The demoscene

Shogun · April 13, 2020

Every once in a while, there's always the odd kid making fun about my age. I remember with a smile all the "why are you playing Metin when you should be having kids" back in the days I played, which sounds as ridiculous now as my parents asking if "those people on the screen" were "real people", except my parents had an excuse for the ignorance in the matter. And later on, after I started WoM2, how people was surprised that I actually knew my way around code or design even though I never went to university or followed any course on the subject.

So here's the story behind it,. Many years before WoM, even before YMIR existed, I was part of an underground culture known as the demoscene, and it turns out that this month, it was accepted by the Finnish government for submission to the UNESCO as a candidate for inmaterial human heritage, so I thought it's a good time to talk about it.

A demo, as its name says, is a demonstration. A game demo demonstrates what a game is capable of doing; and, likewise, the scene demos demonstrate what people are capable of doing. Coders, artists and music producers get together, trying to design a piece of art to please the audience. It may be deep, spiritual, funny; sometimes is completely abstract and purely a showcase of mathematical algorithms; sometimes it's the opposite and everything is subordinated to the design. There are no rules, and everything is done just for the sake of proving yourself and your group (team).

You may have seen a demoscene production before - if you downloaded cracked software, sometimes they would come with a keygen or nocd program playing some cheerful chip music. That's what we call a cracktro - small intros placed by crackers in the software they unprotected, and that was how the whole thing started back in the eighties, when the only form of software distribution was mailing disks or tapes on envelopes.

You may also have heard about LAN Parties where people used to gather to play Counter Strike, Battlefield and other games and, sometimes, win prizes -although nowadays they are kind of made obsolete by bigger and flashier esports events like ESL. Well, those LAN parties (the Gathering, Assembly, Euskal...) started as a place where the scene people would showcase their demos, intros (a small demo limited in size, usually to 64 Kb or 4), music or pixel art. And we still do, although we do it in separate "demo parties" where there's no gaming part.

One of such events is the Revision 2020, which was to take place in Saarbrucken, Germany few days ago but was made online instead because of the infamous virus that keeps us bored enough to write posts like this. So, without further a do, it's time to stop reading this grandpa story you don't understand anyway and watch some mindblowing art! So here are the 1st, 2nd and 3rd qualified demos at the Revision 2020, freshly released this past weekend.

(I really recommend you to download the executable files from Pouet as the quality is of course way better than in the video stream, which isn't nearly as mindblowing. This stuff is made for PC, not Youtube. Online video encoders choke with such high resolution, high fps content. Also don't worry about viruses, this is not the ubertoxic mt2 scene. We do this for fun.)

1st - VX2 by Spectrals

Download https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=85304

2nd - Cathodoluminiscence by MFX

Download https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=85305

3rd - Bring it on by Cocoon

Download https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=85317

If you want to see more, be welcome to check the full list of productions from Revision 2020 (including retro systems) or even better, check the all time "best PC demo" rankings for an endless list of life changing computer art

https://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?type[0]=demo&platform[0]=Windows&page=1&order=thumbup