At Easter 2000, in the Heidmarkhalle in Fallingbostel in northern Germany, thirteen Commodore 64 demos went to the vote at Mekka & Symposium. The winner, with 362 points, was Deus Ex Machina. Plush’s +H2K came second on 284, and nobody else reached 200. The organisers’ results credit it to Crest. It was in fact a joint production: its code was by Crossbow of Crest and Graham of Oxyron, two groups that had been making demos together since 1998.
Fast facts
- Groups: Crest and Oxyron, Germany.
- Platform: Commodore 64, two disk sides.
- Shown: Mekka & Symposium 2000, Fallingbostel, 21–24 April 2000; first in the C64 demo competition.
- Code: Crossbow and Graham; Graham also wrote the loader.
- Music: Jeff, with one tune each by Drax and MSK.
- Graphics: Crossbow, Cyclone, DeeKay and Mermaid; design by DeeKay.
Who made it
CSDb, the scene’s database of C64 releases, credits most of the soundtrack to Jeff: six of the eight tunes it lists are his, with a loading tune by Drax and “Inspired” by MSK. The graphics came from four artists. One of them, Mermaid, explained on CSDb in 2007 that some of the pictures in the end part were already five or six years old when the demo came out. Mermaid had been asked to send DeeKay “all the koala images I had lying around”, pictures in the format of the Koala Painter program, and nearly all of them were used. The idea is credited to Crossbow, DeeKay, Graham and Mitch.
What viewers saw
No published source explains how the demo’s routines work. Its CSDb page has more than eighty comments, and together they give a partial picture of what is in it: an intro with a picture and Jeff’s “Euro-Dance”, a scrolling plasma, a rotating drinks can, an interference-circle part, a disk-turning part and an end part of pictures. Several commenters singled out its design more than its effects. HCL of Booze Design, writing in 2007, thought it “not much new” effect by effect, since most had been seen in Graham’s smaller demos, and that what set it apart was “the way the screens are designed”. Another commenter, Steppe, wrote that the demo was about “all borders active, screen buildups, music synching”: the opened borders, screens that build up piece by piece, and parts timed to the music.
Two comments show how closely viewers looked. One reader thought the drinks can resembled a sprite-stretching routine he had written in 1989; Graham replied that “there is a bit more than stretching to it”. Another pointed out that the interference part’s scroll text claimed a never-before-seen routine for drawing interference circles without cheating, when, by that commenter’s account, Graffity’s Justintime had shown the same routine in 1992, only without the horizontal expansion.
Hidden parts
The demo has hidden parts, documented by its users on CSDb. For one, you load the first file on side two, switch to reverse characters with CTRL and 9, and type RUN. Another, a plasma, is in the note file, and is found by aiming a light pen at the small Deus Ex Machina logo in the lower right corner of the screen. The start of the demo has its own surprise. A contributor found in 2005 that it reacts to the state of the screen when it is run, for example after POKE 53265,63, which switches the VIC-II into bitmap mode. DeeKay added: “You can even give every char its own color and it will still work! I personally pestered xbow about this.” Xbow is Crossbow.
Reception
Two years after the party, Jason “Kenz” Mackenzie of the Binary Zone PD library put Deus Ex Machina in his top ten C64 demos for a revival issue of ZZAP!: “this classy production proved there was still life in the old breadbin yet”. It was also the last disk he added to his catalogue. In March 2004 the Austrian fanzine Lotek64 asked the scener Steppe for his favourite demos, and Deus Ex Machina was the first he named. By September 2026 it had an average rating of 9.44 from 162 votes on CSDb.
Sources
- Mekka & Symposium 2000, official results (web, secondary copy of the organisers’ file): C64 demo competition, 13 entries and points. https://files.scene.org/get/parties/2000/mekkasymposium00/results.txt
- CSDb, event entry for Mekka & Symposium 2000 (web, secondary): dates and venue. https://csdb.dk/event/?id=28
- CSDb, release entry for Deus Ex Machina (web, secondary): credits, tunes, rating; user comments by Steppe (2004, 2007), Clarence (2004), Ronski (2005), Graham (2005), HCL, Mermaid and Motion (2007), Frostbyte (2020) and others; hidden-parts notes by Steppe (2004) and DeeKay (2005); trivia by Clarence (July 2005) and DeeKay (October 2005). https://csdb.dk/release/?id=11585
- Jason “Kenz” Mackenzie, top ten C64 demos, ZZAP! issue 107, March 2002: Deus Ex Machina.
- Interview with Steppe, Lotek64 (Austria) issue 9, March 2004: favourite demos.