Load a pirated game in the late 1980s and the game did not come first. First came a screen that had nothing to do with it: a group’s logo, a tune, and a line of text scrolling along the bottom, sending greetings to other groups. Commodore User described what the cracking crews did to a game in June 1988: it was “cracked, given new loading screens, boasting the name of the crew, and frequently compacted so they load quicker.” Those screens were the crack intros, and the people who made them went on to make the demoscene.
What an intro looked like
The magazines that saw them were not usually kind. In December 1989 Amiga Computing complained that “all these cracked discs carry the modern irritation of computing — the demo”, and described the usual kind:
Pretty coloured screen — look, he can use the copper — pretty scrolly picture — er… and the blitter — electropop music which goes on and on, and daft scrolling text, of the “Hi from Smegman of the Smegs and here is our latest disc so ya boo sucks to the noztrils of” type. Pretty for 30 seconds, useless thereafter.
That list covers the standard parts. There was a logo: Commodore Disk User, describing Commodore 64 crews in 1987, said a crew’s artist drew “the pictures and all other graphics, including the Crew’s logos”. There was music, often borrowed from a commercial game. There was a scroller, a line of text moving across the screen. The same magazine’s description of an ordinary crew demo fits the intros too: “a horizontal scrolling message which contains a message from the programmer along with a few thousand hellos to all the other demo crews”. As Amiga Computing’s parody shows, the messages could jeer at rivals as well. And there was usually some display trick meant to impress other coders; on the Amiga that meant the custom chips the review names, the copper and the blitter.
Players who only wanted the game found the intros tedious. A reader writing to the German magazine Amiga Joker in October 1993 mocked the pirate with 300 disks: “Put it in, gawp at the cracker intro, play for three minutes and leave it to gather dust?”
Who made them
Intros came from the cracking groups: the organised crews who removed copy protection from commercial games and swapped the results across Europe and beyond. The cracking scene entry covers how that network worked. The race to be first with a new game was, in Mike Pattenden’s words in Commodore User, “all about kudos”, and the intro was where a group claimed the credit. Groups that Commodore User named on its 1988 map of the European scene included Fairlight, Fusion and Triad.
The same people often made other things. In June 1987 ZZAP!64‘s Compunet column recommended a Commodore 64 version of the 1969 photograph of an astronaut on the Moon, “complete with stirring Rob Hubbard tune”, by “Dirty Den of the Eastenders Cracking Group”. Commodore User conceded that the crews’ ability was “not in doubt — one look at many of the demos they specialise in, with their slick visual effects and sampled sound is enough to prove that.”
From intros to demos
Looking back in October 1998, CU Amiga asked Crash of the Amiga group Nerve Axis how the demoscene began. “Initially, they were one and the same,” he said. The scene “really evolved from the ‘warez’ scene, from the small intros (cracktros) presented on the front of cracked programs to show off the name of the group which cracked the game.” In his account the intros then grew into productions in their own right: single-file demos on a disk, passed round in compilations; “trackmos”, “autoloading custom disks with as much crammed on one or two disks as possible”; and “megademos on ever-increasing amounts of disks”.
The short form did not disappear. Crash noted that groups “still make intros today”, and that demo parties held 64K and 4K intro competitions “to see how much people can cram into a set limit”. The demoscene and demo parties entries follow that story.
Beyond the home computers
Crack intros followed pirated software onto new machines. In September 1993 the Hungarian magazine 576 KByte reported from TCC ’93, “The Computer Crossroad”, a copy party held in Gothenburg, Sweden, from 29 to 31 May 1993, where an estimated 1,700 people turned up. Alongside Commodore 64, Amiga and PC owners were Super Nintendo owners. The reporter explained why a games console was at a copy party: the pirate movement had started on the SNES too, and groups there were cracking games “with a crack intro!” and writing demos.
Sources
- Mike Pattenden, “Piracy: hacking at the industry’s roots”, Commodore User, June 1988, pp. 93–95: games “cracked, given new loading screens, boasting the name of the crew”; “all about kudos”; the map of European groups; the crews’ demos.
- ZZAP!64 issue 26, June 1987, Compunet column: “The Moon” by Dirty Den of the Eastenders Cracking Group.
- David Bain, “Compunet Culture”, Commodore Disk User, vol. 1 no. 1, November 1987, pp. 36–37: crew artists and logos, borrowed music, scrolling hellos.
- Peter Rivetts, “No harm done”, Amiga Computing, December 1989, pp. 70–72: cracked discs and the “cracker demos” on them.
- Reader’s letter from The Dodger, Dessau, Amiga Joker (Germany), October 1993: the cracker intro on 300 disks.
- “TCC’93” copy party report, 576 KByte (Hungary) issue 37, September 1993: dates, place, attendance, SNES cracks with crack intros.
- “The piracy connection”, demoscene feature, CU Amiga, October 1998, p. 42: Crash of Nerve Axis on cracktros, single-file demos, trackmos, megademos and intro competitions.