Until 1990 a big Amiga demo was usually a megademo: a run of separate parts, each with its own effects and its own tune, with a pause to load between one part and the next. Mental Hangover played as one show. It loaded from the disk while it ran, and it won the demo competition at a party in Gothenburg at Easter 1990. Scoopex have called it the first trackmo ever since. Mark Hellewell, who ran the British group Anarchy, remembered it and Red Sector’s Megademo as the high points of the Amiga scene at the time: “These groups were our heroes and inspiration.”
Fast facts
- Group: Scoopex, its Finnish section with a Swedish musician.
- Credits: code by Slayer, graphics by Reward, music by Uncle Tom.
- Released: April 1990, at the Swedish Elite Easter Conference in Gothenburg, Sweden.
- Result: first in the Amiga demo competition.
- Form: a trackmo, one continuous production loaded from disk as it plays.
Gothenburg, Easter 1990
The Swedish Elite Easter Conference ran from 12 to 15 April 1990 in a school in Gothenburg. It was hosted by the groups Fairlight, Horizon and Miracle. According to results compiled from Robert Hed’s report in Digital and the disk magazine Zine, 476 people came, with an unusual number from abroad: from Norway, Britain, Germany, Finland, the Netherlands and Denmark. There were 27 entries in the demo competition. The rules said that every entry had to work on Kickstart 1.2 and 1.3, the two versions of the Amiga’s built-in system software then in common use. The demos were shown on two television screens, not a big screen. Phenomena were tipped to win but did not finish their demo in time. Mental Hangover came first and Fairlight’s Grunka second. The first prize was a modem.
One continuous show
A megademo kept a small loader program in memory. When one part ended, the loader read the next part from the disk and started it, so every part was a separate program with a break between. Scoopex’s own history says Mental Hangover “eliminated the sequence-character and opened up for free-flow presentations”, using a loader that read tracks from the disk while the demo ran. That is where the word “trackmo” comes from: a track-loaded demo. In Antibyte’s words, it was “the first continuous real-time presentation without discernible interruptions. Up to that point, people did megademos.” Both accounts come from Scoopex members, and public sources do not settle whether any earlier demo did the same. The group’s history adds that trackmos lasted until hard disks became common in the scene, around 1996, when demos could load their data from files instead.
Its makers were modest about the pictures. Reward, who drew the graphics, later said that he liked Mental Hangover best of the group’s productions, “even if it was mostly just logos and fonts and very ugly fill patterns”. Hellewell wrote in 2020 that it “is often cited as being the first demo to have been artistically designed”.
After the party
The scene’s own charts put it at the top. The Crusaders’ Eurochart, a chart in a disk magazine voted by sceners, placed Mental Hangover first among demos in November 1990. It also reached people who never went to a party. British public-domain libraries sold it on disk by January 1991, and one library’s advertisement in Amiga Shopper that June called it “The BEST demo ever”. It was still in the catalogues in 1993.
The demo also crossed to another machine. Around 1992 Doug Little converted it to the Atari STE, and he later recalled that Scoopex approved: “Admittedly the Amiga version is still better!” Slayer announced a sequel, World of Wodka, but never finished it.
Sources
- Swedish Elite Easter Conference 1990, results and party information compiled from Robert Hed’s party report in Digital issue 3/90 and Brainstorm’s diskmag Zine issue 5 (web, secondary): dates, hosts, attendance, rules, entries, placings and prizes. https://www.pouet.net/party.php?which=161&when=1990
- Mark Hellewell, “The Amiga demos of Anarchy, part 1: Phantasmagoria”, Fusion issue 11, 2020, pp. 21–22: Mental Hangover and Red Sector’s Megademo as “our heroes and inspiration”; “often cited as being the first demo to have been artistically designed”.
- Photon, “Scoopex and the Demoscene”, in Chris Wilkins and Roger M. Kean, The Story of the Amiga in Pixels (Fusion Retro Books, 2017), pp. 82–88: Reward’s and Antibyte’s recollections; “Mental Hangover was the first trackmo”.
- Scoopex, group history, “1990 – 1992” (web, secondary): the megademo loader, trackloading, the end of trackmos, World of Wodka. https://www.scoopex1988.org/article-1990-1992.html
- Amiga Format issue 18, January 1991: public-domain library advertisements listing “Scoopex Mental Hangover”.
- Amiga Shopper issue 2, June 1991: public-domain library advertisement, “SCOOPEX MENTAL HANGOVER The BEST demo ever”.
- Amiga Format issue 46, May 1993: public-domain library advertisements listing Mental Hangover.
- “An interview with Doug Little”, Codetapper’s Amiga site (web, secondary): the Atari STE conversion. https://codetapper.com/amiga/interviews/doug-little/
- Demozoo, production entry for Mental Hangover (web, secondary): credits, date, competition placing and the Crusaders Eurochart placings. https://demozoo.org/productions/22186/