Desert Dream begins as a cartoon. A spaceship crosses space to Earth and flies over the pyramids of Egypt, drawn in moving vector lines, while slow, booming drums play underneath. The third pyramid belongs to Kefrens, and it has a defence system for dealing with intruders shaped like watermelons. Then the story stops and the effects start. Kefrens, a Danish group, took the demo to The Gathering in Norway in April 1993 and won the Amiga demo competition. By July Amiga Format was calling it “the best I’ve seen yet”.
Fast facts
- Group: Kefrens, from Denmark.
- Platform: Amiga, on two floppy disks; any Amiga with 1 MB of memory, the A1200 included.
- Released: at The Gathering, Lillestrøm, Norway, 7 to 10 April 1993.
- Placing: first in the Amiga demo competition.
- Credits: code and music by Laxity; graphics by R.W.O. and others.
Winning in Norway
The Gathering’s results list six Amiga demos, with Desert Dream first. Sim Productions’ Speed came second and Spaceballs’ Mobile: Destination Unknown third. The German magazine Amiga Joker covered the party in its June issue. It put the crowd at about 1,800 people from Europe and America, and noted that some had come to meet groups such as TRSI, Kefrens and Sanity.
Amiga Joker’s description gives a sense of the running order. After the cartoon, with its pyramids, spaceships and melon, the music switches between techno and hip-hop. A cube built from thousands of dots sways across the screen, followed by more dot shapes, knotted wire sculptures and dancing glass balls. In the second part metal bars slide across a floor, a cube drifts through space and the viewer rides down a tunnel of dots, before an ordinary scrolling message brings them back to reality. The magazine sold the Gathering’s demos on a 12-disk “Gathering Pack 93” through a mail-order dealer.
The watermelons
In 1997 the Italian Amiga Magazine looked back on the Amiga demo scene and named Desert Dream perhaps the best demo ever made for the Amiga’s original chipset. It read the opening as a reply in a “famous” argument with Melon Dezign: planes firing flying watermelons at the pyramids, the symbol of Kefrens, who answer in kind. The same article called Kefrens an old group “revived for the occasion”. It credited the code and music to Laxity and the graphics to R.W.O. Demozoo’s credits add more coding by Zeus and graphics by Blizzart, Airwalk, Mellica and Zeus.
How it was received
Desert Dream reached British owners through public-domain libraries, which sold demos by the disk. In July 1993 Andy Nuttall reviewed it in Amiga Format’s PD Demo Zone. “Wow, what a stormer!” he wrote, and he called it a cross between a megademo and a trackmo. It had the vector lines and scrolling messages of a megademo, backed by “four or five pieces of absolutely stonking music expertly synced to the graphics”. A caption summed up the group: “The Kefrens are a long-standing demo group who don’t often release work – but when they do… you can bet that it’s impressive.”
Two months later a public-domain library, Visage Computers, told Amiga Format that Desert Dream was its most popular demo of the month. Kefrens’ next demo, D.A.N.E., was third. At Christmas the magazine picked its ten best public-domain releases of 1993, which were “not the bestsellers, but what we thought were the best”. Desert Dream came fifth: “beautifully illustrated and backed by some great tunes, expertly synched.” Libraries were still advertising the two-disk set in 1995.
Sources
- The Gathering 1993, competition results (web, secondary copy of the organisers’ file): Amiga demo competition. https://files.scene.org/get/parties/1993/thegathering93/results.txt
- Amiga Joker (Germany), June 1993: “Demo-Galerie”, report on The Gathering ’93 with descriptions of Desert Dream and Speed and the “Gathering Pack 93” price table.
- Amiga Format issue 48, July 1993, p. 159: PD Demo Zone, Andy Nuttall, review of Desert Dreams (Express PD, disks A276-1&2).
- Amiga Format issue 50, September 1993, p. 158: “Top Ten Demos of the Month”, from Visage Computers.
- Amiga Format issue 54, Christmas 1993, p. 219: “Tippity Top 10 for 1993”.
- Amiga Shopper issue 53, September 1995: public-domain library listing (“Desert Dream 2 disk”).
- Amiga Magazine (Italy) issue 94, November 1997, pp. 22–23: history of the Amiga demo scene; Desert Dream, the Melon Dezign argument, and credits.
- Demozoo, production entry for Desert Dream (web, secondary): release date and full credits. https://demozoo.org/productions/142/