In July 1992 Future Crew entered its demo Unreal in the PC competition at the first Assembly party in Finland, and won. A Greek computer magazine reviewing it that December could hardly contain itself: Unreal, it said, was the best demo ever released for the PC, and perhaps one of the best on any computer. A year later the group won Assembly again with Second Reality, the demo it is still remembered for. Its coder Psi also wrote Scream Tracker, a music editor for the PC modelled on the Amiga’s trackers. When the members grew up and needed paid work, several of them started companies, and Remedy Entertainment, the maker of Max Payne, was one of them.
Fast facts
- From: Finland.
- Founded: 1986, on the Commodore 64; on the PC from 1988.
- Best known for: Unreal (1992), Panic (1992), Second Reality (1993) and Scream Tracker.
- Members at the time of Second Reality: Psi, Trug and Wildfire (code); Marvel and Pixel (graphics); Skaven and Purple Motion (music); Gore (organising); Abyss (bulletin board).
- Later: members founded or joined Remedy Entertainment, Bitboys, Futuremark and Bugbear Entertainment.
From the C64 to the PC
The group told its own early history in a text written by Gore in the mid-1990s. Future Crew began on the Commodore 64 in 1986, made two demos there and moved to the PC in 1988, with an EGA scroller called GR8. Psi was the only member who stayed for the whole time. His Scream Tracker 2.0, “a 4 voice music editing program inspired by the Amiga SoundTracker”, followed soon after the group’s Slideshow I in 1990 and was, in the group’s words, “a real success”. (See SoundTracker for the Amiga program it copied.)
By 1991 the group had gone quiet. Samuli Syvähuoko, who joined that year under the handle Gore, told Wireframe in 2022 that one of his first jobs was to throw out the inactive members and get the group going again. Trug, Pixel, Skaven and Abyss joined at the start of 1992, Wildfire came over from the Atari ST scene that autumn, and the graphic artist Marvel arrived from the Amiga group Sonic in 1993.
Unreal, Panic and Second Reality
Unreal was planned for a Swedish party, but Rebels, an Amiga group, invited Future Crew to Assembly ’92 and asked it to make an invitation intro for the PC scene. The group dropped Unreal for two weeks to write the intro, then finished the demo in time for Assembly. It won the PC demo competition ahead of Triton’s Crystal Dream. The Greek magazine PC Master explained that it was written entirely in assembly language and needed at least a 386SX, a VGA or SVGA card and a Sound Blaster, Sound Blaster Pro or Sound Master II.
At The Party in Denmark that December, Panic came second in the PC demo competition to Witan’s Facts of Life. Future Crew was not happy about it. The group’s history says “there was absolutely no voting” for the PC entries: an Amiga organiser asked the last PC organiser still there which PC demos were best, without telling him his answer would be the official result.
Assembly ‘93 went better. Future Crew organised the PC competitions, and Second Reality won the PC demo competition: 381 points to 334 in the organisers’ results file, and 472 to 403 in the results Future Crew published that October. Skaven, Purple Motion and Marvel won the multichannel music, four-channel music and graphics competitions at the same party.
Music and Scream Tracker
The two musicians released their own music disks, Purple Motion’s Journey and Skaven’s Chaotic Mind, and in 1994 British public-domain libraries were selling both alongside the demos. Journey came with the group’s own module player for Sound Blaster and Gravis UltraSound cards. The UltraSound was the scene’s favourite card: a reader writing to Computer Gaming World in January 1994 said “Future Crew and Renaissance swear by it”.
Scream Tracker 3 was, the group said, more than two years in the making. Psi released it in 1994, and by that November it was on sale in the same libraries’ lists as a “MOD music composer”.
Into the games industry
The group made no big demo after 1993. A demo called The Probe was designed for Assembly ’94 but dropped, and in 1995 Finland’s compulsory military service took Wildfire, Marvel, Pixel and Abyss away in turn. Skaven still won the 32-channel music competition at Assembly ’95 with “Catch That Goblin”.
The members’ next step was work. “If you can turn your hobby into your career that actually pays the bill, that’s the best thing that can ever happen,” Syvähuoko told Wireframe. “And our technical skills at the time were so high we were constantly being contacted by game publishers around the world asking us to start making games.” He founded Remedy Entertainment with Markus Mäki, Sami Nopanen, John Kavaleff and Sami Vanhatalo. Remedy’s first game, Death Rally (1996), had music by Purple Motion. Max Payne followed in 2001 and sold more than 7.5 million copies by 2011, Wireframe reports. Edge’s 2011 survey of Finnish studios credited Remedy with popularising bullet-time in the Max Payne games and praised its Alan Wake.
Trug, Mika Tuomi, started Bitboys with his brother and friends. According to Tom’s Hardware, working on Second Reality gave them a taste for 3D graphics, and Bitboys went on to design graphics chips, first the Pyramid3D for a company called TriTech and then its own Glaze3D. The group’s history adds that by 1997 all of its coders were working on the Pyramid project. At Assembly ’97 the Pyramid3D card was shown, and Remedy premiered Final Reality, a 3D benchmark. In 2011 Edge listed Remedy, the benchmarking company Futuremark and Bugbear Entertainment as companies “all founded by members of a famous demo group, Future Crew”.
Later
The group’s own releases stopped in 1995. The name returned in 2024 on Superselection, a joint demo with the groups Byterapers and Doomsday, with music by Purple Motion among others and graphics by Marvel. It came second in the demo competition at Assembly Summer 2024.
Sources
- “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): founding, members and when they joined, Scream Tracker 2.0, Unreal and the Assembly ’92 invitation, The Party 1992, Assembly ’93, Journey, Scream Tracker 3, The Probe, military service, Assembly ’95, Pyramid, Final Reality. https://wayback.defacto2.net/apollo-x-demo-resources-1999-december-17/fc.htm
- Assembly ‘92, official results (web, secondary copy of the organisers’ file): PC demo competition, 1st Unreal, 2nd Crystal Dream. https://files.scene.org/get/parties/1992/assembly92/results.txt
- PC Master (Greece) issue 35, December 1992, p. 94: review of Unreal.
- The Party 1992, official results (web, secondary copy of the organisers’ file): PC demo competition, 1st Facts of Life by Witan, 2nd Panic. https://files.scene.org/get/parties/1992/theparty92/results.txt
- Assembly ‘93, official PC competition results (web, secondary copy of the organisers’ file): demo, music and graphics results. 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: its own Assembly ’93 PC demo results, 130 votes, Second Reality 472, Optic Nerve 403. https://github.com/mtuomi/SecondReality/blob/master/MAIN/DATA/FCINFO10.TXT
- Future Crew, Second Reality source release, credits part: members’ roles. https://github.com/mtuomi/SecondReality
- Jack Yarwood, “Beyond Max Payne”, Wireframe issue 64, June 2022, pp. 28–31: Syvähuoko joining in 1991, his quotes, Remedy’s founders, Death Rally, Max Payne and its sales.
- Letter on the Gravis UltraSound, Computer Gaming World issue 114, January 1994.
- Public-domain library advertisements, PC Gamer (UK) vol. 1 no. 11, October 1994, and vol. 1 no. 12, November 1994: Chaotic Mind, Journey, Scream Tracker 3.
- Letters page, Zeta (Italy) issue 23, February 1997: Death Rally’s music by Purple Motion.
- “Finland”, Edge issue 229, July 2011, pp. 166–169: Remedy, Futuremark and Bugbear founded by Future Crew members; Alan Wake.
- “The Crazy Story Of BitBoys”, Tom’s Hardware (web, secondary): Mika Tuomi, Bitboys, Pyramid3D, TriTech, Glaze3D. https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/medfield-krait-smartphone-mobile-soc,3117-7.html
- Demozoo, group entry for Future Crew and production entries for Scream Tracker V3.21 and Superselection (web, secondary): the group’s releases, the last before 2024 dated October 1995; Psi as author of Scream Tracker 3; the 2024 release, its credits and placing. https://demozoo.org/groups/357/