At Easter 1992 two Norwegian demo groups, Deadline and Crusaders, held a party for the demo scene, and Spaceballs’ Wayfarer won its demo competition. The Gathering, “TG” to its regulars, has been held at Easter almost every year since. It moved between halls in its first four years, settled in 1996 into the ice-skating hall built for the 1994 Winter Olympics, and by the end of the decade was filling it with thousands of networked computers. Most of the people inside had come to play games, and the demo competitions carried on alongside them.
Fast facts
- Held: every Easter since 1992, except when cancelled in 2020 and 2024, and online in 2020 to 2022.
- Where: Lillestrøm (1992–1993), Bærum (1994), Stavanger (1995), then Vikingskipet in Hamar from 1996.
- Run by: the demo groups Deadline and Crusaders at first; from 1996 the non-profit organisation KANDU.
- Size: about 1,800 people in 1993, according to Amiga Joker; about 4,500 each year from 2000 to 2002, according to a 2003 study of the party.
A demo party at Easter
The first results name the hosts as Deadline and Crusaders, and the dates as 15 to 19 April 1992. Ten demos were ranked. Wayfarer won, and Andromeda, another Norwegian group, came second with D.O.S.
In 1993 Crusaders and Exile ran the party in Lillestrøm, near Oslo, from 7 to 10 April. The German magazine Amiga Joker called it one of the biggest parties of its kind, and reported that about 1,800 “freaks” from Europe and America had come, many hoping to meet the groups TRSI, Kefrens or Sanity. Kefrens’ Desert Dream won the Amiga demo competition, ahead of Speed by Sim Productions and Spaceballs’ Mobile: Destination Unknown. British public-domain libraries sold “The Gathering GFX”, a disk of the party’s pictures, that summer.
The party moved to Rykkin in Bærum for 1994, where Andromeda’s Sequential won the Amiga demo competition with 829 points, more than twice the runner-up’s 371. The results give the voting system: four points for a first choice, two for a second and one for a third. Five’s Superunknown won the PC demo competition. In 1995 the party was held in Stavanger, on Norway’s west coast.
Vikingskipet
In 1996 The Gathering moved to Vikingskipet (“the Viking ship”), the ice-skating hall in Hamar built for the 1994 Winter Olympics, about two hours’ drive from Oslo. The same year its organisers set up KANDU, whose name stands for Kreativ Aktiv Norsk Data Ungdom, “creative, active Norwegian computer youth”, and also reads in Norwegian as “can you?”. It is a non-profit organisation: every volunteer who works on the crew becomes a member.
By then the party was changing. In March 1997 Thies Edeling of the online magazine RAW told Amiga Computing that The Gathering was “the third big party”, after Assembly and The Party, but “from what I’ve heard though, the people attending there mostly consist of PC-gamers (isn’t it fun, playing network Quake for three days at some party? No, it isn’t).” In October 1998 the Danish magazine Amiga Advis listed The Gathering among “the big three” parties, each with more than 3,000 visitors, and complained that all three now drew every nerd who could play Quake.
A study of the party for a European research project on gender and computing, written by Hege Nordli of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in 2003, gives the numbers. The Gathering had grown to about 4,500 participants, with women around 10 per cent of them. The 2000, 2001 and 2002 parties each had about 4,500, and in 2002 the tickets sold out three hours after going on sale. In 1999 some 4,300 people were connected to the party’s temporary network at once, which earned it a place in the Guinness book of records. The demo competitions carried on alongside, run by a demo crew, but “the amount of people being involved in making demos is not very great, considering the total size of the party.”
The Amiga competitions
The Amiga demo competition kept running into the 2000s. Amiga Format put the best demos of The Gathering ‘97 on its cover CD that June, with a recommendation: “Don’t miss The Black Lotus’ Captured Dreams demo… it’s amazing!” Captured Dreams had won with 1,752 points, 1,100 ahead of the runner-up. TRSI’s Rise won in 1998.
Then Spaceballs, a group from Halden in Norway, won four years running: Supermonster in 1999, Hypnopolis in 2000, Powergod in 2001 and Scrimm in 2002. Not everyone was impressed. Reviewing Supermonster, the Danish Amiga Advis found it neither super nor a monster, and suggested that Spaceballs lived off its name and the fact that the party was in its home country. By 2003 the Amiga and PC demos competed together, and Odd Demo Design’s World Domination, a PC demo, won ahead of two Amiga entries from Ephidrena and Spaceballs.
| Year | Amiga demo winner | Group |
|---|---|---|
| 1992 | Wayfarer | Spaceballs (one demo competition) |
| 1993 | Desert Dream | Kefrens |
| 1994 | Sequential | Andromeda |
| 1997 | Captured Dreams | The Black Lotus |
| 1998 | Rise | TRSI |
| 1999 | Supermonster | Spaceballs |
| 2000 | Hypnopolis | Spaceballs |
| 2001 | Powergod | Spaceballs |
| 2002 | Scrimm | Spaceballs |
Later years
The Gathering stayed in Vikingskipet. It was cancelled in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic and held online in its place, and again online in 2021 and 2022, before returning to Hamar in 2023. The 2024 party was cancelled a few months beforehand; a competition organiser wrote on Demozoo that there had been “a myriad of complicated reasons, no single reason”. It came back in 2025, and in 2026 the party marked 30 years in Vikingskipet. Its demo competitions are now a single combined demo competition alongside game jams, graphics, music and “useless utility” contests. The 2026 results counted 133 new productions that year, “in addition to the over 4600 since 1992”.
Sources
- The Gathering 1992, results (web, secondary copy of the organisers’ file): hosts, dates, demo competition. https://files.scene.org/get/parties/1992/thegathering92/results.txt
- The Gathering 1993, results (web, secondary copy of the organisers’ file): hosts, Lillestrøm, dates (the header misprints the year as 1994), Amiga demo competition. https://files.scene.org/get/parties/1993/thegathering93/results.txt
- The Gathering 1994, results (web, secondary copy of the organisers’ file): voting system, Amiga and PC demo competitions. https://files.scene.org/get/parties/1994/thegathering94/results.txt
- The Gathering 1997 to 2003, results (web, secondary copies of the organisers’ files): Amiga demo competitions and the 2003 combined demo competition. https://files.scene.org/get/parties/1997/thegathering97/results.txt and the matching files for 1998 to 2003.
- The Gathering 2026, results (web, secondary copy of the organisers’ file): Vikingskipet, the combined demo competition, the count of productions since 1992. https://files.scene.org/get/parties/2026/thegathering26/results.txt
- Amiga Joker (Germany), June 1993, “Demo-Galerie”: The Gathering ’93, about 1,800 visitors, Desert Dream and Speed.
- Amiga Computing issue 63, August 1993, public-domain advertisements: “The Gathering GFX”.
- “Scene Amiga”, Amiga Computing issue 110, March 1997, p. 23: Thies Edeling on The Gathering.
- Amiga Format issue 98, June 1997, PD Select: demos from The Gathering ’97, Captured Dreams.
- Amiga Advis (Denmark), October 1998: “the big three” parties and their visitors.
- Amiga Advis (Denmark), February 2000: review of Supermonster, first at The Gathering 1999.
- Hege Nordli, The Gathering: Computer parties as means for gender inclusion, SIGIS project deliverable D04, appendix 2.1, NTNU, July 2003 (web, secondary): Vikingskipet, KANDU, participant numbers, the 1999 network record, the demo crew. http://pdf.textfiles.com/academics/sigis_d04_2.01_ntnu1.pdf
- Demozoo, party series for The Gathering and entry for The Gathering 2024 (web, secondary): places and dates of each edition, the online editions, the 2024 cancellation. https://demozoo.org/parties/series/11/
- Wikipedia, “The Gathering (LAN party)” (web, secondary): the 2020 cancellation, the return in 2023 and 2025, and 30 years in Vikingskipet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gathering_(LAN_party)