In February 2010 a new party in Gothenburg set the Commodore 64 and the Amiga side by side. Datastorm’s first results ran an Amiga demo competition and a C64 demo competition, and matching competitions for graphics and music on both machines, under the line “there was no shelter from it”. Fairlight’s One Little Wish won on the C64 and Supergroup’s Super Original on the Amiga, both with 7.66 points. For the next decade Datastorm was one of the places where groups that had started in the 1980s brought new work for the machines they had started on.
Fast facts
- Where: Gothenburg, Sweden.
- Held: every February from 2010 to 2014, then in February and September 2017, and in August 2018 and 2019. No later editions are listed by CSDb or Demozoo.
- Run by: the groups Genesis Project and Up Rough at every edition, with SceneSat, Divine Stylers, Tulou and PACiF!C named in some years.
- Competitions: demos, intros, music and graphics for the C64 and the Amiga, with “other platform” and wild categories for anything else.
Two machines, one party
CSDb names the organiser groups of the first Datastorm, held from 5 to 7 February 2010, as Genesis Project, SceneSat and Up Rough. Genesis Project, a C64 cracking and demo group founded in West Germany in 1986, had been restarted in 2009. From 2013 the results files carry the organisers’ names in their headers: Up Rough, Genesis Project, Divine Stylers, Tulou and SceneSat that year, and Up Rough, Genesis Project, PACiF!C, Tulou and Divine Stylers from 2017.
The competitions grew with the party. The 2011 results list eleven competitions, among them Amiga ASCII art, a C64 4K intro, an Amiga 64K intro and demos for “other platforms”. By 2013 the Amiga demo competition had split in two, one for the original Amiga 500 and one for the more powerful Amiga 1200, and the C64 had 4K intro, graphics and music competitions of its own. Some competitions were small: the 2010 Amiga demo competition had three entries, and the Amiga bootblock competition, for intros small enough to fit in the 1K bootblock of a floppy disk, had four.
Who won
The C64 demo competition belonged to Fairlight. It won in 2010 with One Little Wish, in 2011 with Lash and in 2012 with One Quarter, and again in 2014, 2018 and 2019, twice in partnership with the groups Offence and Prosonix. Triad broke the run twice, with Revolved in 2013 and Neon in February 2017.
On the Amiga, Spaceballs, the Norwegian group behind State of the Art, won in 2011 with Norwegian Kindness by 324 points to 269, and took the Amiga 500 demo competition in 2017 with Makt and in 2018 with PEEK. Focus Design won the Amiga 1200 demo competition three times. Scoopex, an Amiga group founded in Austria in 1988, won the bootblock competition in 2013 with Photon’s 1Klång and in 2014 with Block boot.
| Year | C64 demo | Amiga demo |
|---|---|---|
| 2010 | One Little Wish, Fairlight | Super Original, Supergroup |
| 2011 | Lash, Fairlight | Norwegian Kindness, Spaceballs |
| 2012 | One Quarter, Fairlight | Revision 2012 Invitation, Focus Design |
| 2013 | Revolved, Triad | Fifteen Years of Fame, Up Rough (A500); Mo’saik, Focus Design (A1200) |
| 2014 | We Are All Connected, Fairlight, Offence and Prosonix | Old Habbits Die Hard, Insane (A500); Energy Bar, Focus Design (A1200) |
| 2017 | Neon, Triad | Makt, Spaceballs (A500); Stormrider, Focus Design (A1200) |
| 2018 | Fopcycle, Fairlight, Offence and Prosonix | PEEK, Spaceballs (A500); 3R0HW, Insane (A1200) |
| 2019 | The Last Truckstop 3, Fairlight | Time Will Tel, Nah-Kolor (A500) |
The final Datastorm, and after
CSDb lists the February 2014 party as “The Final Datastorm”. It was not. The party came back in February 2017, added a summer edition that September, and moved to August for 2018 and 2019. The 2019 results still carried C64 and Amiga demo competitions, with a C64 4K intro competition won by Genesis Project’s 4k PETSCII Intro. Neither CSDb nor Demozoo lists an edition after August 2019.
Sources
- Datastorm 2010 to 2019, results (web, secondary copies of the organisers’ files): competitions, entries, points and winners; organiser groups in the headers from 2013. https://files.scene.org/get/parties/2010/datastorm10/results.txt, https://files.scene.org/get/parties/2011/datastorm11/results.txt and the matching files for 2012, 2013, 2014, 2017, 2018 and 2019.
- CSDb, the Commodore 64 Scene Database, event entries for Datastorm 2010 to 2019 (web, secondary): dates, organisers and organiser groups, “The Final Datastorm” (2014), the 2017 summer edition, C64 competition results. https://csdb.dk/event/?id=1577 and https://csdb.dk/event/?id=2158
- Demozoo, party series for Datastorm (web, secondary): dates and places of each edition from 2010 to 2019, and the 2010 organisers. https://demozoo.org/parties/series/17/