Communities

Aminet began in January 1992 as a single Amiga 3000 in Switzerland, run by the student Urban Müller. Mirrored around the world, and sold on a long series of CD-ROMs from 1993, it gathered the Amiga's freely distributable software, music modules, pictures and demos in one place. In May 1996 it passed 30,000 files, more than any other FTP archive, and it is still taking uploads today.

A door was an outside program that a bulletin board handed its caller over to. Door games such as Trade Wars, Legend of the Red Dragon, Barren Realms Elite and Usurper let players who never met compete in a shared world, a few turns a day, one phone call at a time. A handful still run on internet-connected boards.

A bulletin board system was a computer with a modem that answered the phone. From Ward Christensen and Randy Suess's CBBS in Chicago in 1978 to the tens of thousands of boards linked by FidoNet in the 1990s, BBSes carried messages, public domain software and shareware, and on the pirate boards, cracked games and the demos and intros of the scene. The internet replaced most of them in the late 1990s, though a few kept running.

Codebase64 is a contributor-written wiki of Commodore 64 programming articles, source code and technical references. Frantic set it up after discussions on CSDb in 2007, combining new contributions with preserved material from older magazines and websites.

Compunet connected Commodore users to messages, uploaded software and shared creative work over the telephone. Its C64 demo directories gave musicians, artists and programmers an audience beyond local disk swapping.

A crack intro was the short title screen a cracking group added to a pirated game: the group's logo, some music and a scrolling message of greetings and boasts. Period magazines described them from 1987 onwards, mostly with scorn, and later traced the demoscene back to them.

The organised groups who removed copy protection from games and swapped the results across Europe and the US, racing each other to be first. Period magazines reported copy parties, scene fanzines and police raids, and the groups' intros and demos grew into the demoscene.

The C64 Scene Database records productions, people, groups and events through information supplied by its users. Klaus Andersen, known as Perff, began the project in 2001 with Kilroy and other members of No Name, using cross-references to connect releases with the people who made them.

Weekend gatherings where demo groups met in person, showed new work on a big screen and voted for the winners. They grew out of the copy parties of the late 1980s. By the early 1990s The Party in Denmark and Assembly in Finland drew thousands, and parties such as The Gathering, Evoke, Breakpoint and Revision carried the format into the 21st century.

Programmers, artists and musicians who make demos: programs that generate pictures and music as they run, made to show what a machine can do. The scene grew out of software cracking and online swapping in the mid-1980s, organised itself into groups, diskmags and parties, and moved from the C64 to the Amiga, Atari ST and PC.

Fan translators are hobbyists who hack a game's data to replace its Japanese text with another language, and share the result as a patch. The practice began in the Dutch MSX scene in 1993, took off in the late 1990s as emulators made Super Famicom games playable on PCs, and produced complete English versions of games such as Final Fantasy V, Seiken Densetsu 3 and Mother 3 years before, or instead of, any official release.

The players who compete at one-on-one fighting games, and the scene they built. It grew out of the arcades that filled with Street Fighter II players from 1991, found itself on internet message boards and at tournaments such as Battle by the Bay and Evo, kept Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike alive through the genre's lean years, and grew again with Street Fighter IV in 2009.

James Burrows's GameBase front end for Windows and Michael Plate's GameBase64 collection, which set out in 1998 to catalogue every Commodore 64 game. Its first major release came in September 2003, with credits, screenshots and extras for each game and a scripting language that starts it in the user's chosen emulator; by 2004 it listed more than 16,000 games. The collection reached 30,000 entries in 2023.

The Homebrew Computer Club brought Bay Area computer builders together from 1975. Its meetings and newsletters exchanged practical work, with a mapping period for announcements and a random-access period for finding collaborators.

A volunteer archive of Commodore 64 music, started in May 1996 by a scener known as The Shark to merge the SID collections on the internet into one accurate, properly credited set. Its first release in July 1996 held about 4,000 tunes; after 85 updates it holds more than 61,000, with a crew that rips, fixes and credits every file and a text file, the STIL, of notes about the tunes.

ICPUG grew from a PET user group into a network supporting several Commodore machines. Its volunteer journal, software library and regional meetings offered practical help independent of the manufacturer.

The Internet Archive is a non-profit library in San Francisco that began archiving the web in 1996. Since 2013 it has run old computers, consoles and arcade machines inside the web browser, using a JavaScript version of the MESS and MAME emulators, alongside scanned magazines, manuals and software catalogues. Two copyright lawsuits, from book publishers and record labels, have limited its book lending and cost it money and staff time.

Gatherings where players bring their own computers and connect them to one local network. Doom (1993) could link four PCs over a network, and playing it with friends meant carrying the computers into one room; by 1999–2000 magazines were reporting events of hundreds of players in Britain and network parties springing up in Germany, the big Scandinavian demo parties had become mostly gaming events, and in 2013 DreamHack set the Guinness record with 22,810 visitors.

Ludum Dare began in April 2002 as a dare between a couple of dozen online friends to make a game from scratch in 24 hours. It grew into an online event, held two or three times a year, in which thousands of people make a game around a theme in 48 or 72 hours. Evoland, Titan Souls, Mini Metro, Inscryption and Friday Night Funkin' all began as entries. Its organiser has said that Ludum Dare 64, in October 2028, will be the last scheduled event.

Micronet 800 used British Telecom’s Prestel network to bring software, news and messages to home-computer owners. Its telesoftware service downloaded programs through a modem, alongside the costs and limits of a telephone session.

Modding is changing a published game: new levels, new graphics and sounds, new rules, or a whole new game on the old engine. It began with hacks such as Castle Smurfenstein in 1983, became a mass hobby when Doom's WAD files let anyone add levels without touching the original, and went on to produce Team Fortress, Counter-Strike, Defense of the Ancients and the careers of the people who made them.

NESdev is the community of programmers, hardware researchers and emulator authors who worked out how the Nintendo Entertainment System and Famicom behave, without Nintendo's help, and wrote it down. It grew from a mailing list and a website of text files in the late 1990s into the NESdev Wiki, forum and Discord server, which new NES games and emulators are built on today.

No-Intro maintains catalogues of software images and publishes DAT files for collection managers. Its records distinguish titles and revisions, while checksums help identify whether a file matches a recorded copy.

The Software Preservation Society works on preserving original software media, including protected floppy disks. Its IPF approach describes disk data and layout, while raw captures retain a different layer of evidence.

Speedrunners finish games as fast as they can and publish the evidence. The community grew from Doom players swapping recorded demo files in 1994 and from Quake done Quick, a 19-minute 49-second run through Quake in 1997. Speed Demos Archive opened the idea to every game, tool-assisted runs showed what was theoretically possible, and since 2010 Games Done Quick marathons have raised tens of millions of dollars for charity.

Chip music is written for, or on, a computer's or console's own sound chip. By the mid-1980s players were buying Commodore 64 games for Rob Hubbard's tunes and voting for their favourite composers; demo crews and Amiga trackers carried the music on, and 'chiptune' became the scene's name for small modules that imitated the old chips. From the late 1990s fans collected every SID tune in the High Voltage SID Collection, remixed the classics on CD and stage, and turned the Game Boy into a live instrument.

One of the earliest recorded video game tournaments was a night of Spacewar! at Stanford in 1972, played by about twenty programmers for a year's subscription to Rolling Stone. Atari's 1980 Space Invaders tournament drew more than 10,000 players, television put arcade champions on screen in the early 1980s, and Nintendo toured its World Championships in 1990. Networked PC games in the 1990s brought cash prizes, a Ferrari and professional leagues, and by 2000 South Korea was treating StarCraft as a spectator sport.

A total conversion replaces so much of a game (its levels, graphics, sounds and often its rules) that only the engine is left. Justin Fisher's Aliens TC for Doom in 1994 made the name famous; Quake and Half-Life conversions such as Team Fortress and Counter-Strike became games in their own right.

Martijn van der Heide's website, started in November 1995 and offering downloads from January 1997. For almost two decades it was the main archive of ZX Spectrum software, documents and magazine scans, and it asked publishers and authors for permission to distribute their games, removing those whose owners said no. Its updates stalled in the mid-2010s; its database became the basis of ZXDB and Spectrum Computing, and a 2020 relaunch prompted a rival World of Spectrum Classic.