Demo Scene | Code Like It's 198x

In November 1987 the first issue of Commodore Disk User tried to explain something odd happening on Compunet, the online network for Commodore 64 owners. “The commonest type of program which is uploaded onto Compunet is probably The Demo,” wrote David Bain. “A demo is essentially a demonstration of a computer’s capabilities. At first sight, this sounds rather boring, but believe you me they’re not.” About thirty new demos went up “almost every day”, far more than anyone could afford to download.

A demo is a program that makes its pictures and music while it runs. It sells nothing and plays no game; it exists to show what its authors could make a machine do. The people who made them called themselves crews, then groups, and the loose international community around them became known as the scene.

Cracking crews and copy parties

Much of the scene grew out of software piracy, and the magazines of the time said so. In June 1988 Commodore User ran a feature by Mike Pattenden on the “network of hackers throughout Europe” who had been “trading cracked games and demos for years”. Removing a game’s copy protection was a race, and “it’s all about kudos”. The cracked copy went out with a new front end: games were “cracked, given new loading screens, boasting the name of the crew, and frequently compacted so they load quicker”. Those title screens became known as crack intros.

Pattenden counted nearly 50 gangs in Germany and a dozen in Britain, and described how they met. “Copy parties are simply the international gatherings for the crews and their friends to get together and swap ideas and games.” The month before his article, one at Venlo in the Netherlands had circulated games that were not yet on sale. “Although there is rivalry between teams,” he wrote, “they collaborate in the circulation of games and demos.”

Compunet and the British crews

In Britain, Compunet gave the C64 scene a home of its own. Bain’s article describes how a crew was organised: a coder “who handles the often complex machine code part of the demo”, an artist “who draws the pictures and all other graphics, including the Crew’s logos”, and usually a musician, “although many demos feature musical pieces hacked out of the latest software”. On Compunet’s chat service users could call themselves “anything you like. This system works very well for the demo crews, who often use Partyline under their own crew name!”

Bain singled out Thrust Concert, “a four minute long extravaganza with an animated band playing along to a famous piece of Rob Hubbard music”. He had less time for the “bog standard” demo: a picture, a piece of borrowed music and “a horizontal scrolling message which contains a message from the programmer along with a few thousand hellos to all the other demo crews”.

ZZAP!64 followed the same uploads, not always kindly. In April 1987 Gary Liddon’s Compunet column opened with more of “those adrenalin provoking proggies with all the fave features that everybody just loves to see. And this month we’ve got them all – bit map screens, Rob Hubbard music and sprites in the border scrolling messages!” Then he relented: “despite this youthful cynicism, things are getting a bit better in the whacky world of demodom.” He named the Mean Team as “the most prolific demo factory”. Sprites in the border meant opening the borders, already a demo cliché while a professional programmer writing in the same issue was still nervous of using it in a game.

The work was noticed. “Software companies regularly stalk the demo sections searching for coders, artists and musicians,” Bain reported, “and many crews have already been hired thanks to their demo uploads.”

Groups, diskmags and charts

By the early 1990s the C64 scene had its own press. In November 1992 ZZAP!64’s public domain column described diskmags, magazines distributed on disk “produced by enthusiasts”, which carried “the latest gossip and news of upcoming parties, as well as interviews, reports, contact addresses and probably the most interesting thing, the charts”. The column reprinted the charts voted for by readers of the diskmag Remark.

The same column shows how the scene talked about its own work. It reported that groups such as Black Mail, Beyond Force and Horizon had “made a comeback” after a lean period, and that everyone was waiting for the next demo from Crest. It explained scene slang for readers: DYPP scrollers, tech-tech, FLI, and the “trackmo”, a demo that loads its next part from disk while the current one is still running. One demo it reviewed, by Triad, was a protest against the police assault on Rodney King, shown as pages of text before the effects began.

The Amiga and the Atari ST

The 16-bit machines arrived with the scene already in place, and their demos reached ordinary owners through public domain libraries, which sold them by the disk. ST Amiga Format‘s “Demos Corner” in July 1989 picked through the month’s releases for both machines. On the Amiga it waded through “the usual collection of mega-copper-blitter-nutter demos”, a nod to the custom chips that Amiga demos leaned on, and on its pick of the month, a disk of six demos, called Kefrens’ Psychoball “probably the most visually impressive”, with “sampled effects, large multi-colour blitter objects and very smooth scrolling”.

On the Atari ST, which had no such chips, most of the demos it received “consisted mainly of either regurgitated Rob Hubbard tunes (remember him!), sampled music or digitised pictures”. The exception was the Union Demo, the work of a group called The Union and “not a single demo, but a whole collection of various demos”. It showed effects “that many still maintain are not possible such as fast, multi-plane parallax scrolling while playing a complex sound sample, as well as full overscan and sprites in the border”.

Parties

By the mid-1990s the biggest parties were built around competitions with cash prizes. Amiga Format reported from The Party V in Fredericia, Denmark, held from 27 to 29 December 1995, where “thousands of Amiga fans from all over the world came together for the biggest demo event of the year”. First prize in the demo competition was $3,500. The party produced more than 50 new Amiga demos, and the winner was Closer by the group CNCD. See demo parties, The Party and Assembly.

The PC

On the PC, sound cards became part of the scene’s identity. A reader writing to Computer Gaming World in January 1994 called the Gravis UltraSound “the underground’s card of choice”, adding that “Future Crew and Renaissance swear by it”. By October 1994 public domain dealers in PC Gamer were selling Future Crew’s Second Reality as a two-disk set, the “ultimate Future Crew demo”, needing 4 MB of memory.

Heritage

On 9 April 2020 the Finnish Heritage Agency announced that Finland’s Ministry of Education and Culture had added the demoscene to the country’s National Inventory of Living Heritage, one of 12 new entries. Aalto University reported that it was added “as the first branch of digital culture ever”. The listing is Finland’s own; it is not an inscription on UNESCO’s international lists.

Sources

David Bain, “Compunet Culture”, Commodore Disk User, vol. 1 no. 1, November 1987, pp. 36–37: demos as the commonest upload, thirty a day, crew roles, handles on Partyline, Thrust Concert, “bog standard” demos, software companies hiring crews, Compunet’s 1984 start.
Mike Pattenden, “Piracy: hacking at the industry’s roots”, Commodore User, June 1988: cracking gangs, loading screens with the crew’s name, copy parties, Venlo, gang numbers in Germany and Britain.
Gary Liddon, Compunet column (“Strange transformations”), ZZAP!64 issue 24, April 1987, p. 47: the “fave features” of Compunet demos, including border sprites; the Mean Team.
ZZAP!64 issue 90, November 1992, public domain column: diskmags, Remark’s charts, Black Mail, Beyond Force, Horizon, Crest, scene slang, trackmos, the Triad demo.
“Demos Corner”, ST Amiga Format issue 13, July 1989, p. 38: Amiga and ST demos on public domain library disks, Kefrens’ Psychoball, the Union Demo.
“The Party V” report, Amiga Format issue 82, March 1996: dates, place, attendance, prize money, number of releases, Closer by CNCD.
Letter on the Gravis UltraSound, Computer Gaming World issue 114, January 1994.
Public domain advertisement, PC Gamer (UK) vol. 1 no. 11, October 1994: Second Reality.
Finnish Heritage Agency, “Demoscene, musical saw playing and horsemanship of the Roma – 12 new elements inscribed on the National Inventory of Living Heritage”, 9 April 2020 (web, secondary). https://www.museovirasto.fi/en/articles/demoskene-sahansoitto-ja-romanien-hevostaidot-elavan-perinnon-kansalliseen-luetteloon-12-uutta-kohdetta
Aalto University, “The demoscene accepted to the national inventory of living heritage”, 7 May 2020 (web, secondary). https://www.aalto.fi/en/news/the-demoscene-accepted-to-the-national-inventory-of-living-heritage