Code Like It's 198x

Demo Parties

Where the scene met, competed and voted

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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.

“Productions with greetingscrollers not allowed,” reads the top of the results from The Party 1991, held in Aars, Denmark, between Christmas and New Year. A scrolling message of hellos to other groups was the most familiar sight in a 1980s demo. The Party wanted something more, and 1,252 people came to see who could provide it. Alcatraz’s Odyssey won the demo competition, ahead of Hardwired, credited in the results to The Silents, and Razor 1911’s Voyage.

A demo party is a weekend gathering of the demo scene. Coders, musicians and graphic artists bring their computers to a hall, often a school or a sports arena, and stay awake as long as they can. New demos, intros, music and pictures are shown on a big screen, and the people in the hall vote for the winners.

From copy parties

The first scene gatherings were about swapping. In June 1988 Commodore User described “copy parties” as “simply the international gatherings for the crews and their friends to get together and swap ideas and games”, and reported on one at Venlo in the Netherlands where games not yet in the shops had changed hands. A month later a reader wrote in to say that in that week alone he had been invited to “no less than 5 copy parties in Denmark, Germany and Sweden”. See cracking scene for where the software came from.

By the early 1990s the competitions had taken over. The Party grew from 1,252 visitors in 1991 to about 2,500 in 1992, according to the organisers’ results. When the first Assembly was held in Finland in the summer of 1992, the organisers’ closing note boasted “over 700 people showed up… biggest party ever held in Finland”.

The big parties

Party Where Held Notes
The Party Denmark: Aars, Herning, Fredericia 1991–2002 Between Christmas and New Year
Assembly Finland: Kauniainen, Kerava, then Helsinki 1992 to now Each summer; a winter event was added later
The Gathering Norway 1992 to now Held at Easter
Evoke Germany; first held at Arnoldsweiler, near Düren from 1997
Breakpoint Bingen am Rhein, Germany 2003–2010 Easter
Revision Saarbrücken, Germany from 2011 Easter

Assembly began, in its organisers’ words, as “a rebel dream”: a school party dreamed up by members of the Amiga group Rebels and run with Complex and Future Crew. It moved to a school in Kerava in 1993, to a Helsinki ice hall in 1994, to the Helsinki exhibition centre from 1995 and to the Hartwall Areena, a sports arena, from 1999. In 1995 the organisers formed a company, Assembly Organizing, and in 2018 the telecoms company Telia became its majority owner, with an eye on esports and gaming.

At Easter the German parties took their turn. Breakpoint ran from 2003 to 2010 in Bingen am Rhein. When it ended, a team that included several of its organisers and people from the earlier Mekka & Symposium started Revision in Saarbrücken in 2011. They insisted it was “a completely new event”, not “Breakpoint with a different name”.

What happened there

MCmicrocomputer’s report on Assembly ’93 gives a picture of a party at the time. More than 1,300 people paid 100 markka each to spend a weekend in a school in Kerava, from 10 on Friday morning until 2 on Sunday afternoon. There was a canteen open around the clock, beds and showers, a techno concert and ray-traced films on a giant screen, and a bulletin board to dial into. Sponsors gave hardware, software, posters, T-shirts and programming books as prizes, and the shareware publisher Epic MegaGames put up $1,500 in cash for the PC demo competition.

The Party was bigger still. For its 1993 edition it moved to what Amiga Format called Scandinavia’s largest conference centre, in Herning, with room for more than 3,000 people, a 6-metre by 4-metre screen and “24-hour entertainment”. Prize money for the demo, graphics and music competitions came to more than $1,000. Two years later, at The Party V in Fredericia, the demo competition alone paid $3,500 to the winner, and the party saw more than 50 new Amiga demos released.

The competitions

Each party set its own categories and rules, but the same kinds of competition recur:

  • Demo: the main event. At Assembly ‘93 the PC demos all ran on the organisers’ 486 PCs, with a Tseng ET4000 graphics card and a choice of Sound Blaster, Sound Blaster Pro, Gravis UltraSound or Roland sound hardware.
  • Intro: a demo with a size limit. At Assembly ’93 an intro had to be under 100 KB, uncompressed. By Breakpoint 2007 there were separate competitions for 64 KB and 4 KB intros on the PC and the Amiga.
  • Music: Assembly ’93 ran separate competitions for four-channel music, the format of Amiga trackers such as ProTracker, and for multichannel music. By 1995 it had a 32-channel competition.
  • Graphics: still pictures. Assembly ’93 accepted pictures in PCX or LBM format at set VGA resolutions.
  • Wild: anything else. At The Party V any computer could compete, “from a ZX80 to a Silicon Graphics Station”, provided the entrant brought it. All eight entries were made on Amigas.
  • Game: at Breakpoint 2004 .theprodukkt won the 96 KB game competition with .kkrieger, a first-person shooter that fitted in 96 KB.

Voting

Winners were chosen by the people at the party. At Assembly ‘93 each voter could name up to five entries, with five points for a first choice, four for a second and so on, and the organisers’ file counts 105 ballots. Second Reality won the PC demo competition with 381 points to 334 for The Silents’ Optic Nerve, though Future Crew’s own published count gave 472 to 403 from 130 votes.

The system did not always work. Future Crew’s own history says that at The Party 1992 “there was absolutely no voting” for the PC demos: an Amiga organiser asked the last remaining PC organiser which PC demos were best, without telling him his answer would stand as the official result. Witan’s Facts of Life was listed first and Future Crew’s Panic second.

Some winning margins were wide. At The Party 1993 Complex’s Origin won the Amiga demo competition with 2,340 points to 1,860 for Full Moon by Virtual Dreams and Fairlight. At The Party 1994 Andromeda’s Nexus 7 scored 1,443, more than twice the runner-up’s 710. At Breakpoint 2007 farbrausch’s debris. won the PC demo competition with 1,474 points, ahead of Andromeda’s Noumenon on 815 and Synesthetics’ Lucy in the Sky with Deities on 775.

Winners

Production Group Party Competition
Odyssey Alcatraz The Party 1991 Demo
Unreal Future Crew Assembly ’92 PC demo
State of the Art Spaceballs The Party 1992 Amiga demo
Second Reality Future Crew Assembly ’93 PC demo
Origin Complex The Party 1993 Amiga demo
Nexus 7 Andromeda The Party 1994 Amiga demo
Closer CNCD The Party V, 1995 Amiga demo
.kkrieger .theprodukkt Breakpoint 2004 96 KB game
debris. farbrausch Breakpoint 2007 PC demo
Elevated RGBA and TBC Breakpoint 2009 PC 4 KB intro

Later years

The parties outlived the machines they started on. Assembly grew into a gaming and esports business as well as a demo party. During the COVID-19 pandemic Assembly and Revision both held online editions. In 2020 Finland added the demoscene to its national inventory of living heritage; see demo scene.

Sources

See also

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