Demoscene show

May 31, 2007

I did a little show to my colleagues about the demoscene.

There was an interesting “video postcard” in the Eurovision show in Helsinki just a few weeks ago where they showed footage from Assembly demoparty.

Things I showed

Here are the things that I showed. The list shows year, title, group and genre.

The newer stuff is either simply a video or the exe runs on Windows, so you should be able to just grab and run it on a fairly new Windows-based PC. The older ones run under pure DOS, and may not work even in a virtual machine. And since DOS machines are not so easy to get hold of these days, some guys produced a Mindcandy DVD which you can buy to watch these – the recording/conversion to DVD tries to be as authentic as possible.

1993 “Second Reality”, Future Crew (demo). The classicest classic there can be. If you only can watch one demo, then watch this.

1993 “Crystal Dream 2”, Triton (demo). Another classic released around the same time. Previous one was from Finland, this is from Sweden. If you’ve ever heard of the FastTracker music software, then Triton are the guys who made it.

1999 “Real reality”, N.E.V.E.R. (wild) A real-life remake of Second Reality :)

2000 “fr08 .the.product”, Farb-Rausch (64k). Note that the executable size is 64 kilobytes. No tricks involved – it really is this small. And be sure to watch it all the way to the end scroller, I think the music is best there and also the text is great fun.

2000 “Heaven 7”, Exceed (64k). Another great 64k, shorter but with a unique ambience.

2000 “LeGorso”, tAAt.fi (wild). tAAt is a funny Finnish crew, this one is a stopmovie made of legos.

2002 “The way out”, Unreal Voodoo (wild). The everlasting battle between sceners and “guagers” :)

2002 “Visual approach to the aesthetics of techno”, Concept (wild). Check out sound and video sync.

2004 “Obsoleet”, Unreal Voodoo (demo). A very very nice storydemo about a scener growing up :)

Things I didn’t show

I didn’t have enough time for all I had on the list, but here are the ones I had in the pipeline. Watch them if you can.

1995 “Dope”, Complex (demo). One of my favourite oldskool music tracks here.

2002 “Squish”, and (64k). “and” is a Russian developer who has alone made this great 64k. The text speaking uses Windows XP speech API which caused a big discussion about whether its cheating or not. And conversely the speech part didn’t seem to work on Vista but otherwise it’s great.

2003 “Project Genesis”, Conspiracy (64k). Conspiracy is a great group from Hungary.

2003 “ix”, Moppi productions (demo). You need to be very drunk or stoned to appreciate this one, it’s very tripping.

2003 “Zoom3”, and (64k)

2003 “Grand theft”, Otherside (wild). GTA anyone?

2003 “Legomania”, Doomsday (demo). This rocks!!! As computers become more powerful, demos are less about showing off hardware and more about telling a story. And this one has a nice story which builds upon their previous one – one of their previous ones ended with a legoman walking around the globe and this one starts at that point.

2004 “The Prophecy: Project Nemesis”, Conspiracy (64k). Nice effects, explosions, phoenix in the end.