Just after Christmas 1991, 1,252 people turned up at The Party in Aars, a small town in northern Denmark. The hosts were three demo groups, Melon Dezign with its parent cracking group Crystal, Trix of Anarchy’s Danish branch and The Silents, and their results carried one rule at the top: “Productions with greetingscrollers not allowed.” The next year about 2,500 came. For the rest of the decade The Party filled the days between Christmas and New Year, and the Amiga demos that won there were bought from British public-domain libraries and talked about in magazines across Europe.
Fast facts
- Held: every December from 1991 to 2002, from 27 to 29 December in most years.
- Where: Aars (1991–1992 and 1996–2002), Herning (1993–1994) and Fredericia (1995), all in Denmark.
- Size: 1,252 visitors in 1991 and about 2,500 in 1992, by the organisers’ counts. The Herning venue in 1993 had room for more than 3,000.
- Competitions: demo, intro, music and graphics on the Amiga and the PC, and on the Commodore 64 from 1993 in the organisers’ results files (CSDb also lists C64 competitions at the 1992 party, run by the group Camelot), plus “wild” competitions for anything else.
The first two parties
The 1991 results list only the top three demos, with no points: Alcatraz’s Odyssey first, Hardwired, credited to The Silents, second, and Razor 1911’s Voyage third. Another 31 productions follow without a placing. Cougar of Sanity came second in the graphics competition.
The Party 1992 called itself “The Party II, the Final”, hosted by Crystal, The Silents and Anarchy in Aars from 27 to 29 December. It was not the final one. Spaceballs’ State of the Art, with its dancers traced from videotape, won the Amiga demo competition with 585 points to 354 for Anarchy’s 3D Demo II. Melon Dezign won the Amiga intro competition, and the four-channel music competition went to Moby, credited to DRD, the French group Dreamdealers he later left for Sanity.
The PC demo result that year was less orderly. Future Crew’s own history says there was no voting for the PC demos at all: an Amiga organiser asked the last PC organiser left which demos were best, and his answer became the official result. Witan’s Facts of Life was listed first and Future Crew’s Panic second.
Herning and Fredericia
In 1993 The Silents, Lemon and Spaceballs moved the party to Herning, to what Amiga Format called Scandinavia’s largest conference centre, with room for more than 3,000 people, a 6-metre by 4-metre screen and “24-hour entertainment”. There was more than $1,000 in prize money for the demo, graphics and music competitions.
Twenty-eight Amiga demos were ranked. Complex’s Origin won with 2,340 points, ahead of Full Moon by Virtual Dreams and Fairlight on 1,860 and Sanity’s Arte on 1,592, with Spaceballs’ 9 Fingers fourth. Sanity also won both the Amiga music competition, with Moby’s Elektrik Funk, and the graphics competition. The Commodore 64 had competitions of its own for the first time, and Camelot’s Tower Power won the C64 demo competition.
The Party 1994 stayed in Herning. Andromeda’s Nexus 7, written for the new AGA Amigas, won the Amiga demo competition with 1,443 points, more than twice the 710 of Virtual Dreams’ Psychedelic.
In 1995 The Party V went to Fredericia. Amiga Format sent Simon Carless, who found “thousands of Amiga fans from all over the world” at “the biggest demo event of the year”. The winner of the demo competition took $3,500, more than 50 new Amiga demos were released, and every one of the eight entries in the wild competition, open to any machine “from a ZX80 to a Silicon Graphics Station”, had been made on an Amiga. CNCD’s Closer won the Amiga demo competition with 1,662 points to 613 for the runner-up; Carless called it “the runaway winner”.
Back to Aars
From 1996 the party was back in Aars; the 1998 results name the venue as the Messecenter exhibition centre. Amiga Format reported that over 2,500 people came in 1996, and that the organisers ran an internet server and display screens in a huge hall with dormitories and canteens.
The Amiga still had its own demo competition, and the winners kept coming from the Amiga’s best-known groups: Bomb’s Skaft 7 in 1996, My Kingdom by Haujobb and Scoopex in 1997 and Scoopex’s Alien 2 in 1998. But the PC competitions were growing, with separate categories for Java demos in 1997 and for Windows demos in 1998, and in 1999 the PC demos were split into accelerated and non-accelerated competitions.
Gamers and sceners
By the late 1990s the people who came to make demos were a minority. In March 1997 Thies Edeling of the online magazine RAW told Amiga Computing that The Party was “the most popular one” in the Amiga scene. In October 1998 the Danish magazine Amiga Advis counted The Party among “the big three”, with The Gathering and Assembly, each with more than 3,000 visitors. All three, it complained, now attracted every nerd who could switch on a computer and play Quake, and sceners often preferred smaller parties. The prize money still drew them: The Party 1998 offered $2,000 to the winners of its demo competitions, about 13,000 kroner for a first place.
The organisers pushed back. The Party 2000 was subtitled “Back To The Roots”, and its results closed with a plea to sceners to come in 2001 and fill all the halls, so that the gamers “won’t have any room anymore”. The Party 2001 combined the Amiga and PC demos into one competition, and Demozoo records it as the last edition to hold proper demoscene competitions. In 2002 the only demo competition left was a combined one for wild demos, 64K intros and demos, with ten entries, and no Amiga or C64 competitions at all. That December was the last The Party.
Demo competition winners
The organisers’ results name these winners of the main demo competitions. From 2001 the Amiga and PC demos competed together.
| Year | Amiga | PC | C64 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1991 | Odyssey, Alcatraz (one competition for all) | ||
| 1992 | State of the Art, Spaceballs | Facts of Life, Witan | |
| 1993 | Origin, Complex | Untitled, Dust | Tower Power, Camelot |
| 1994 | Nexus 7, Andromeda | Project Angel, Impact Studios | Access Denied, Access Denied |
| 1995 | Closer, CNCD | ||
| 1996 | Skaft 7, Bomb | Alto Knallo, Free Electric Band | Nine, Reflex |
| 1997 | My Kingdom, Haujobb and Scoopex | Tribes, Pulse and Melon | Second Reality, Smash Designs |
| 1998 | Alien 2, Scoopex | MOAI, Nomad | Triage III, Smash Designs |
| 1999 | Concrete, Ephidrena | Kasparov, Elitegroup (accelerated) | Y2K, No Name |
| 2000 | Megademo 2000, Haujobb | Love Creation MAX, INF | Starburst 96, Padua |
| 2001 | Elements (combined competition) | Decade 50% | |
| 2002 | CloseGL, Jesper and Sharky (combined competition) |
Sources
- The Party 1991, results (web, secondary copy of the organisers’ file): hosts, place, visitors, the rule against greetings scrollers, demo and graphics competitions. https://files.scene.org/get/parties/1991/theparty91/results.txt
- The Party 1992, results (web, secondary copy of the organisers’ file): “The Party II, the Final”, hosts, dates, 2,500 visitors, PC and Amiga demo, Amiga intro and four-channel music competitions. https://files.scene.org/get/parties/1992/theparty92/results.txt
- The Party 1993, results (web, secondary copy of the organisers’ file): organisers, dates, Herning; Amiga, PC and C64 competitions. https://files.scene.org/get/parties/1993/theparty93/results.txt
- The Party 1994, official competition results (web, secondary copy of the organisers’ file): Amiga, PC and C64 demo competitions. https://files.scene.org/get/parties/1994/theparty94/results.txt
- The Party 1995, final points (web, secondary copy of the organisers’ file): dates; Amiga demo competition, 1,662 points to 613. https://files.scene.org/get/parties/1995/theparty95/results.txt
- The Party 1996 to 2002, results (web, secondary copies of the organisers’ files): demo competition winners and categories; Messecenter, Aars (1998); “Back To The Roots” and the closing plea (2000); the combined competitions (2001, 2002). https://files.scene.org/get/parties/1996/theparty96/results.txt and the matching files for 1997 to 2002.
- “The History of the Future Crew”, the group’s own history, republished by apollo-X Demo Resources, December 1999 (web, secondary): the PC demo result at The Party 1992. https://wayback.defacto2.net/apollo-x-demo-resources-1999-december-17/fc.htm
- News, Amiga Format issue 54, Christmas 1993, p. 17: The Party 1993 venue, capacity, screen and prize money.
- Simon Carless, “The Party V”, Amiga Format issue 82, March 1996, p. 63: Fredericia, attendance, first prize, number of Amiga demos, the wild competition, Closer.
- Amiga Format issue 96, April 1997, PD Select: The Party ’96, over 2,500 people, facilities.
- “Scene Amiga”, Amiga Computing issue 110, March 1997, p. 23: Thies Edeling on The Party, The Gathering and Assembly.
- Amiga Advis (Denmark), October 1998: “the big three” parties, visitor numbers, gamers, The Party 1998 prize money.
- Demozoo, party series for The Party and entries for The Party 2001 and 2002 (web, secondary): places and dates of each edition; 2001 the last with proper demoscene competitions. https://demozoo.org/parties/series/19/