Just after Christmas 1991, 1,252 people came to The Party in Aars, Denmark, and the demo competition came with a rule printed at the top of the results: “Productions with greetingscrollers not allowed.” Hardwired came second, behind Alcatraz’s Odyssey and ahead of Razor 1911’s Voyage. It was the work of two groups, the Danish Crionics and The Silents, and it filled two floppy disks. Public-domain libraries sold it for years, and in 2015 The Amiga Book put it among its five best Amiga demos, calling it “a seminal work that practically defined the demo scene for years to come”.
Fast facts
- Groups: Crionics and The Silents, Denmark and Sweden.
- Platform: Amiga with 1 MB of memory, on two disks.
- Released: at The Party 1991, Aars, Denmark, in December 1991.
- Result: second in the demo competition.
- Credits: code by The Spy, Deftronic, Murphy, Saxs and Guzzler; graphics by Mikael Balle, Sionic and Zycho; music by Jesper Kyd.
The Party 1991
The Party was new in 1991. Its results name the hosts as “Melon Dezign/Crystal, Trix/Anarchy Dk and Silents”. They list the top three in the demo competition and then another 31 productions without placings, from demos to short intros and a music disk: Alcatraz’s Odyssey first, “Hard Wired by The Silents” second and Voyage third. The results give no points. The ban on greetings, the scrolling lists of hellos to other groups that ran through most demos of the time, is the only rule the results record. See demo parties for how the competitions worked.
The results name only The Silents, but the demo was a joint production. The scene database Demozoo credits it to both groups. All five coders were members of Crionics, and two of the graphic artists, Mikael Balle and Sionic, and the musician, Jesper Kyd, were members of The Silents. Zycho, the third artist, belonged to Crionics. In Britain at least one public-domain library listed it the other way round, as “Hardwired by Crionics”.
What it looks like
The Amiga Book describes it as “the epic Hardwired”, which “clocks in at nearly eleven minutes and runs the gamut of Amiga programming tricks, throwing around complex geometry like it was child’s play. In 1991, this was jaw-dropping stuff and it was hard to believe it fit on just two floppy disks.” Demozoo’s tags for the demo list the kinds of effect on screen: glenz vectors (see-through 3D shapes), shade bobs, a star scroller, a cube and a 3D scene with shadows. No public source describes how its code produced these effects.
Reception
Hardwired reached most Amiga owners through public-domain libraries, which copied demos onto disk and sold them by post. Through 1992 British libraries advertised it in Amiga Shopper and Amiga User International, marked as needing 1 MB. In July 1992 the Wakefield library 17-Bit Software ranked it third in its “all time top 10” demos in an advertisement in The One, one place above Odyssey. American buyers could get it too: in 1994 an advertiser in Amiga Game Zone sold a ten-disk demo pack that “includes Odyssey, Hardwired, and 3 others”.
It also counted in the scene’s own charts. Mark Hellewell, who ran the rival group Anarchy, recalled that The Silents held first place among groups in the Eurochart, a chart voted by sceners and distributed on disk, in January 1992, and that after they “teamed up with Crionics to create the ground-breaking demo Hardwired”, it “inevitably pushed them to No.1 once again”.
Afterwards
Crionics broke up early in 1992, and Demozoo records that three of its coders, The Spy, Murphy and Deftronic, joined The Silents. Several of the people behind Hardwired later made games. Demozoo lists The Spy, Deftronic, Murphy, Guzzler, Sionic and Jesper Kyd as later members of the Copenhagen developer Zyrinx, whose first game was the Mega Drive shoot ’em up Sub-Terrania in 1994. Kyd told Wireframe in 2019 that he met the future founders of IO Interactive in the demo scene and started Zyrinx with them. He went on to compose the music for IO Interactive’s Hitman games.
Sources
- The Party 1991, results (web, secondary copy of the organisers’ file): hosts, 1,252 visitors, the rule against greetings scrollers, and the demo competition. https://files.scene.org/get/parties/1991/theparty91/results.txt
- Mark Hellewell, “Anarchy & the Demoscene”, in Chris Wilkins and Roger M. Kean, The Story of the Amiga in Pixels (Fusion Retro Books, 2017), pp. 78–79: the Eurochart and Hardwired.
- The Amiga Book, revised edition (Imagine Publishing, 2015), p. 134: “Top 5 Amiga Demos”, on Hardwired.
- Public-domain library advertisements, Amiga Shopper issue 12, April 1992, issue 14, June 1992, and issue 18, October 1992, and Amiga User International vol. 6 no. 8, September 1992: Hardwired, two disks, 1 MB, “Hardwired by Crionics”.
- 17-Bit Software advertisement, The One issue 46, July 1992: “All time top 10 demos”, Hardwired third.
- Public-domain advertisement, Amiga Game Zone issue 1, 1994: demo pack with Odyssey and Hardwired.
- Matthias Sundström, interview with Jesper Kyd, Wireframe issue 23, September 2019, pp. 18–20: meeting the founders of IO Interactive, Zyrinx, Sub-Terrania and Hitman.
- Edge issue 8, May 1994: review of Sub-Terrania, developer Zyrinx.
- Demozoo, production entry for Hardwired, and group entries for Crionics and The Silents (web, secondary): credits, release date, tags, group memberships, and later membership of Zyrinx. https://demozoo.org/productions/1913/