A year after State of the Art won The Party in Denmark, Spaceballs came back to the same party with more dancers. 9 Fingers filled two disks with figures taken from video, dancing to a techno track, and it placed fourth. Britain’s public-domain buyers ranked it higher: by the spring of 1994 9 Fingers was top of the demo charts that libraries sent to Amiga Format, and one of those charts put it ahead of all three demos that had beaten it at the party. CU Amiga thought it “even better than the original”.
Fast facts
- Group: Spaceballs, from Norway.
- Released: at The Party, Herning, Denmark, 27 to 29 December 1993.
- Placing: fourth in the Amiga demo competition, with 1,512 points.
- Platform: Amiga, on two floppy disks, running from one drive.
- Credits: code by Lone Starr and a second Spaceballs coder, with a trackloader by President Screw; graphics by TMB Designs; music by Travolta and Vinnie.
Fourth at The Party
The Party 1993 moved to Herning, and Spaceballs were among its hosts: the organisers’ results name The Silents, Lemon. and Spaceballs as the organisers. Twenty-eight Amiga demos were ranked. Complex’s Origin won with 2,340 points, ahead of Full Moon by Virtual Dreams and Fairlight with 1,860 and Sanity’s Arte with 1,592. 9 Fingers was fourth with 1,512, only 80 points behind Arte and more than a thousand ahead of the fifth-placed demo. The results list it in two parts, “9 Fingers 1” and “9 Fingers 2”, of about 820 KB each.
The team was much the same as the one behind State of the Art. Demozoo credits the code to Lone Starr and a second coder, with a trackloader by President Screw: the routine that reads the demo’s data straight off the disk, without going through AmigaDOS. TMB Designs drew the graphics, and Travolta and Vinnie wrote the music. A 2015 retrospective in The Amiga Book says the title came from the programmer hurting a finger during development and finishing the demo with nine.
Dancers again
9 Fingers went back to the idea that had made State of the Art famous: dancers filmed on video and turned into animation, the technique called rotoscoping. CU Amiga’s reviewer described stylised video animations, mostly of dancers “going loopy to a decent techno backing track”, and said the coders had done “a sterling job vastly improving the graphics over the originals”. The Amiga Book called it “the spiritual successor to State Of The Art” and said it “lacks originality, of course, but makes up for it with better visuals, including photo-real dancers.” Spaceballs described how they made State of the Art’s dancers in their disk magazine R.A.W., but public sources do not describe how the 9 Fingers animation was stored or drawn.
Top of the charts
In Britain, public-domain libraries sold demos by post for the price of copying a disk, and 9 Fingers sold. CU Amiga reviewed it in March 1994 as the follow-up to State of the Art: “it’s even better than the original!” The review ended by calling Spaceballs “still the best demo crew”. One library’s advertisement in Amiga Format that April was blunter: “If you liked State of the Art, you’ll die! SERIOUSLY GOOD!”
Amiga Format printed a different library’s top ten demos each month, and in April 1994 Telescan Computer Services put 9 Fingers first. In May Choice Software in Sheffield did the same, with Full Moon second, Arte fourth and Origin sixth. The same issue ran Steve Bradley’s feature on public-domain demos. Its caption called 9 Fingers “a lesson in how to produce a fantastic rave demo. Funky and fun”, and Bradley, complaining how few demos held a viewer’s attention, wrote that “few demos match the standards of State of the Art, Jesus On E’s and Nine Fingers.” The two-disk set was still in libraries’ lists of top demos in the autumn of 1995.
Sources
- The Party 1993, competition results (web, secondary copy of the organisers’ file): organisers, dates and the Amiga demo competition. https://files.scene.org/get/parties/1993/theparty93/results.txt
- CU Amiga, March 1994: public-domain review of 9 Fingers (Graphic F/X, disks MU184A and MU184B).
- Amiga Format issue 58, April 1994: PD Demo Zone, “Top 10 Demos” from Telescan Computer Services; and a public-domain library advertisement for disk 2919.
- Amiga Format issue 59, May 1994: PD Demo Zone, “Top 10 Demos” from Choice Software; and Steve Bradley’s feature on public-domain demos, with the caption on 9 Fingers.
- Amiga Shopper issue 54, October 1995: public-domain library advertisement (“Top demos: Spaceballs 9 Fingers (2 disks)”).
- The Amiga Book, revised edition (Imagine Publishing, 2015), p. 134: “Top 5 Amiga Demos”, on 9 Fingers.
- Demozoo, production entry for 9 Fingers (web, secondary): release date and credits. https://demozoo.org/productions/89/