On the last weekend of July 1993, more than 1,300 people packed into a school in Kerava, north of Helsinki, for Assembly ‘93. The PC demos in the competition ran on the organisers’ 486 PCs, fitted with Tseng ET4000 graphics cards and a choice of sound cards, and the audience watched them on a giant screen. When the ballots were counted, Future Crew’s Second Reality had won with 381 points in the organisers’ results file, with The Silents’ Optic Nerve second on 334. Future Crew’s own information file that October printed different totals as “the final and true results” and told readers to ignore the other result files circulating on bulletin boards: 472 points to 403 from 130 votes, with Xography’s Elements third on 242.
The Italian magazine MCmicrocomputer, reporting on the party the following March, called it “la stupenda demo Second Reality”. By the autumn of 1994 British public-domain libraries were selling it on two floppy disks as the “ultimate Future Crew demo”. In 2013, for its twentieth anniversary, the group put the complete source code online.
Fast facts
- Group: Future Crew, Finland.
- Platform: PC under MS-DOS.
- Released: at Assembly ’93, Kerava, 30 July to 1 August 1993.
- Result: first in the PC demo competition: 381 points in the organisers’ file, 472 in Future Crew’s own count.
- Source code: published in 2013 and dedicated to the public domain.
Assembly ’93
Assembly was only in its second year. Future Crew had helped to start it in 1992, and in 1993 the group ran the PC side of the party again. The group’s own history calls the party “a big advancement on the PC side”: for the first time there were PC intro, music and graphics competitions alongside the demo competition. MCmicrocomputer’s report gives a sense of the event. The school stayed open from 10 in the morning on Friday until 2 in the afternoon on Sunday, with a canteen open around the clock, beds and showers. Entry cost 100 markka. The shareware publisher Epic MegaGames sponsored the PC demo competition with $1,500 in cash and more than $1,000 in goods, and sent its vice-president, Mark Rein, to hand over the prizes and talk to anyone who wanted to write games.
Voting was by the audience. Each voter could name up to five entries, and a first choice was worth five points, a second four, and so on down. The organisers’ file counts 105 ballots; Future Crew’s counts 130. Future Crew’s members did well across the board: Skaven’s “Ice Frontier” won the multichannel music competition, Purple Motion’s “Sundance” won the four-channel music competition, and Marvel’s “Ice Kingdom” won the graphics competition.
Who made it
Second Reality’s own credit screens name the people behind each part. The code was written by Psi, Trug and Wildfire, the graphics were drawn by Marvel and Pixel, with some by Skaven, and the music was composed by Skaven and Purple Motion. Trug also did the 3D rendering and animation. The scene database Demozoo adds Abyss and Gore for additional design.
How it spread
Demos like this travelled by modem. In February 1994 a reviewer in the Italian magazine The Games Machine, writing about a local group’s demo, told anyone who had not heard of Future Crew to dial the bulletin board Ultimo Impero, go to the PC demo area and download Second Reality. British readers could buy it by post. In October 1994 a public-domain library advertising in PC Gamer listed “2ND REALITY (2) – Ultimate Future Crew demo. 4Mb”: two disks, and a PC with 4 MB of memory. Libraries advertising in PC Zone were still listing it the following spring.
It spread beyond the PC too. The Commodore 64 group Smash Designs made a C64 demo modelled on it. In 1999 a reader of the C64 magazine GO64! described showing that version at his school, where “faces changed, mouths fell open” and his science teacher “could absolutely not contain his enthusiasm”.
Its reputation held. Slashdot’s readers voted Second Reality one of the “10 best hacks of all time” in 1999, and in 2022 Samuli Syvähuoko, who had been a Future Crew member, told Wireframe: “It’s still rated in the top five in most demo rating boards.”
The source code
On 1 August 2013, twenty years after Assembly ’93, Mika Tuomi, known in the group as Trug, published the source code and data of Second Reality on GitHub “to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the demo”. The release is dedicated to the public domain under the Unlicense. It holds a folder for each part of the demo, the programs that stitch the parts together, and the pictures and music data. Most of the code is x86 assembly language and C, with some Pascal.
Sources
- Assembly ‘93, official PC competition results (web, secondary copy of the organisers’ file): voting system, 105 ballots, PC demo placings and points, music and graphics winners. https://files.scene.org/get/parties/1993/assembly93/results.txt
- Future Crew, information file FCINFO10.TXT, 7 October 1993, in the Second Reality source release: “the final and true results” of the Assembly ’93 PC competitions, 130 votes, Second Reality 472, Optic Nerve 403. https://github.com/mtuomi/SecondReality/blob/master/MAIN/DATA/FCINFO10.TXT
- MCmicrocomputer (Italy) issue 138, March 1994, p. 378: Assembly ‘93 report: attendance, venue, dates and hours, entry price, facilities, competition machine, Epic MegaGames’ sponsorship and Mark Rein, Future Crew’s first prize for Second Reality.
- “The History of the Future Crew”, the group’s own history, written by Gore with later additions, republished by apollo-X Demo Resources, December 1999 (web, secondary): Future Crew’s part in organising Assembly ’92 and ’93, the new PC competitions at Assembly ’93, Second Reality first shown there. https://wayback.defacto2.net/apollo-x-demo-resources-1999-december-17/fc.htm
- Future Crew, Second Reality source release, credits part (
CREDITS/MAIN.C): the credit screens. https://github.com/mtuomi/SecondReality - Demozoo, production entry for Second Reality (web, secondary): credits for Abyss and Gore. https://demozoo.org/productions/108/
- The Games Machine (Italy) issue 61, February 1994, readers’ software pages: download Second Reality from the BBS Ultimo Impero.
- Public-domain library advertisement, PC Gamer (UK) vol. 1 no. 11, October 1994: “2ND REALITY (2) – Ultimate Future Crew demo. 4Mb”.
- Public-domain library advertisement, PC Zone issue 24, March 1995.
- Reader’s article, GO64!, September 1999: showing Smash Designs’ C64 demo modelled on Second Reality at school.
- Jack Yarwood, “Beyond Max Payne”, Wireframe issue 64, June 2022, pp. 28–31: Slashdot’s 1999 vote, Samuli Syvähuoko’s quote.
- Mika Tuomi, “SecondReality” repository, GitHub, created 1 August 2013 (web, secondary): README (“made to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the demo”) and Unlicense. https://github.com/mtuomi/SecondReality