On 25 October 2008, at the X party in the Netherlands, Booze Design showed Edge of Disgrace in the Commodore 64 demo competition. It won with 9.346 points to 8.854 for Oxyron’s Natural Wonders 2, and the Scene.org Awards for 2008 named it the best demo of the year on an oldschool platform. By then the group was seventeen years old. It had come second at one of Sweden’s biggest parties in 1993, won competitions on and off since, and one of its coders had written ByteBoozer, a cruncher made for demos. It was still releasing demos in 2026.
Fast facts
- From: Sweden.
- Founded: June 1991, by Trash and Vodka, according to the scene database CSDb.
- Platform: Commodore 64.
- Best known for: Edge of Disgrace (2008), first at X’2008.
- Other competition winners: Soul (X’98), Royal Arte (Mekka & Symposium 2001), Industrial Breakdown (Floppy 2003), Cycle (Floppy 2004) and Andropolis (LCP 2009).
- Members included: HCL (a member from the start), Trash, Vodka, Jailbird, Dane, JackAsser and Mirage.
- Tools: the ByteBoozer cruncher and a disk loader, both by HCL.
The 1990s
CSDb records Booze Design’s first releases in 1991: demos, crack intros and disk covers. Two years later the group had a place near the top. At The Computer Crossroads in Gothenburg, held from 29 to 31 May 1993 and attended by an estimated 1,700 people, its demo Totally Stoned II came second in the C64 demo competition behind Censor Design’s Wonderland X. The Hungarian magazine 576 KByte, reporting from the party, found a surprising amount of new material in the Booze Design demo and singled out a full-screen sprite effect as perhaps the best of its kind so far.
The two groups shared a coder for a while. CSDb lists HCL as a member of Censor Design from November 1993 to 1995, while he stayed in Booze Design. Releases were sparse in the mid-1990s, but in 1998 the group’s demo Soul won the C64 demo competition at X in the Netherlands.
The 2000s
The group won the C64 demo competition at Mekka & Symposium in Germany in 2001 with Royal Arte, and at the Floppy party in 2003 and 2004 with Industrial Breakdown and Cycle. The musician Dane joined in 2004.
HCL’s cruncher, ByteBoozer, came out in 2003. A cruncher compresses a program so it takes fewer disk blocks and loads faster, then unpacks itself when run. That September the Austrian C64 fanzine Lotek64 tested nine crunchers on the 184-block tape file of Andrew Braybrook’s Uridium. ByteBoozer 0.9 needed no extra hardware, packed the file to 106 blocks, jointly the best result, and took 17 minutes to do it. The reviewer rated it the overall winner: the best packing in an acceptable time. Later versions stayed in use for years, including one that runs on a PC; see compression for how ByteBoozer compares with other C64 crunchers, and disk fastloaders for the Booze Design loader.
In 2005 Booze Design, Triad and Fairlight started a disk magazine together, Nordic Scene Review, made mostly of reviews of new demos. The German-language C64 magazine CeVi-aktuell welcomed it, noting that the three groups were “still among the most active groups in the scene”.
Edge of Disgrace and after
Edge of Disgrace, made by HCL, Dane and Jailbird, won at X in October 2008. The next year Andropolis won the C64 demo competition at the LCP party.
At X’2014 Booze Design came within a fraction of winning again. Its demo, listed in the organisers’ results as The Booze Demo and released as Uncensored, scored 4.7595. Comaland, by Censor Design and Oxyron, won with 4.7848.
The group kept working after that, mostly for smaller parties. CSDb records wins at Fjälldata in 2020 with Remains and in 2025 with Codeboys & Endians, and at Gubbdata in 2019 with The Elder Scrollers. In 2022 it released a demo called 30 Years, and in 2026 another, Dane50.
Sources
- 576 KByte (Hungary) issue 37, September 1993: report on TCC ’93, “The Computer Crossroad”, Gothenburg, 29–31 May 1993: attendance and C64 demo results, Totally Stoned II second, comments on its sprite effect.
- Lotek64 (Austria) issue 7, September 2003: cruncher test, ByteBoozer 0.9 by HCL of Booze Design.
- CeVi-aktuell issue 1, May 2005: Nordic Scene Review by Triad, Fairlight and Booze Design (quoted here in translation).
- Lotek64 issue 14, June 2005: news, Nordic Scene Review launched by the Swedish groups Triad, Fairlight and Booze Design.
- X-2008, results (web, secondary copy of the organisers’ file): demo competition, 24–26 October 2008. https://files.scene.org/get/parties/2008/x08/results.txt
- X2014, official results (web, secondary copy of the organisers’ file): demo competition. https://files.scene.org/get/parties/2014/x14/results.txt
- Scene.org Awards, archive for 2008, “Best demo on an oldschool platform” (web, secondary). https://awards.scene.org/archive.php?year=2008&cat=best-demo-on-an-oldschool-platform
- CSDb, group entry for Booze Design and its release entries (web, secondary): founding, members and their dates, releases and competition placings, including Soul, Royal Arte, Industrial Breakdown, Cycle, Andropolis, Uncensored and the later Swedish party results. https://csdb.dk/group/?id=505
- CSDb, group entry for Censor Design (web, secondary): HCL’s membership, November 1993 to 1995. https://csdb.dk/group/?id=2310