by hand. By hand you'll have better control of style, and details like paint texture, etc.. Animating characters (with genuine character) is trivial by hand but quite difficult procedurally (you have to resort to essentially manual animation in the end). There's the question of offline vs online rendering... if you're offline rendering you can go bonkers with millions of objects. I personally like being able to run it real time, I find it gives it a more intimate feeling, and is easier to reproduce (but am not against offline rendering if you find it suitable!). Also very exciting to me is baking randomness, either with a fixed seed or changing seeds every time. You get a different piece every time you watch it! The possibilities are really vast, and mostly unexplored.
  - smokel 3y ago
    This is a very interesting addition to the discussion. The digital art world and the demoscene sometimes briefly met, but I assume that most of the time its members look down on eachother. An interesting artist in this respect is Karl Sims [1]. As far as I know, he was not involved in the demoscene, but he sure did make some interesting things! [1] https://www.karlsims.com/ https://www.karlsims.com/
    - algorias 3y ago
      From the little exposure I've had of the digital art world (I assume you mean high art as in fancy galleries and such) is that it's much more fad driven. One year the "it" thing is interaction, and so everyone rushes to do that. Then it's AI, so people rush to be the first to publish a book written by AI or whatever. Say what you will about the current demoscene stylistically, it is to this day an underground, non-commercial movement (maybe countercultural? labels don't really matter, I'm just trying to gesture at something). People make stuff for the hell of it, with themselves as the target audience. It's hard to beat the sheer joy of that.
- boomlinde 3y ago
  The basic premise of this post is utterly wrong. > I have another pet theory on why the demoscene died. It didn't die. Revision hosts hundreds of sceners every year. This year over 400 entries were submitted to the competition, including 40 full PC demos and over 40 tracked/oldschool/executable music entries. Even for small, local C64/Amiga parties here you have to race for tickets to these events. We released a C64 intro outside a competition a couple of months ago, and within a couple of days it was buried in the inflow of new C64 releases on CSDB. The C64 scene is bigger now than when I got into it 18 years ago. > The same story goes for tracked music or chiptunes, compared to MP3s. That didn't die either. Things don't die just because you stop pay attention to them. The notion of competing with Pixar is absurd; the terms of competition and markets are entirely different. Pixar makes movies for the mainstream to make money. Sceners make productions for sceners that may be more interesting to them than a Pixar production in an esoteric sense that the mainstream will not understand.
  - smokel 3y ago
    No need to be so harsh. You seem to be misinterpreting and misunderstanding my comment. I get it that there are still people who are trying to keep the spirit alive, and I wish them all the most of fun, but as I try to explain it is no longer the same for most of us who were there in the 80s and 90s. "The demoscene died" is a trope that means that the original demoscene feeling is gone for many. If you got into the demoscene in 2005, I doubt you experienced it first-hand, but I am sure you have read about it. Edit: To go into the Pixar argument a bit more: In 1993 a demo such as Second Reality could impress "normies" as much as an MTV video clip could. Remember that back then video clips were often total utter crap, and some demos were buttery smooth 50fps animations with a distinctive feel that you could not find anywhere in popular culture. In my personal opinion, after the end of the 90s the demoscene devolved into a "L'art pour l'art" incrowd which is great fun for some of its members, but less so for the general public.
    - tari3x 3y ago
      I'd like to fault the Pixar argument in yet another aspect - every Pixar video any of us have ever seen is heavily compressed. I did not appreciate how much is lost that way until I started playing real demos on the big screen as opposed to their youtube rendering. Take Through the Cracks by Still - it is not compressable, and everyone I show it to on the big projection wall agrees that it is unlike any video they've ever experienced.
- skrebbel 3y ago
  > the demoscene died It didn’t!
- Zetobal 3y ago
  In germany a lot of it was because of the success of Crytek with Crysis at the time. The first cryengine was mostly build by demoscene enthusiasts :) They gobbled up a lot of demoscene people and from Crytek they got scattered around the globe.
  - effekt 3y ago
    Not just crytek! Yager also had founding demosceners I believe? There's more in Germany for sure. 3DMark the benchmark by Futuremark is as the name suggests, made by ex Future Crew. The list goes on. If you go around looking at where most demosceners from the past decade or two work today, you'll find the vast majority of them work at places like Unity, Unreal (Epic), etc.
    - Zetobal 3y ago
      Yeah, most of my circle works at epic or VFX studios now.
- gorkish 3y ago
  If you want to contend that a screen of video and two channels of audio is the endgame, that's fine. But it's not :)
- z3phyr 3y ago
  Can it be not expanded to the current hardware? Making it do what other people think is impossible, investigating undefined behavior in hardware, which would be more given the behemoth size. A real time demo where every pixel can be deformed, giving rise to an ultra interactive world in less than 4GB memory.
  - leptons 3y ago
    The real competition on modern hardware is the 64K and lower competitions. Doing something interesting in 64K or even 4K is how you really show off programming skills on modern hardware.
0xcb0 3y ago
For me, it is and will always be art! I have tried and failed to be any good in this competition, but I for sure enjoyed watching these demos and still get this flashback when I see one. Oh dear, good old times when having a 3D animation and sound all running fluidly (on that old machines) from a small tiny program felt like magic. I have respect for the guys that kept on creating them and making it part of the computer/internet history! Thank you all!
- jnovek 3y ago
  For what it's worth, UNESCO agrees that it's art: https://www.unesco.de/en/culture-and-nature/intangible-cultural-heritage/demoscene-culture-digital-real-time-animations https://www.unesco.de/en/culture-and-nature/intangible-cultu...
  - effekt 3y ago
    Huge shoutout to Digitale Kultur e.V. for that -- that club was founded by the folks that organize the Evoke demoparty!
adhoc32 3y ago
The demoscene was once the birthplace of elite programmers.
- throwaway14356 3y ago
  some how they forgot to push the boundaries? Baking AI into it should present enough of a challenge if you want it.
- pixelpoet 3y ago
  I could write more or less a whole book on various demosceners and what they've done since (RTX, Media Molecule, modern tile based GPU architectures, visibility culling middleware in most games, music library used in most games, on and on, ...)
  - adhoc32 3y ago
    I would buy that book.
jnovek 3y ago
If you like the music from demoscene, much of it was written on a tracker sequencer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_tracker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_tracker. I've been playing with Polyend's hardware tracker recently and I love it. If you want to try a tracker out yourself Renoise is great (much cheaper) option for PC/Mac/Linux. There are also several free trackers out there with varying levels of practicality (I only know Polyend and Renoise so I can't really suggest which free ones are good). There's a bit of a learning curve but once you get the hang of the workflow it's tons of fun!
- Not_John 3y ago
  There is also https://scenesat.com/ https://scenesat.com/ my goto Demoscene Music Radio :)
- enlyth 3y ago
  Also check out this popular video by Ahoy on the history of trackers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roBkg-iPrbw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roBkg-iPrbw
- skripp 3y ago
  I can also recommend Sunvox as a great tracker, but it’s much more than that. Free on most platforms and around 10 usd on iOS/android.
  - slmjkdbtl 3y ago
    Sunvox is my favorite software, I can hardly remember any other software with so much personality + utility + smoothness + multi platform
    - pixelpoet 3y ago
      One of the example songs actually makes the user interface slowly morph into a sort of demo (!!!!), wait for it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHFSrxlouh8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHFSrxlouh8 PS. Demoscene is by far the best thing to ever come out of computing, as a whole.
PuffinBlue 3y ago
EMF Camp[0] in the UK last year had a talk about this[1]. I attended in person. It was a fascinating intro to something I didn’t really understand existed. EMF camp is something of a wonder in itself. If you can make it to the next one, go! [0] https://www.emfcamp.org/ https://www.emfcamp.org/ [1] https://youtu.be/e-qjLfnOrx8?feature=shared https://youtu.be/e-qjLfnOrx8?feature=shared
- dave84 3y ago
  EMF Camp has an entire demoparty contained within it: Field-FX!
  - z303 3y ago
    and run ByteJams most Monday's at 8pm UK time https://www.twitch.tv/FieldFxDemo https://www.twitch.tv/FieldFxDemo
KingOfCoders 3y ago
I still remember my first sine scroller, even it is nearly 40y ago. It was the first time I wrote software together with other people.
- effekt 3y ago
  I remember trying to replicate a sine scroller at age 9, not having the slightest clue what a sine wave is, I just let sprites go up and down linearly on a C64 and couldn't for the life of me figure out a way to make that a smooth wave until years later :D
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
Nice little interview that touches on a number of the magical parts of the scene and the many elements and major sites. This guy only started in 1997? All good, but feel like that's just a bit 'after' the golden, significant era. There was definitely a change as PC/windows development happened ...right around then I'd say. But maybe that's just my take on it. Feel like references to some classic demos should be late 80s/early 90s for the sheer impact and that it was a much much more active scene then. Future Crew "Second Reality" forever. ;) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iw17c70uJes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iw17c70uJes
- royjacobs 3y ago
  I was part of the PC demoscene in that era (1997-2002) and it definitely was a super productive and exciting time. The transition to Windows wasn't necessarily a big deal, but the impact of 3d acceleration definitely was. In that period 3d accelerators were basically capable of running Quake and not much else. Traditional demo effects that relied on reading the backbuffer (even to just do some basic postprocessing) were either unavailable or had to have bespoke implementations per card. There were no shaders to speak of, and so on. For me that really killed demoscene innovation for a while, and a lot of demos basically consisted of a bunch of alpha-blended layers for a while. Nowadays, though, I'd say the scene is probably doing pretty well even though it's arguably even more niche than it used to be. Oh well.
  - skrebbel 3y ago
    > and a lot of demos basically consisted of a bunch of alpha-blended layers for a while Ahh the legendary glBlendFunc(GL_ONE, GL_ONE) era. The most underrated of demoscene styles!
    - 3seashells 3y ago
      Te white in white paint era
  - effekt 3y ago
    Same here. I came in on the back end of having to write your own engine from scratch (not just 3D, but general graphics.) MOV AX, 13h; INT 10h will forever be burned into my memory. The transition was definitely odd. What brought it around for me was when fr-08 was released and the broader scene realized what _could_ be done with procedural generation and whatnot.
wiz21c 3y ago
In case you wonder, the scene is not dead. It certainly is not what it was anymore, but there are still many people trying to push the limits on old computers. Some demomakers are also active in the emulation scene. But in the end, I guess all of that will die with "our" generation. We were born in that golden age and kids today can't live in our past (and that's fortunate!). So our art, emulators, scene will eventually pass away with us. So don't wait, write that demo while you're still young enough to compete :-) (I did my last production at 49 :-) ) Greetz to Imphobia/ImpactStudios/Cascada/FrenchTouch !
- detaro 3y ago
  If by "all of that" you mean people caring about Commodore vs Amiga pissing matches, maybe. But the Demoscene is much more, and that's not tied to your generation. There's demos targeting platforms that have only now existed for a few years.
  - hnlmorg 3y ago
    > Commodore vs Amiga I assume you mean Atari? Commodore owned Amiga
    - anon25783 3y ago
      they might mean C64/C128 vs. Amiga
      - Beldin 3y ago
        I initially thought parent commenter was being witty... thanks to this comment, I realised that the parent commenter might not have known that.
- fasterik 3y ago
  Maybe it will live on with the advent of fantasy consoles/computers. PICO-8 and similar systems provide the same kind of time and space limitations as the old systems, which still encourages a certain amount of creativity and ingenuity.
_chu1 3y ago
Even though I'm 15 I love tracker music and have so much respect for the work that was done in the days the demoscene was huge. I really hope it keeps going so I can be notable making my own tracker music.
- Benanov 3y ago
  I started making my own tracker music at 15. Grab yourself a tracker and a bunch of samples and give it a go. For me it was FastTracker II and ripping samples from the .mod and .s3m and .xm files I could find. Yours will probably be Milktracker, Modplug Tracker, Schism Tracker, and a bunch of royalty-free sample packs online. Yeah your first module will suck. It's OK. They all do. Soon you'll be discovering open fifths. Then inversions. Then suspended chords. Then modes. Then panning tricks, portamentoes, playing with the all the effects and envelopes and all the cute tricks invented in trackers since I last used one. I'm "Broam" on modarchive.org
  - _chu1 3y ago
    I use samples from some SF2s as well, specifically this odd Super Nintendo styled SF2 I downloaded years ago because some samples in it are super cool and weird not to mention the perfect sample rate and size, specifically this oddly-heavenly sounding nylon acoustic guitar, but for electric guitars (which I wanna experiment with making metal in trackers) I use FM guitars because they just shred hard as hell for some unknown reason. I use OpenMPT on Windows but I've heard there are others that are much better. I saw the website for Renoise but looking at some screenshots, it really gives me the "what the fuck do I do here and how" kind of feeling software like FL Studio or Cubase gives me. I also love sampling voices, I have this old WAV from the 90s of some guy from IBM talking about what information technology would become, and sampling him is funny.
    - dceddia 3y ago
      I don’t know if you’ve already run across this but you might like Ableton’s Learning Synths site and also Syntorial. They’re both more on the side of learning to program synthesizers than using the DAWs themselves, but I always wished I had learned earlier about how all those knobs worked. 0: https://learningsynths.ableton.com/ https://learningsynths.ableton.com/ 1: https://www.syntorial.com/ https://www.syntorial.com/
meerita 3y ago
I organized two demoscene parties in Argentina with some friends. It was a fantastic experience, although I didn't get any sleep for four consecutive days during both occasions. I wish we could continue organizing these events, but the demoscene has become more mainstream with the advent of the internet and numerous channels for showcasing your work, including AI.
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
Some more anecdotes and praise for the scene from the first UNESCO declaration in 2020: Finland adds the demoscene as a UNESCO intangible world cultural heritage https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22876961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22876961
trollied 3y ago
There have been some great Demo Scene history books published over the last few years. https://www.editions64k.fr/product/demoscene-the-logo-art/ https://www.editions64k.fr/product/demoscene-the-logo-art/ https://www.editions64k.fr/product/demoscene-the-amiga-years-vol-1/ https://www.editions64k.fr/product/demoscene-the-amiga-years... etc. Very high quality books, great for a coffee table or a nostalgic read.
- res0nat0r 3y ago
  Thanks! These look great.
mrdoob2 3y ago
In the 2000s I did a quite a few demos¹. Even if it was fun I often felt it was useless because the skills I was acquiring were only applicable for game development and that was something I was not interested in. It was quite a shock to me when I found myself working on a WebGL demo for Google² and all what I had learnt in the demoscene paid off (and has continued paying off ever since!³⁴). 1. https://ricardocabello.com/ https://ricardocabello.com/ 2. https://experiments.withgoogle.com/3-dreams-of-black https://experiments.withgoogle.com/3-dreams-of-black 3. https://threejs.org/ https://threejs.org/ 4. https://m.pouet.net/lists.php?which=153 https://m.pouet.net/lists.php?which=153
- Flam 3y ago
  Your work was an inspiration for me growing up! A big fan of anything mrdoob
  - mrdoob2 3y ago
    Glad to hear! ^^
- sigmoid10 3y ago
  Getting older, one of the most important things I've learned is that no technical skill is useless. Especially since you never know where you end up. I've had so many things at university where I was absolutely sure that I'd never need them. And for like 90% of them I was right. But the remaining 10% were incredible boosters to my career and I never would have thought they could have such a huge a impact.
  - arkitaip 3y ago
    Being a techie also means that you aquire meta skills like being able to figure out and troubleshoot random tech very fast, no matter how trivial or complex. Where most people would never bother to dig deep enough or quite really fast, techies can deep wide and deep, over a long period if need be.
  - block_dagger 3y ago
kebman 3y ago
Some Atari ST demos and chiptunes The Union Demo https://youtu.be/comSfq97R9s?si=BjaC_NyEpnkBsCTG https://youtu.be/comSfq97R9s?si=BjaC_NyEpnkBsCTG Wicked Polygons Screen - Synergy Megademo https://youtu.be/T7YZ3n35eNg?si=29zuqG9dCCnp52hk https://youtu.be/T7YZ3n35eNg?si=29zuqG9dCCnp52hk FirST Love by Overlanders https://youtu.be/3QginSr9V7A?si=rY3KGclc26lX24k3 https://youtu.be/3QginSr9V7A?si=rY3KGclc26lX24k3 Scavenger - Wicked Polygons https://youtu.be/xi7fg7UvsbM?si=BBb1pU3pZqwnWs2P https://youtu.be/xi7fg7UvsbM?si=BBb1pU3pZqwnWs2P
- alexisread 3y ago
  I'd have gone with a few different ones :) https://youtu.be/vyeYjw3zjSc https://youtu.be/vyeYjw3zjSc The world according to nordlicht https://youtu.be/1hvFiv2hpYE https://youtu.be/1hvFiv2hpYE Sea of color https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPkKiLturF8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPkKiLturF8 Dark side of the spoon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yexNdSLEpIY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yexNdSLEpIY What if demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZVgOtWiH2M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZVgOtWiH2M Atari game tools (ST as well as STE)
plussed_reader 3y ago
My favorite is Krieger, a quake looking fps in 95KB from 2004 Run as admin in windows land and it should start. https://www.myabandonware.com/game/kkrieger-chapter-1-cl1 https://www.myabandonware.com/game/kkrieger-chapter-1-cl1
- effekt 3y ago
  Check out ryg's blog about it[1]. To nobody's surprise, other than tweeting things my puny brain can't decypher, I believe he works on Unreal Engine these days. 1. https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2012/04/08/metaprogramming-for-madmen/ https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2012/04/08/metaprogramming-for...
  - plussed_reader 3y ago
    I had read this once upon a time, but thank you for reaffirming one of the designers. Nice to see them still in the game.
ezequiel-garzon 3y ago
I realize this peaked with old hardware, but I wonder, do visual artists that want to use the latest hardware for similar art not count as part of the demoscene? Why not? I imagine these hackers liked the technical challenge but also the aesthetics.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  Because without the technical challenge element, it's "just" audiovisual art, but check out the music video for T69 Collapse by Aphex Twin (photosensitive epillepsy warning): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqayDnQ2wmw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqayDnQ2wmw. More information / interview with the visual artist: https://www.fastcompany.com/90216189/how-aphex-twins-t69-collapse-video-used-a-neural-network-for-hallucinatory-visuals https://www.fastcompany.com/90216189/how-aphex-twins-t69-col...
- algorias 3y ago
  It's trivial to "count" as part of the demoscene. Just release your work at one of the numerous parties held every year. All the smaller ones even accept remote entries. An important part of the culture is that the releases are non-commercial, free to distribute and so on.
bhouston 3y ago
The demo scene was so formative. Like many others of a certain age in the 3D industry, I was first a demo scene coder, because what else was one to do if you were good at math and computer science but still stuck in high school? My 1997-era renderer did reflections, bump, color textures, etc all in 16 bit using x86 assembler rasterizers, no floating point, with 256 color palette - source can be found from this link: https://twitter.com/benhouston3d/status/1260346800176877571 https://twitter.com/benhouston3d/status/1260346800176877571 Another demo from the same era (1996), also includes source: https://twitter.com/benhouston3d/status/1272530352070971397 https://twitter.com/benhouston3d/status/1272530352070971397 Nearly 30 years later I am still doing 3D graphics, contributing to Threejs (which is run by mrdoob, another demo scene coder), glTF, VFX software, https://web3dsurvey.com https://web3dsurvey.com and have run a computer-graphics company for the last ~20 years: https://threekit.com https://threekit.com
- sensanaty 3y ago
  As someone born a bit after these demos, any tips for how to make this sort of thing? My C/C++/ASM skills are pitiful but I'd love to sharpen them, and this seems like a perfect way to do so
- TheRoque 3y ago
  Is the 3D industry a good one to get into ? Or is it too full of crunch and low pays ?
  - bhouston 3y ago
    It was horrible to work for a VFX firm in terms of work-life balance, but the pay was okay. I quit after 3 years. One crunch time lasted 27 days in a row many of which many were 10hrs per day. And then I didn't even get credit on the final film even though what I did was critical for it. When I started my own firm in 2005 I adopted a no-overtime policy in reaction to that. This was more feasible since I was creating and delivering software and this was more predictable and containable than doing VFX itself. This has loosened a bit as the company grew, we got funding, then got other divisions, etc.
brap 3y ago
Is the .NFO scene still alive? I remember making a few (terrible) NFOs about 20 years ago for some bottom tier “release groups”, in exchange for leech access to one of their “sites”. I imagine now with everything on torrent it’s not as popular. Not to mention streaming services etc.
- topato 3y ago
  Scene rls groups are still alive and well, and still adhering to the bizarre lists of rules they always did.
  - akikoo 3y ago
    Those rules guarantee the quality of the releases and the rar archive splitting enables the racing of releases from site to site. If you want to read about the warez scene, here's a pretty comprehensive book about it (you can download the pdf freely): https://punctumbooks.com/titles/warez-the-infrastructure-and-aesthetics-of-piracy/ https://punctumbooks.com/titles/warez-the-infrastructure-and...
    - topato 3y ago
      Haha, no, I'm well aware of the reasoning behind those rules. I was speaking more about enc rules for TV and Movies etc If you're not familiar with the agreed-upon rules nfos, I recommend checking them out, some of the nuke-able offences make me smile: https://scenerules.org/ https://scenerules.org/
trainyperson 3y ago
I wasn’t around during the heyday of Demoscene but everything I see always blows me away. I think these days, Dwitter has a similar vibe. 140-character JavaScript demos: https://www.dwitter.net/ https://www.dwitter.net/
- effekt 3y ago
  Which is, in fact, a demotool made by sceners and released at a party (check their about!) Just like Shadertoy and others :)
- datameta 3y ago
  I too discovered sizecoding through dwitter way past the original demoscene era, but I think codegolfing with javascript scratches a similar CS/math/language tricks itch. Had a lot of fun with dwitter, and it definitely helped me feel more fluent in coding for work, just from all the practice even though optimizing 140bytes and SWE-ing multiple thousand line files are two different niches at first glance.
HeckFeck 3y ago
The demoscene is certainly top of the 'wish I was there' list. There isn't anything that I know which brings together visual and audible arts with engineering inventiveness in the same way. I have purchased an Amiga 500 to play with demos someday, if anyone has a favourite demo that will run on the A500 please let me know!
- smokel 3y ago
  Download ASM-One [1] and try to implement a triangle filler and rotate your first 3D cube. Once you succeed, you will certainly get some of that demoscene feel! Bonus points if you consult only books, and disconnect from the internet. [1] https://aminet.net/package/dev/asm/ASM-One https://aminet.net/package/dev/asm/ASM-One
- remiche 3y ago
  Eon, by TheBlackLotus. Quite modern A500 demo on 2 disks, and it rocks !
  - pixelpoet 3y ago
    Seconding this, absolute killer! Saw it live at Revision 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BRNBuf_MhI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BRNBuf_MhI
- flanbiscuit 3y ago
  > The demoscene is certainly top of the 'wish I was there' list. Ditto. Back in high school (early 90's) I had a friend who had an Amiga, this was rare for the US. I would go over to his house often and he would show me demos he downloaded off a BBS. I was always in awe of them. We also watched Demos release on PC as well. I later learned about the Demoscene parties/events in Europe and it made me wish I had grown up closer to that.
- amiga386 3y ago
  If you'd like some of the classics: * Megademo by RSI (1989): https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=3119 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=3119 * Mental Hangover by Scoopex (1990): https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=1472 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=1472 * Enigma by Phenomena (1991): https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=394 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=394 * Hardwired by Crionics & TSL (1991): https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=981 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=981 * Jesus on E's by LSD (1992): https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=5265 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=5265 * World of Commodore by Sanity (1992): https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=2938 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=2938 * State of the Art by Spaceballs (1992): https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=99 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=99 * Desert Dream by Kefrens (1993): https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=1483 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=1483 * How to Skin A Cat by Melon Dezign (1993): https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=3539 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=3539
dfxm12 3y ago
As someone who grew up with a woefully outdated computer, while my friends were playing duke nukem 3d or half life and saving MP3s on their luxuriously large HDDs, I was content with demos and mods. Demos certainly fit most definitions of the hard to define "Art" (with a capital A), but at some level, I think art is anything you put even a little more of yourself into than you need to, and thinking back to some of my conversations with some people in the scene on IRC, you can tell demos more than meet that bar. In a way, demoparties were like a modern take on the French Salon. Around the same time, I was learning how to play guitar, so I especially got into trackers. Just thinking in a different way about writing and playing music helped. Music is a combo of art and math, and trackers helped me understand this in a different way from my music theory teacher.
- effekt 3y ago
  Gave my baby brother FastTracker when he was 13 I believe, not only did he become one of the best chip musicians ever, it effectively shaped his entire life toward pursuing music in some form or another. After this unexpected HN post today, I'll be queueing up some bleeps.
zfxfr 3y ago
I have been following the demoscene for a little more than 20 years now. Wrote only a couple demos. Last one was last year for Revision 2023. I am actually so glad to be European (living in France) because it seems it is almost inexistant outside Europe.
- effekt 3y ago
  Vive la france, shoutout to TiTAN :) And yes. Demoscene specifically only has tiny pockets in the US.
Zetobal 3y ago
Shout out to Karlsruhe-Durlach and tUM <3
wildekek 3y ago
I went to several demoscene parties in the late 90's. It was the most inclusive crowd I've ever been part of. People from all countries, walks of life and genders. There was a place for any kind of freak. It really learned me to accept and enjoy people very different than me.
nzoschke 3y ago
Love the demoscene. As kid with my first computer, demos like Second Reality were pure magic to download, run and watch. I still use demoscene videos a lot in my DJ and VJ work. If you know you know but most ppl have never seen these works of art. Here’s a 60 minute audio/video DJ set remixing demos with new music. https://vimeo.com/726202756 https://vimeo.com/726202756
agentultra 3y ago
If you want to get started in demoscene today there's a great tutorial series by the lovebyte folks [0] that is pretty great. [0] https://tcc.lovebyte.party/day0/ https://tcc.lovebyte.party/day0/
- algorias 3y ago
  Seconding this. Coding on fantasy consoles is easy and fun, and it scratches that "hmm, what can I do on this weird platform?" itch.
yafbum 3y ago
I was introduced to the scene at 15 and was active in it until about 17. Too young to travel to proper demo parties, but old enough to contribute code and music, and to enjoy the demo disks that came in the mail after a swap party. It's interesting to rationalize it as an art form today. It sounds reasonable, but I don't think I or my friends thought of what we were doing as art, at the time. We were trying to impress each other with things that looked cool. To the extent that art was involved, yes, we needed music and graphics and fonts and creative designs, but we did these things out of necessity, without calling ourselves composers or graphic artists or type designers or art directors. Watching what others sent you and contributing your own stuff created a sense of belonging which I feel was really the primary motivator for my friends and me. Regarding tools, there was one thing that was frowned upon in my circles: the use of demomaker software. These point and click apps allowed people to call themselves demo makers even though they did nothing technical. Boo!
- zygy 3y ago
  Thanks for sharing. Do you have similar side projects today?
  - yafbum 3y ago
    I never stopped :) both at work and outside.
rep_movsd 3y ago
The modern dev can try https://dwitter.net https://dwitter.net Here is all of mine https://dweetabase.3d2k.com/?user=rep_movsd https://dweetabase.3d2k.com/?user=rep_movsd
- Minor49er 3y ago
  You would probably also enjoy Shadertoy which is a similar kind of site for showing off and sharing code snippets for graphical demos https://www.shadertoy.com/ https://www.shadertoy.com/
haxiomic 3y ago
This generation's demoscene is very much alive and existing entirely within social VR. It's not well known about outside and often the participants learned to code shaders for VR as their first experience of programming. The technical skill there is stunning If you have PC VR at home, here's how you can start the rabbit hole https://vrchat.com/home/launch?worldId=wrld_f5a298f6-83e6-45ee-be58-4fafbbd38139 https://vrchat.com/home/launch?worldId=wrld_f5a298f6-83e6-45... Feel free to reach out to me for more, I'd love to show you around
slmjkdbtl 3y ago
There's a great documentary on Demoscene https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-keHkcTZD4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-keHkcTZD4
- omoikane 3y ago
  I second this recommendation for Moleman 2 documentary, but the video I found has a different link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRkZcTg1JWU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRkZcTg1JWU Looks like this version is in English, while the earlier link is in Hungarian, otherwise they appear to be the same film.
- effekt 3y ago
  If you'd like to know where the demoscene came from, look no further than The BBS Documentary[1] The whole thing started w/ cracktros in the 80s and through the artscene it eventually evolved into its own scene that was entirely disconnected from its roots in piracy. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dddbe9OuJLU&list=PL7nj3G6Jpv2G6Gp6NvN1kUtQuW8QshBWE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dddbe9OuJLU&list=PL7nj3G6Jpv...
sysadm1n 3y ago
I remember downloading demos from Pouet and testing them out on my machine. I quickly realized some of these only worked on higher-spec'd machines than mine, and some of them were laggy and glitchy af, but they still worked. What I gathered is that every line of code counts in a demo, and the hardware constraints were a good thing as you had to push the envelope of the hardware. Now people spin up bloated Electron apps on their machines which could be slimmed down substantially if more effort was put into reducing lines of code and all those wasted CPU cycles are embarrassing. But people have beefy setups that can run Electron and a host of other apps simultaneously, so they don't care to put in the effort anymore. Always code as if you're coding a demo is my mantra.
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juliangoldsmith 3y ago
One impressive example of what's possible in 64k is Clean Slate by Conspiracy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6INL_pxX8L4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6INL_pxX8L4
effekt 3y ago
I saw the headline and was hoping it'd mention psenough who has been my only lifeline in the last decade to keep up with what's going on in the scene, and I'm sure I have that in common with a lot of old sceners. Highly recommend watching his monthly reports[1]. He also streams on twitch[2] and all larger parties have fully embraced live streaming on a mainstream platform such as twitch these days, despite ads. Also highly recommend going to Europe to attend one of the big parties. As the article says, the scene is and has always been mostly a European thing (post-BBS, post-buccaneer, after the split from piracy mid-end of the 90s) and much of the audience here seems very US-centric in their perception :) 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPUxD7hCVeo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPUxD7hCVeo 2. https://www.twitch.tv/psenough https://www.twitch.tv/psenough
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dzign 3y ago
My top 3 demos: Second Reality by Future Crew: https://youtu.be/iw17c70uJes https://youtu.be/iw17c70uJes Pump by Iguana: https://youtu.be/5u4EV9VPPUU https://youtu.be/5u4EV9VPPUU Stash by TBL, The Black Lotus: https://youtu.be/cfbjiTrctJs https://youtu.be/cfbjiTrctJs
dasloop 3y ago
Eric Prydz show Holo is, to me, like an Amiga demo but using gigantic holographic projectors. Updated graphics and sound but same vibes.
z3phyr 3y ago
What does it take to form a community of enthusiasts who make computers do something that is thought to be impossible or difficult? Not necessarily demo scene with its rule, but close, like Flipcode or LambdaTheUltimate articles. What we currently have is a bunch of blogs which are hard to find.
codeguppy 3y ago
I built recently a demoscene like demo in JavaScript using my coding platform. Here is the program: https://codeguppy.com/code.html?javascript_is_cool https://codeguppy.com/code.html?javascript_is_cool Just press Play.
bitwize 3y ago
I showed my wife some Atari 2600 demos running on the MiSTer. She was impressed, and even more so when I explained to her why the effects were so impressive, the actual hardware constraints the coders had to work with/around to get that stuff on the screen. She's a big fan of movies like Hackers, so when I told her how it got started, with bored teenagers in the UK, France, Germany, Scandinavia, etc. looking to make their mark on the world through their computers, first with pirated software and later with standalone demos, it resonated with her fondness for that kind of tech-rebelliousness. I never was and probably never will be a part of the demoscene, but it's inspired me for decades and I'm passing along that inspiration to people close to me.
js2 3y ago
The Apple IIgs had some cool demos, many of them from Free Tools Association. The fan website is still up, but unfortunately the demos don't work in modern browsers: http://www.freetoolsassociation.com/ http://www.freetoolsassociation.com/ Here's one on YouTube though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duxHZ2D0Iio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duxHZ2D0Iio
stevefan1999 3y ago
The gaming industry should always look on the demoscene. One of the most influential demo, Second Reality [1] (I think it is internally called Unreal 2), eventually impressed Tim Sweeney (yes, that Tim Sweeney from Epic Games today) and wanted to hire Future Crew to make Epic Pinball but was unsuccessful. Coincidentally, the first FC Assembly demo is called Unreal, and I'm not sure if that has anything to do with Unreal the game, and the etymology of Unreal Engine itself. I always liked demoscene because they push the tech to its limit, for example kkrieger which is a DirectX game in 96K [3], which is rare to this day due to Wirth's law [2], considering most of the games today are bloated as hell. Too bad there aren't demo groups in Hong Kong, or I may join when I was still a carefree teen back in 10 years ago when I was 14. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iw17c70uJes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iw17c70uJes [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger
nebula8804 3y ago
Anyone in the Pittsburgh area come on down to Demosplash: One of the longest running demo parties in America as well as one of the largest in America! Disclaimer: Now lets be real, Demoscene was always bigger in Europe compared to the US so while this is one of the largest demo parties in America, it still looks like this: [0]:https://twitter.com/demosplash/status/1594182872944050176 https://twitter.com/demosplash/status/1594182872944050176 If you are interested, it is occurring at Carnegie Mellon University at 5000 Forbes Ave on Nov 3-4. [1]:https://www.demosplash.org/ https://www.demosplash.org/

553 points by keiferski 3y ago

Changed my life, tbh

I used to be part of the music scene back in '95 and it basically changed my life. I'm so proud to have a presence somewhere in the dark corners of the scene.org FTP.

smokel 3y ago

I have another pet theory on why the demoscene died. Up until the late 1990s it was not possible to playback full screen video on regular PC hardware, because of both CPU and storage limitations. This meant that if you wanted smooth high resolution animations, you'd have to resort to programming and a lot of tricks. As soon as full screen video became an option, the only limitation was the actual content of the pixels, and everything could be prerendered. Competing as an individual with, say, Pixar in that context would never make your stuff look nice. The same story goes for tracked music or chiptunes, compared to MP3s. This reduced the audience to those who could understand the effort that you went through. In many ways, that just never compares to the original demoscene feel. It was an amazing time to be alive, but it will never come back, because technology has moved on. I wonder what underground scene kids these days will cherish as much later in life.

Mountain_Skies 3y ago
For what it's worth, YouTube's compression renders many videos of demos into a mushed up mess, especially things like 10,000 item point clouds that still look crisp with each point individually rendered by the program but on YouTube comes out as a vibrating smudge.
galangalalgol 3y ago
I was never part of it. But it seems like it is still fairly popular. The constraints are artificial now, but other than just creating work, those constraints shape what is produced in a way that is still pleasing. Other constrained stuff like tiny wasm game competitions are fun too. I'm hoping demoscene on microcontrollers becomes a thing. Though you'd have to be selective. Many of them absolutely demolish the capabilities of an amiga1000. Constrained generative networks would be interesting too.
- MDGeist 3y ago
  As an outsider myself this was my assumption for why the demoscene is not the same as it once was, the hardware constraints are no the same as in the 90s. That being said I kind of look at the demo reels for new versions of Unreal Engine as a sort of modern incarnation of pushing the limits.
  - leptons 3y ago
    Take a look at the 64K and lower demos that are still very much a technical challenge and show off a lot of programming skill. https://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?type%5B%5D=64k&page=1 https://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?type%5B%5D=64k&page=1 There's even a 32 byte demo category. What can someone do that's interesting in 32 bytes? Not a lot, but they still do it. 64K, 8k, and 4k compos are still alive and well on modern platforms and they are just as amazing as they used to be.
badsectoracula 3y ago
I was into demoscene back when i in middle school in the late 90s and people were claiming even then that the demoscene is dead. Turns out this never happend and it is alive to this day[0]. There are new productions for various platforms ranging from modern to retro and from full restricted intros (256 byte DOS intros, 4k Windows intros) to full blown demos all the time. [0] https://www.pouet.net/index.php https://www.pouet.net/index.php
- Jare 3y ago
  The demoscene died when the PC became too powerful for hardware tricks to compete. Actually, it died when people started making demos in C and horror C++. No wait, the demoscene died when 3D cards made art/modeling the only valuable thing. No wait, let me get this right. The demoscene died when mp3 music produced in DAWs replaced mods, and photoshop and wacoms replaced deluxe paint pixelart. Hm... maybe it died when the internet made everthing available so nothing felt special anymore. Or when the web and Flash became the place to get a quick fix of visual design. Maybe it died when kids became more interested in esports and LoL than in coding. I'm sure it died when Youtube meant you didn't even need the hardware or the download to watch a demo. Maybe it was when the iPhone appstore meant the most popular device on earth couldn't run demos. I don't know, I can't decide.
  - deleted 3y ago
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adhoc32 3y ago
The demoscene has always been about real-time graphics. It never sought to compete with video animations. Many demosceners were, at heart, game developers who valued and appreciated real-time code, often considering animations to be "lame".
- vidarh 3y ago
  But that's the point. Today this is a big distinction that makes it more difficult for many people to appreciate. When we saw Commodore 64 demos for example, they often impressed even relatively non-technical people. But today a demo that pushes the limits technically will often only look impressive to those who understand the technical limitations. That has significantly changed the potential audience to a diminishing subset even if relatively technical people.
  - 1000100_1000101 3y ago
    Anyone who plays AAA games knows the currently state of the art and technical limitations. Sure it's not everyone, but a large enough non-technical portion of the population will be able to appreciate it, to some degree.
    - vidarh 3y ago
      This is assuming that they'll look at a non-interactive demo and get why someone would insist on not pre-rendering everything in the first place instead of comparing it against pre-generated video. That was becoming a problem already 20+ years ago in explaining to people what made a given demo impressive, because most people aren't interested in the technical limitations.
- smokel 3y ago
  I totally agree that this was the opinion of many demosceners. However, my point is that this would seldom be the opinion of the general public. The demoscene grew organically, and trying to define what it should be about seemed a bit silly. The artificial limits, such as 64K or 4K intros sure were fun to compete with, but they make little or no sense to the uninitiated, and were pretty much arbitrary. It was actually what put me off a bit -- I enjoyed the demoscene to learn new things and to experiment with computers in total freedom. I had no need for artificial limitations set out by competitions, and never really cared much for the gatherings of socially less developed boys who smelled pretty bad (even though I exactly matched that profile myself :). I really liked the contrarian groups who faked a lot. In Nooon's "Stars" (1995) a 3D bee is rendered with a complete wing missing, to fake a high poly count. "Transgression 2" by MFX may also be a good example of what I am trying to convey here. Obviously it was not real-time ray tracing, but what was it? It puzzled me for weeks!
warpspin 3y ago
> As soon as full screen video became an option, the only limitation was the actual content of the pixels, and everything could be prerendered. Competing as an individual with, say, Pixar in that context would never make your stuff look nice. Not sure that was a factor. You could already earlier prerender things, just maybe not minutes of it, but for loops it always was a thing. Back then in the late 80ies/early 90ies, at least in the C64 scene, it was a huge topic sometimes and people stressed when especially spectacular effects where "realtime", so there will be no doubts, cause prerendering carried a huge stigma with it for a long time. In fact, this was what held back the demoscene for a while, cause a lot of very stylish things just were not possible at least on C64 hardware without prerendering or at least doing the 3d calculations up front. The scene actually had to overcome their fixation on "realtime" effects before a lot of very artsy, stylish demos became possible, once people started focussing on what you see, not how you achieve it. The latter part might not apply to stronger machines, though, admittedly. On the C64 any kind of long running animation is a feat in itself, even if you trade limited CPU for limited memory.
gnramires 3y ago
Procedural art has a different quality to it though :) Edit: That is to say, I don't think the only value of the demoscene is to create something cool under technical limitations. I think it's to create something cool in a computational medium (the spirit lives on as procedural art, shader art, etc. as well). Every method of producing a work (done under finite time, I guess :P) will give sometimes vastly different results. Hand drawing an animation will give something completely different under similar time constraints as video editing and completely different from procedural drawing. To give some examples: you can easily render thousands of points, e.g. stars, make them twinkle, draw thousands of trees, and give them all detailed movement. That's very hard to do by hand. By hand you'll have better control of style, and details like paint texture, etc.. Animating characters (with genuine character) is trivial by hand but quite difficult procedurally (you have to resort to essentially manual animation in the end). There's the question of offline vs online rendering... if you're offline rendering you can go bonkers with millions of objects. I personally like being able to run it real time, I find it gives it a more intimate feeling, and is easier to reproduce (but am not against offline rendering if you find it suitable!). Also very exciting to me is baking randomness, either with a fixed seed or changing seeds every time. You get a different piece every time you watch it! The possibilities are really vast, and mostly unexplored.
- smokel 3y ago
  This is a very interesting addition to the discussion. The digital art world and the demoscene sometimes briefly met, but I assume that most of the time its members look down on eachother. An interesting artist in this respect is Karl Sims [1]. As far as I know, he was not involved in the demoscene, but he sure did make some interesting things! [1] https://www.karlsims.com/ https://www.karlsims.com/
  - algorias 3y ago
    From the little exposure I've had of the digital art world (I assume you mean high art as in fancy galleries and such) is that it's much more fad driven. One year the "it" thing is interaction, and so everyone rushes to do that. Then it's AI, so people rush to be the first to publish a book written by AI or whatever. Say what you will about the current demoscene stylistically, it is to this day an underground, non-commercial movement (maybe countercultural? labels don't really matter, I'm just trying to gesture at something). People make stuff for the hell of it, with themselves as the target audience. It's hard to beat the sheer joy of that.
boomlinde 3y ago
The basic premise of this post is utterly wrong. > I have another pet theory on why the demoscene died. It didn't die. Revision hosts hundreds of sceners every year. This year over 400 entries were submitted to the competition, including 40 full PC demos and over 40 tracked/oldschool/executable music entries. Even for small, local C64/Amiga parties here you have to race for tickets to these events. We released a C64 intro outside a competition a couple of months ago, and within a couple of days it was buried in the inflow of new C64 releases on CSDB. The C64 scene is bigger now than when I got into it 18 years ago. > The same story goes for tracked music or chiptunes, compared to MP3s. That didn't die either. Things don't die just because you stop pay attention to them. The notion of competing with Pixar is absurd; the terms of competition and markets are entirely different. Pixar makes movies for the mainstream to make money. Sceners make productions for sceners that may be more interesting to them than a Pixar production in an esoteric sense that the mainstream will not understand.
- smokel 3y ago
  No need to be so harsh. You seem to be misinterpreting and misunderstanding my comment. I get it that there are still people who are trying to keep the spirit alive, and I wish them all the most of fun, but as I try to explain it is no longer the same for most of us who were there in the 80s and 90s. "The demoscene died" is a trope that means that the original demoscene feeling is gone for many. If you got into the demoscene in 2005, I doubt you experienced it first-hand, but I am sure you have read about it. Edit: To go into the Pixar argument a bit more: In 1993 a demo such as Second Reality could impress "normies" as much as an MTV video clip could. Remember that back then video clips were often total utter crap, and some demos were buttery smooth 50fps animations with a distinctive feel that you could not find anywhere in popular culture. In my personal opinion, after the end of the 90s the demoscene devolved into a "L'art pour l'art" incrowd which is great fun for some of its members, but less so for the general public.
  - tari3x 3y ago
    I'd like to fault the Pixar argument in yet another aspect - every Pixar video any of us have ever seen is heavily compressed. I did not appreciate how much is lost that way until I started playing real demos on the big screen as opposed to their youtube rendering. Take Through the Cracks by Still - it is not compressable, and everyone I show it to on the big projection wall agrees that it is unlike any video they've ever experienced.
skrebbel 3y ago
> the demoscene died It didn’t!
Zetobal 3y ago
In germany a lot of it was because of the success of Crytek with Crysis at the time. The first cryengine was mostly build by demoscene enthusiasts :) They gobbled up a lot of demoscene people and from Crytek they got scattered around the globe.
- effekt 3y ago
  Not just crytek! Yager also had founding demosceners I believe? There's more in Germany for sure. 3DMark the benchmark by Futuremark is as the name suggests, made by ex Future Crew. The list goes on. If you go around looking at where most demosceners from the past decade or two work today, you'll find the vast majority of them work at places like Unity, Unreal (Epic), etc.
  - Zetobal 3y ago
    Yeah, most of my circle works at epic or VFX studios now.
gorkish 3y ago
If you want to contend that a screen of video and two channels of audio is the endgame, that's fine. But it's not :)
z3phyr 3y ago
Can it be not expanded to the current hardware? Making it do what other people think is impossible, investigating undefined behavior in hardware, which would be more given the behemoth size. A real time demo where every pixel can be deformed, giving rise to an ultra interactive world in less than 4GB memory.
- leptons 3y ago
  The real competition on modern hardware is the 64K and lower competitions. Doing something interesting in 64K or even 4K is how you really show off programming skills on modern hardware.

0xcb0 3y ago

For me, it is and will always be art! I have tried and failed to be any good in this competition, but I for sure enjoyed watching these demos and still get this flashback when I see one. Oh dear, good old times when having a 3D animation and sound all running fluidly (on that old machines) from a small tiny program felt like magic. I have respect for the guys that kept on creating them and making it part of the computer/internet history! Thank you all!

jnovek 3y ago
For what it's worth, UNESCO agrees that it's art: https://www.unesco.de/en/culture-and-nature/intangible-cultural-heritage/demoscene-culture-digital-real-time-animations https://www.unesco.de/en/culture-and-nature/intangible-cultu...
- effekt 3y ago
  Huge shoutout to Digitale Kultur e.V. for that -- that club was founded by the folks that organize the Evoke demoparty!

adhoc32 3y ago

The demoscene was once the birthplace of elite programmers.

throwaway14356 3y ago
some how they forgot to push the boundaries? Baking AI into it should present enough of a challenge if you want it.
pixelpoet 3y ago
I could write more or less a whole book on various demosceners and what they've done since (RTX, Media Molecule, modern tile based GPU architectures, visibility culling middleware in most games, music library used in most games, on and on, ...)
- adhoc32 3y ago
  I would buy that book.

jnovek 3y ago

If you like the music from demoscene, much of it was written on a tracker sequencer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_tracker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_tracker. I've been playing with Polyend's hardware tracker recently and I love it. If you want to try a tracker out yourself Renoise is great (much cheaper) option for PC/Mac/Linux. There are also several free trackers out there with varying levels of practicality (I only know Polyend and Renoise so I can't really suggest which free ones are good). There's a bit of a learning curve but once you get the hang of the workflow it's tons of fun!

Not_John 3y ago
There is also https://scenesat.com/ https://scenesat.com/ my goto Demoscene Music Radio :)
enlyth 3y ago
Also check out this popular video by Ahoy on the history of trackers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roBkg-iPrbw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roBkg-iPrbw
skripp 3y ago
I can also recommend Sunvox as a great tracker, but it’s much more than that. Free on most platforms and around 10 usd on iOS/android.
- slmjkdbtl 3y ago
  Sunvox is my favorite software, I can hardly remember any other software with so much personality + utility + smoothness + multi platform
  - pixelpoet 3y ago
    One of the example songs actually makes the user interface slowly morph into a sort of demo (!!!!), wait for it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHFSrxlouh8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHFSrxlouh8 PS. Demoscene is by far the best thing to ever come out of computing, as a whole.

PuffinBlue 3y ago

EMF Camp[0] in the UK last year had a talk about this[1]. I attended in person. It was a fascinating intro to something I didn’t really understand existed. EMF camp is something of a wonder in itself. If you can make it to the next one, go! [0] https://www.emfcamp.org/ https://www.emfcamp.org/ [1] https://youtu.be/e-qjLfnOrx8?feature=shared https://youtu.be/e-qjLfnOrx8?feature=shared

dave84 3y ago
EMF Camp has an entire demoparty contained within it: Field-FX!
- z303 3y ago
  and run ByteJams most Monday's at 8pm UK time https://www.twitch.tv/FieldFxDemo https://www.twitch.tv/FieldFxDemo

KingOfCoders 3y ago

I still remember my first sine scroller, even it is nearly 40y ago. It was the first time I wrote software together with other people.

effekt 3y ago
I remember trying to replicate a sine scroller at age 9, not having the slightest clue what a sine wave is, I just let sprites go up and down linearly on a C64 and couldn't for the life of me figure out a way to make that a smooth wave until years later :D

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

Nice little interview that touches on a number of the magical parts of the scene and the many elements and major sites. This guy only started in 1997? All good, but feel like that's just a bit 'after' the golden, significant era. There was definitely a change as PC/windows development happened ...right around then I'd say. But maybe that's just my take on it. Feel like references to some classic demos should be late 80s/early 90s for the sheer impact and that it was a much much more active scene then. Future Crew "Second Reality" forever. ;) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iw17c70uJes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iw17c70uJes

royjacobs 3y ago
I was part of the PC demoscene in that era (1997-2002) and it definitely was a super productive and exciting time. The transition to Windows wasn't necessarily a big deal, but the impact of 3d acceleration definitely was. In that period 3d accelerators were basically capable of running Quake and not much else. Traditional demo effects that relied on reading the backbuffer (even to just do some basic postprocessing) were either unavailable or had to have bespoke implementations per card. There were no shaders to speak of, and so on. For me that really killed demoscene innovation for a while, and a lot of demos basically consisted of a bunch of alpha-blended layers for a while. Nowadays, though, I'd say the scene is probably doing pretty well even though it's arguably even more niche than it used to be. Oh well.
- skrebbel 3y ago
  > and a lot of demos basically consisted of a bunch of alpha-blended layers for a while Ahh the legendary glBlendFunc(GL_ONE, GL_ONE) era. The most underrated of demoscene styles!
  - 3seashells 3y ago
    Te white in white paint era
- effekt 3y ago
  Same here. I came in on the back end of having to write your own engine from scratch (not just 3D, but general graphics.) MOV AX, 13h; INT 10h will forever be burned into my memory. The transition was definitely odd. What brought it around for me was when fr-08 was released and the broader scene realized what _could_ be done with procedural generation and whatnot.

wiz21c 3y ago

In case you wonder, the scene is not dead. It certainly is not what it was anymore, but there are still many people trying to push the limits on old computers. Some demomakers are also active in the emulation scene. But in the end, I guess all of that will die with "our" generation. We were born in that golden age and kids today can't live in our past (and that's fortunate!). So our art, emulators, scene will eventually pass away with us. So don't wait, write that demo while you're still young enough to compete :-) (I did my last production at 49 :-) ) Greetz to Imphobia/ImpactStudios/Cascada/FrenchTouch !

detaro 3y ago
If by "all of that" you mean people caring about Commodore vs Amiga pissing matches, maybe. But the Demoscene is much more, and that's not tied to your generation. There's demos targeting platforms that have only now existed for a few years.
- hnlmorg 3y ago
  > Commodore vs Amiga I assume you mean Atari? Commodore owned Amiga
  - anon25783 3y ago
    they might mean C64/C128 vs. Amiga
    - Beldin 3y ago
      I initially thought parent commenter was being witty... thanks to this comment, I realised that the parent commenter might not have known that.
fasterik 3y ago
Maybe it will live on with the advent of fantasy consoles/computers. PICO-8 and similar systems provide the same kind of time and space limitations as the old systems, which still encourages a certain amount of creativity and ingenuity.

_chu1 3y ago

Even though I'm 15 I love tracker music and have so much respect for the work that was done in the days the demoscene was huge. I really hope it keeps going so I can be notable making my own tracker music.

Benanov 3y ago
I started making my own tracker music at 15. Grab yourself a tracker and a bunch of samples and give it a go. For me it was FastTracker II and ripping samples from the .mod and .s3m and .xm files I could find. Yours will probably be Milktracker, Modplug Tracker, Schism Tracker, and a bunch of royalty-free sample packs online. Yeah your first module will suck. It's OK. They all do. Soon you'll be discovering open fifths. Then inversions. Then suspended chords. Then modes. Then panning tricks, portamentoes, playing with the all the effects and envelopes and all the cute tricks invented in trackers since I last used one. I'm "Broam" on modarchive.org
- _chu1 3y ago
  I use samples from some SF2s as well, specifically this odd Super Nintendo styled SF2 I downloaded years ago because some samples in it are super cool and weird not to mention the perfect sample rate and size, specifically this oddly-heavenly sounding nylon acoustic guitar, but for electric guitars (which I wanna experiment with making metal in trackers) I use FM guitars because they just shred hard as hell for some unknown reason. I use OpenMPT on Windows but I've heard there are others that are much better. I saw the website for Renoise but looking at some screenshots, it really gives me the "what the fuck do I do here and how" kind of feeling software like FL Studio or Cubase gives me. I also love sampling voices, I have this old WAV from the 90s of some guy from IBM talking about what information technology would become, and sampling him is funny.
  - dceddia 3y ago
    I don’t know if you’ve already run across this but you might like Ableton’s Learning Synths site and also Syntorial. They’re both more on the side of learning to program synthesizers than using the DAWs themselves, but I always wished I had learned earlier about how all those knobs worked. 0: https://learningsynths.ableton.com/ https://learningsynths.ableton.com/ 1: https://www.syntorial.com/ https://www.syntorial.com/

meerita 3y ago

I organized two demoscene parties in Argentina with some friends. It was a fantastic experience, although I didn't get any sleep for four consecutive days during both occasions. I wish we could continue organizing these events, but the demoscene has become more mainstream with the advent of the internet and numerous channels for showcasing your work, including AI.

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

Some more anecdotes and praise for the scene from the first UNESCO declaration in 2020: Finland adds the demoscene as a UNESCO intangible world cultural heritage https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22876961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22876961

trollied 3y ago

There have been some great Demo Scene history books published over the last few years. https://www.editions64k.fr/product/demoscene-the-logo-art/ https://www.editions64k.fr/product/demoscene-the-logo-art/ https://www.editions64k.fr/product/demoscene-the-amiga-years-vol-1/ https://www.editions64k.fr/product/demoscene-the-amiga-years... etc. Very high quality books, great for a coffee table or a nostalgic read.

res0nat0r 3y ago
Thanks! These look great.

mrdoob2 3y ago

In the 2000s I did a quite a few demos¹. Even if it was fun I often felt it was useless because the skills I was acquiring were only applicable for game development and that was something I was not interested in. It was quite a shock to me when I found myself working on a WebGL demo for Google² and all what I had learnt in the demoscene paid off (and has continued paying off ever since!³⁴). 1. https://ricardocabello.com/ https://ricardocabello.com/ 2. https://experiments.withgoogle.com/3-dreams-of-black https://experiments.withgoogle.com/3-dreams-of-black 3. https://threejs.org/ https://threejs.org/ 4. https://m.pouet.net/lists.php?which=153 https://m.pouet.net/lists.php?which=153

Flam 3y ago
Your work was an inspiration for me growing up! A big fan of anything mrdoob
- mrdoob2 3y ago
  Glad to hear! ^^
sigmoid10 3y ago
Getting older, one of the most important things I've learned is that no technical skill is useless. Especially since you never know where you end up. I've had so many things at university where I was absolutely sure that I'd never need them. And for like 90% of them I was right. But the remaining 10% were incredible boosters to my career and I never would have thought they could have such a huge a impact.
- arkitaip 3y ago
  Being a techie also means that you aquire meta skills like being able to figure out and troubleshoot random tech very fast, no matter how trivial or complex. Where most people would never bother to dig deep enough or quite really fast, techies can deep wide and deep, over a long period if need be.
- block_dagger 3y ago

kebman 3y ago

Some Atari ST demos and chiptunes The Union Demo https://youtu.be/comSfq97R9s?si=BjaC_NyEpnkBsCTG https://youtu.be/comSfq97R9s?si=BjaC_NyEpnkBsCTG Wicked Polygons Screen - Synergy Megademo https://youtu.be/T7YZ3n35eNg?si=29zuqG9dCCnp52hk https://youtu.be/T7YZ3n35eNg?si=29zuqG9dCCnp52hk FirST Love by Overlanders https://youtu.be/3QginSr9V7A?si=rY3KGclc26lX24k3 https://youtu.be/3QginSr9V7A?si=rY3KGclc26lX24k3 Scavenger - Wicked Polygons https://youtu.be/xi7fg7UvsbM?si=BBb1pU3pZqwnWs2P https://youtu.be/xi7fg7UvsbM?si=BBb1pU3pZqwnWs2P

alexisread 3y ago
I'd have gone with a few different ones :) https://youtu.be/vyeYjw3zjSc https://youtu.be/vyeYjw3zjSc The world according to nordlicht https://youtu.be/1hvFiv2hpYE https://youtu.be/1hvFiv2hpYE Sea of color https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPkKiLturF8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPkKiLturF8 Dark side of the spoon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yexNdSLEpIY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yexNdSLEpIY What if demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZVgOtWiH2M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZVgOtWiH2M Atari game tools (ST as well as STE)

plussed_reader 3y ago

My favorite is Krieger, a quake looking fps in 95KB from 2004 Run as admin in windows land and it should start. https://www.myabandonware.com/game/kkrieger-chapter-1-cl1 https://www.myabandonware.com/game/kkrieger-chapter-1-cl1

effekt 3y ago
Check out ryg's blog about it[1]. To nobody's surprise, other than tweeting things my puny brain can't decypher, I believe he works on Unreal Engine these days. 1. https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2012/04/08/metaprogramming-for-madmen/ https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2012/04/08/metaprogramming-for...
- plussed_reader 3y ago
  I had read this once upon a time, but thank you for reaffirming one of the designers. Nice to see them still in the game.

ezequiel-garzon 3y ago

I realize this peaked with old hardware, but I wonder, do visual artists that want to use the latest hardware for similar art not count as part of the demoscene? Why not? I imagine these hackers liked the technical challenge but also the aesthetics.

Cthulhu_ 3y ago
Because without the technical challenge element, it's "just" audiovisual art, but check out the music video for T69 Collapse by Aphex Twin (photosensitive epillepsy warning): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqayDnQ2wmw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqayDnQ2wmw. More information / interview with the visual artist: https://www.fastcompany.com/90216189/how-aphex-twins-t69-collapse-video-used-a-neural-network-for-hallucinatory-visuals https://www.fastcompany.com/90216189/how-aphex-twins-t69-col...
algorias 3y ago
It's trivial to "count" as part of the demoscene. Just release your work at one of the numerous parties held every year. All the smaller ones even accept remote entries. An important part of the culture is that the releases are non-commercial, free to distribute and so on.

bhouston 3y ago

The demo scene was so formative. Like many others of a certain age in the 3D industry, I was first a demo scene coder, because what else was one to do if you were good at math and computer science but still stuck in high school? My 1997-era renderer did reflections, bump, color textures, etc all in 16 bit using x86 assembler rasterizers, no floating point, with 256 color palette - source can be found from this link: https://twitter.com/benhouston3d/status/1260346800176877571 https://twitter.com/benhouston3d/status/1260346800176877571 Another demo from the same era (1996), also includes source: https://twitter.com/benhouston3d/status/1272530352070971397 https://twitter.com/benhouston3d/status/1272530352070971397 Nearly 30 years later I am still doing 3D graphics, contributing to Threejs (which is run by mrdoob, another demo scene coder), glTF, VFX software, https://web3dsurvey.com https://web3dsurvey.com and have run a computer-graphics company for the last ~20 years: https://threekit.com https://threekit.com

sensanaty 3y ago
As someone born a bit after these demos, any tips for how to make this sort of thing? My C/C++/ASM skills are pitiful but I'd love to sharpen them, and this seems like a perfect way to do so
TheRoque 3y ago
Is the 3D industry a good one to get into ? Or is it too full of crunch and low pays ?
- bhouston 3y ago
  It was horrible to work for a VFX firm in terms of work-life balance, but the pay was okay. I quit after 3 years. One crunch time lasted 27 days in a row many of which many were 10hrs per day. And then I didn't even get credit on the final film even though what I did was critical for it. When I started my own firm in 2005 I adopted a no-overtime policy in reaction to that. This was more feasible since I was creating and delivering software and this was more predictable and containable than doing VFX itself. This has loosened a bit as the company grew, we got funding, then got other divisions, etc.

brap 3y ago

Is the .NFO scene still alive? I remember making a few (terrible) NFOs about 20 years ago for some bottom tier “release groups”, in exchange for leech access to one of their “sites”. I imagine now with everything on torrent it’s not as popular. Not to mention streaming services etc.

topato 3y ago
Scene rls groups are still alive and well, and still adhering to the bizarre lists of rules they always did.
- akikoo 3y ago
  Those rules guarantee the quality of the releases and the rar archive splitting enables the racing of releases from site to site. If you want to read about the warez scene, here's a pretty comprehensive book about it (you can download the pdf freely): https://punctumbooks.com/titles/warez-the-infrastructure-and-aesthetics-of-piracy/ https://punctumbooks.com/titles/warez-the-infrastructure-and...
  - topato 3y ago
    Haha, no, I'm well aware of the reasoning behind those rules. I was speaking more about enc rules for TV and Movies etc If you're not familiar with the agreed-upon rules nfos, I recommend checking them out, some of the nuke-able offences make me smile: https://scenerules.org/ https://scenerules.org/

trainyperson 3y ago

I wasn’t around during the heyday of Demoscene but everything I see always blows me away. I think these days, Dwitter has a similar vibe. 140-character JavaScript demos: https://www.dwitter.net/ https://www.dwitter.net/

effekt 3y ago
Which is, in fact, a demotool made by sceners and released at a party (check their about!) Just like Shadertoy and others :)
datameta 3y ago
I too discovered sizecoding through dwitter way past the original demoscene era, but I think codegolfing with javascript scratches a similar CS/math/language tricks itch. Had a lot of fun with dwitter, and it definitely helped me feel more fluent in coding for work, just from all the practice even though optimizing 140bytes and SWE-ing multiple thousand line files are two different niches at first glance.

HeckFeck 3y ago

The demoscene is certainly top of the 'wish I was there' list. There isn't anything that I know which brings together visual and audible arts with engineering inventiveness in the same way. I have purchased an Amiga 500 to play with demos someday, if anyone has a favourite demo that will run on the A500 please let me know!

smokel 3y ago
Download ASM-One [1] and try to implement a triangle filler and rotate your first 3D cube. Once you succeed, you will certainly get some of that demoscene feel! Bonus points if you consult only books, and disconnect from the internet. [1] https://aminet.net/package/dev/asm/ASM-One https://aminet.net/package/dev/asm/ASM-One
remiche 3y ago
Eon, by TheBlackLotus. Quite modern A500 demo on 2 disks, and it rocks !
- pixelpoet 3y ago
  Seconding this, absolute killer! Saw it live at Revision 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BRNBuf_MhI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BRNBuf_MhI
flanbiscuit 3y ago
> The demoscene is certainly top of the 'wish I was there' list. Ditto. Back in high school (early 90's) I had a friend who had an Amiga, this was rare for the US. I would go over to his house often and he would show me demos he downloaded off a BBS. I was always in awe of them. We also watched Demos release on PC as well. I later learned about the Demoscene parties/events in Europe and it made me wish I had grown up closer to that.
amiga386 3y ago
If you'd like some of the classics: * Megademo by RSI (1989): https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=3119 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=3119 * Mental Hangover by Scoopex (1990): https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=1472 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=1472 * Enigma by Phenomena (1991): https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=394 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=394 * Hardwired by Crionics & TSL (1991): https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=981 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=981 * Jesus on E's by LSD (1992): https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=5265 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=5265 * World of Commodore by Sanity (1992): https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=2938 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=2938 * State of the Art by Spaceballs (1992): https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=99 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=99 * Desert Dream by Kefrens (1993): https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=1483 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=1483 * How to Skin A Cat by Melon Dezign (1993): https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=3539 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=3539

dfxm12 3y ago

As someone who grew up with a woefully outdated computer, while my friends were playing duke nukem 3d or half life and saving MP3s on their luxuriously large HDDs, I was content with demos and mods. Demos certainly fit most definitions of the hard to define "Art" (with a capital A), but at some level, I think art is anything you put even a little more of yourself into than you need to, and thinking back to some of my conversations with some people in the scene on IRC, you can tell demos more than meet that bar. In a way, demoparties were like a modern take on the French Salon. Around the same time, I was learning how to play guitar, so I especially got into trackers. Just thinking in a different way about writing and playing music helped. Music is a combo of art and math, and trackers helped me understand this in a different way from my music theory teacher.

effekt 3y ago
Gave my baby brother FastTracker when he was 13 I believe, not only did he become one of the best chip musicians ever, it effectively shaped his entire life toward pursuing music in some form or another. After this unexpected HN post today, I'll be queueing up some bleeps.

zfxfr 3y ago

I have been following the demoscene for a little more than 20 years now. Wrote only a couple demos. Last one was last year for Revision 2023. I am actually so glad to be European (living in France) because it seems it is almost inexistant outside Europe.

effekt 3y ago
Vive la france, shoutout to TiTAN :) And yes. Demoscene specifically only has tiny pockets in the US.

Zetobal 3y ago

Shout out to Karlsruhe-Durlach and tUM <3

wildekek 3y ago

I went to several demoscene parties in the late 90's. It was the most inclusive crowd I've ever been part of. People from all countries, walks of life and genders. There was a place for any kind of freak. It really learned me to accept and enjoy people very different than me.

nzoschke 3y ago

Love the demoscene. As kid with my first computer, demos like Second Reality were pure magic to download, run and watch. I still use demoscene videos a lot in my DJ and VJ work. If you know you know but most ppl have never seen these works of art. Here’s a 60 minute audio/video DJ set remixing demos with new music. https://vimeo.com/726202756 https://vimeo.com/726202756

agentultra 3y ago

If you want to get started in demoscene today there's a great tutorial series by the lovebyte folks [0] that is pretty great. [0] https://tcc.lovebyte.party/day0/ https://tcc.lovebyte.party/day0/

algorias 3y ago
Seconding this. Coding on fantasy consoles is easy and fun, and it scratches that "hmm, what can I do on this weird platform?" itch.

yafbum 3y ago

I was introduced to the scene at 15 and was active in it until about 17. Too young to travel to proper demo parties, but old enough to contribute code and music, and to enjoy the demo disks that came in the mail after a swap party. It's interesting to rationalize it as an art form today. It sounds reasonable, but I don't think I or my friends thought of what we were doing as art, at the time. We were trying to impress each other with things that looked cool. To the extent that art was involved, yes, we needed music and graphics and fonts and creative designs, but we did these things out of necessity, without calling ourselves composers or graphic artists or type designers or art directors. Watching what others sent you and contributing your own stuff created a sense of belonging which I feel was really the primary motivator for my friends and me. Regarding tools, there was one thing that was frowned upon in my circles: the use of demomaker software. These point and click apps allowed people to call themselves demo makers even though they did nothing technical. Boo!

zygy 3y ago
Thanks for sharing. Do you have similar side projects today?
- yafbum 3y ago
  I never stopped :) both at work and outside.

rep_movsd 3y ago

The modern dev can try https://dwitter.net https://dwitter.net Here is all of mine https://dweetabase.3d2k.com/?user=rep_movsd https://dweetabase.3d2k.com/?user=rep_movsd

Minor49er 3y ago
You would probably also enjoy Shadertoy which is a similar kind of site for showing off and sharing code snippets for graphical demos https://www.shadertoy.com/ https://www.shadertoy.com/

haxiomic 3y ago

This generation's demoscene is very much alive and existing entirely within social VR. It's not well known about outside and often the participants learned to code shaders for VR as their first experience of programming. The technical skill there is stunning If you have PC VR at home, here's how you can start the rabbit hole https://vrchat.com/home/launch?worldId=wrld_f5a298f6-83e6-45ee-be58-4fafbbd38139 https://vrchat.com/home/launch?worldId=wrld_f5a298f6-83e6-45... Feel free to reach out to me for more, I'd love to show you around

slmjkdbtl 3y ago

There's a great documentary on Demoscene https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-keHkcTZD4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-keHkcTZD4

omoikane 3y ago
I second this recommendation for Moleman 2 documentary, but the video I found has a different link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRkZcTg1JWU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRkZcTg1JWU Looks like this version is in English, while the earlier link is in Hungarian, otherwise they appear to be the same film.
effekt 3y ago
If you'd like to know where the demoscene came from, look no further than The BBS Documentary[1] The whole thing started w/ cracktros in the 80s and through the artscene it eventually evolved into its own scene that was entirely disconnected from its roots in piracy. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dddbe9OuJLU&list=PL7nj3G6Jpv2G6Gp6NvN1kUtQuW8QshBWE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dddbe9OuJLU&list=PL7nj3G6Jpv...

sysadm1n 3y ago

I remember downloading demos from Pouet and testing them out on my machine. I quickly realized some of these only worked on higher-spec'd machines than mine, and some of them were laggy and glitchy af, but they still worked. What I gathered is that every line of code counts in a demo, and the hardware constraints were a good thing as you had to push the envelope of the hardware. Now people spin up bloated Electron apps on their machines which could be slimmed down substantially if more effort was put into reducing lines of code and all those wasted CPU cycles are embarrassing. But people have beefy setups that can run Electron and a host of other apps simultaneously, so they don't care to put in the effort anymore. Always code as if you're coding a demo is my mantra.

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juliangoldsmith 3y ago

One impressive example of what's possible in 64k is Clean Slate by Conspiracy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6INL_pxX8L4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6INL_pxX8L4

effekt 3y ago

I saw the headline and was hoping it'd mention psenough who has been my only lifeline in the last decade to keep up with what's going on in the scene, and I'm sure I have that in common with a lot of old sceners. Highly recommend watching his monthly reports[1]. He also streams on twitch[2] and all larger parties have fully embraced live streaming on a mainstream platform such as twitch these days, despite ads. Also highly recommend going to Europe to attend one of the big parties. As the article says, the scene is and has always been mostly a European thing (post-BBS, post-buccaneer, after the split from piracy mid-end of the 90s) and much of the audience here seems very US-centric in their perception :) 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPUxD7hCVeo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPUxD7hCVeo 2. https://www.twitch.tv/psenough https://www.twitch.tv/psenough

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dzign 3y ago

My top 3 demos: Second Reality by Future Crew: https://youtu.be/iw17c70uJes https://youtu.be/iw17c70uJes Pump by Iguana: https://youtu.be/5u4EV9VPPUU https://youtu.be/5u4EV9VPPUU Stash by TBL, The Black Lotus: https://youtu.be/cfbjiTrctJs https://youtu.be/cfbjiTrctJs

dasloop 3y ago

Eric Prydz show Holo is, to me, like an Amiga demo but using gigantic holographic projectors. Updated graphics and sound but same vibes.

z3phyr 3y ago

What does it take to form a community of enthusiasts who make computers do something that is thought to be impossible or difficult? Not necessarily demo scene with its rule, but close, like Flipcode or LambdaTheUltimate articles. What we currently have is a bunch of blogs which are hard to find.

codeguppy 3y ago

I built recently a demoscene like demo in JavaScript using my coding platform. Here is the program: https://codeguppy.com/code.html?javascript_is_cool https://codeguppy.com/code.html?javascript_is_cool Just press Play.

bitwize 3y ago

I showed my wife some Atari 2600 demos running on the MiSTer. She was impressed, and even more so when I explained to her why the effects were so impressive, the actual hardware constraints the coders had to work with/around to get that stuff on the screen. She's a big fan of movies like Hackers, so when I told her how it got started, with bored teenagers in the UK, France, Germany, Scandinavia, etc. looking to make their mark on the world through their computers, first with pirated software and later with standalone demos, it resonated with her fondness for that kind of tech-rebelliousness. I never was and probably never will be a part of the demoscene, but it's inspired me for decades and I'm passing along that inspiration to people close to me.

js2 3y ago

The Apple IIgs had some cool demos, many of them from Free Tools Association. The fan website is still up, but unfortunately the demos don't work in modern browsers: http://www.freetoolsassociation.com/ http://www.freetoolsassociation.com/ Here's one on YouTube though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duxHZ2D0Iio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duxHZ2D0Iio

stevefan1999 3y ago

The gaming industry should always look on the demoscene. One of the most influential demo, Second Reality [1] (I think it is internally called Unreal 2), eventually impressed Tim Sweeney (yes, that Tim Sweeney from Epic Games today) and wanted to hire Future Crew to make Epic Pinball but was unsuccessful. Coincidentally, the first FC Assembly demo is called Unreal, and I'm not sure if that has anything to do with Unreal the game, and the etymology of Unreal Engine itself. I always liked demoscene because they push the tech to its limit, for example kkrieger which is a DirectX game in 96K [3], which is rare to this day due to Wirth's law [2], considering most of the games today are bloated as hell. Too bad there aren't demo groups in Hong Kong, or I may join when I was still a carefree teen back in 10 years ago when I was 14. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iw17c70uJes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iw17c70uJes [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger

nebula8804 3y ago

Anyone in the Pittsburgh area come on down to Demosplash: One of the longest running demo parties in America as well as one of the largest in America! Disclaimer: Now lets be real, Demoscene was always bigger in Europe compared to the US so while this is one of the largest demo parties in America, it still looks like this: [0]:https://twitter.com/demosplash/status/1594182872944050176 https://twitter.com/demosplash/status/1594182872944050176 If you are interested, it is occurring at Carnegie Mellon University at 5000 Forbes Ave on Nov 3-4. [1]:https://www.demosplash.org/ https://www.demosplash.org/