Enigma opens with a field of stars that swings about as if the viewer were steering a small, nimble spaceship. Then the stars part to reveal a spinning cube with a starfield on one face and animated vector graphics on the others. Amiga Shopper’s reviewer compared it to the effects television studios made with Quantel equipment. The demo was made by the Swedish group Phenomena, and it won the Amiga demo competition at the Anarchy Easter Party in Sweden at the end of March 1991. That August Amiga Shopper gave it 10 out of 10 and called it “a fun packed and alarmingly clever demo”.
Fast facts
- Group: Phenomena, from Sweden.
- Released: at the Anarchy Easter Party, Sweden, 29 to 31 March 1991.
- Placing: first in the Amiga demo competition.
- Platform: Amiga with the original chipset; a version that installs on a hard disk also circulates.
- Credits: code by Azatoth, with additional code by Judas; music by Firefox and Tip; graphics by Uno, Imbecille and Terminator; ray-traced animation by Azatoth.
Easter in Sweden
Phenomena came to the party on a run of wins. Azatoth’s Vectormania had won in Motala the previous November, and Celebrandil’s Animotion in Odense, Denmark, at Christmas. Results for the Easter party, compiled later from Complex’s disk magazine Maggy and the party’s own disks, list about two dozen Amiga demos. Enigma came first, ahead of Shining’s Vector Exterminator and Cryptoburners’ invitation demo, and won 6,000 Swedish kronor. The same compilation notes that there was no graphics competition, and that music had to be handed in as programs that played themselves. Firefox and Tip entered the music competition too; the compiled results do not record their placing.
Not every account agrees on the result. A history of Phenomena written by one of its members in the late 1990s remembers Enigma taking second place “and some nice money”. The compiled results, a description written for the party’s pack disks and the scene databases all give it first.
What it shows
Amiga Shopper’s review, in its guide to public-domain software in August 1991, is the fullest period description of the demo. It named the group behind it as “Firefox and Tip (music), Azatoth (coding) and Uno (graphics)”, and called it “a collection of very simple demos, very cleverly sequenced music and bags of surprises”.
After the starfield and the cube comes a parody of A Trip to Mars, a demo from a few months before, under the heading “and now a REAL trip to Mars”. Its vector objects “animate very realistically”, and the ground is “a graduated copper list”, which “gives the effect of the ground fading away into the distance”. A copper list is a program for the Amiga’s copper coprocessor, which can rewrite a colour on every line as the beam goes down the screen, so the ground fades through more shades than the palette holds. A second vector scene follows in which “the objects in the world are all light source-shaded”. Then come bouncing balls and an end message that recedes into the distance “like the titles of Star Wars”.
At the very end Azatoth added a showpiece for his own ray-tracing program, Perfect View, which he was releasing into the public domain: an animated ray-traced picture. Public sources describe what the demo looks like, not how its routines were written.
The music
Firefox and Tip’s soundtrack is a tracker module, a song file that plays sampled instruments through the Amiga’s four sound channels. It has lasted on its own: The Mod Archive, an online collection of modules, has hosted it since 1998 as musiklinjen.mod, and it has been downloaded more than 80,000 times there. In 1991 Amiga Shopper praised the “very cleverly sequenced music”, and a public-domain library advertisement in April 1992 summed the disk up as “superb grx and music”.
How it was received
British Amiga owners met Enigma through public-domain libraries, which sold demos on disk for a small copying fee. Libraries were advertising it by July 1991. In September 1992 it was still in 17 Bit Software’s list of its ten best-selling demos, in ninth place, eighteen months after its release.
Within the scene it did well too. The disk magazine R.A.W., in its second issue in February 1992, published a vote on the best demos of 1991; according to the Demozoo database, Enigma came third. British libraries went on selling it well into the A1200 years. A library advertisement in Amiga Format in September 1995 still listed it, with a three-word verdict: “Old but great.”
Sources
- Anarchy Easter Party 1991, results compiled from Complex’s disk magazine Maggy issue 9 and the Anarchy party pack disks (web, secondary): Amiga demo placings, prize money and the music competition. https://www.pouet.net/party.php?which=70&when=1991
- Anarchy Easter Conference 1991, party pack disk description (web, secondary): “the winning demo was the glory Phenomena demo ‘Enigma’”. https://files.scene.org/get/parties/1991/easter_conference91/misc/easterc.91r
- Amiga Shopper issue 3, July 1991: public-domain library advertisement (“Phenomena Enigma Demo”).
- Amiga Shopper issue 4, August 1991, pp. 123–124: public-domain demo reviews, Enigma (17 Bit Software), 10/10.
- Amiga Shopper issue 12, April 1992: public-domain library advertisement (“Phenomena Enigma (P) superb grx and music”).
- Amiga Format issue 38, September 1992: PD Demo Zone, “Top Ten Demos of the Month” from 17 Bit Software.
- Amiga Format issue 75, September 1995: public-domain library advertisement.
- In Medias Res (web magazine, late 1990s), “Phenomena – The history!”, by a member of the group (web, secondary). http://zakalwe.fi/~shd/texts/imr/z2apheno.htm
- Demozoo, production entry for Enigma (web, secondary): release date, credits, the hard-disk version and the R.A.W. issue 2 vote. https://demozoo.org/productions/143/
- The Mod Archive, module 101789, musiklinjen.mod, by Firefox (web, secondary): hosted since August 1998, download count, and listeners’ comments identifying it as the Enigma soundtrack. https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&query=101789