“It is with Melon that people really began to talk about design in a demo.” That was the verdict of the Italian Amiga Magazine in 1997, looking back on the Amiga demo scene. It called Melon Dezign “controversial and highly original”, recognisable by the cartoon look of its productions, and able to make work interesting and admired even when it had nothing technically new to show. The group began in Denmark as the demo arm of a cracking group, helped to run the first Party, turned its members’ skills to a commercial platform game, and in the mid-1990s drew much of its membership from France.
Fast facts
- From: Denmark; later members in France, Norway and elsewhere.
- Active: from 1991; new Amiga releases in the 2020s.
- Platforms: Amiga, and the PC from 1996.
- Known for: cartoon-style, design-led demos such as How to Skin a Cat (1993), Ninja (1994) and Planet M (1995); the platform game Naughty Ones.
- Placings: first in the Amiga intro competition at The Party 1992; third in the Amiga demo competition at Assembly ’93.
From Crystal to The Party
According to the scene database Demozoo, Melon Dezign was formed by Paleface and Seen after they left Quartex, as a subgroup of the cracking group Crystal that made demos and intros. Demozoo lists dozens of “cracktros”, the short intros attached to cracked games, credited jointly to Crystal and Melon Dezign between late 1991 and 1993. Amiga Power gave a different account in 1994, describing Melon Dezign as “a demo group founded two years ago by Jacob and Henrik”, two of the developers of Naughty Ones.
The group was involved in the scene’s biggest party from the start. The organisers’ results for The Party 1991, held in Aars, Denmark, in December, name its hosts as “Melon Dezign/Crystal, Trix/Anarchy Dk and Silents”. A year later, at The Party 1992, Melon Dezign won the Amiga intro competition with 213 points, well ahead of the runner-up’s 121.
Demos with a look of their own
The German magazine Amiga Joker made a Melon Dezign production its showpiece demo of the month in August 1992. The coders were fantastic, it said, and the group’s graphic artist or designer was a true master of the craft. The reviewer was struck most by how smoothly one sequence flowed into the next: a logo spinning through every possible axis, a rubber cube stretched to its limit, a whole Game Boy flying in and zooming to fill the screen without a single judder. Amiga Magazine later named Human Target, from April 1992, among the notable Amiga demos of that year.
British magazines noticed the difference too. In June 1993 Amiga Format reviewed Prism, a slideshow of 22 pictures by the artist Mack: “totally excellent”, with styles from fantasy to futuristic to “downright odd”. Two months later CU Amiga reviewed How to Skin a Cat: “Melon Design always come up with something a bit different. This one’s completely free of the usual scroll-text and techno-babble of most demos, and looks a lot better for it.” It had “an arty laid-back style”, the reviewer wrote, and was “worth a go if you’ve had enough of the usual demo fare”. At Assembly ’93 in Finland that summer, The Romantic Demo came third in the Amiga demo competition.
Melons and Kefrens
Melon Dezign’s demos lived up to the name. Amiga Power described them as “each with a distinctly melon-y theme”. In 1997 Amiga Magazine read the opening of Kefrens’ Desert Dream, with its aircraft firing flying watermelons at the pyramids, the symbol of Kefrens, who answer in kind, as part of a “famous” argument with Melon Dezign. That is how the magazine read it. Demozoo lists a joint Kefrens and Melon Dezign production, Schmoovy, from December 1993.
Naughty Ones
In March 1994 Amiga Power previewed Naughty Ones, a platform game “out of the Rick Dangerous college of games”, published by Kompart and credited to “Melon Dezign and Interactivision”. The team named in the preview was the programmer Jacob Gorm Hansen, the artist Henrik Lund Mikkelsen and the musician Martin Agger. They had quit the demo scene to make it. The title, they explained, came from a Danish word for characters who are not afraid of a challenge and get themselves into trouble.
The game did not make the group’s fortune. In August 1996 Amiga Joker reviewed Jimmy’s Fantastic Journey, a shareware platform game credited to Melon Dezign, whose full version cost 22 marks. It introduced the team as known throughout the demo scene, and noted that their attempt to conquer the games market with Naughty Ones had failed some time before.
Ninja, Baygon and Planet M
Other members went into the games industry. When Melon Dezign’s Ninja came seventh at The Party 1994, two points ahead of Sanity’s Roots, The Australian Commodore and Amiga Review explained that it had been “produced by the Melon members working at Funcom”, the Norwegian games developer. “Melon are known for their ritual deviation from anything ‘standard’,” the column said, and Ninja was “really more of an animation” than a demo: the story was simple and the art cartoony, “but the design and music syncing can’t be faulted”.
By then the group was partly French. The French magazine Dream listed Melon Dezign among the country’s demo groups in April 1995, with the members Alex, Mack, Nam, Thorin and Walt: “qui ne les connait pas?” (who doesn’t know them?). Members of the group Movement had recently joined.
In October 1995 CU Amiga reviewed two new Melon demos for the A1200. Baygon took “a trip back to the 70s” with “pastel-tinted psychedelia” and a hip-hop track, “a relief from the banging techno of the competition”. Planet M mixed “pop-art cartoon graphics” with doctored digitised pictures: “Melon manage to combine cutting edge routines with some real low tech effects and get away with it.” Two years later Amiga Magazine called Planet M a demo it would never tire of watching, for its soundtrack and the cheek of its themes and effects, and “perhaps the last symbol of a scene that no longer exists”.
Later years
Demozoo lists Melon Dezign’s first PC productions in 1996 and releases into the late 1990s and 2003. From 2021 the group released new demos for the original Amiga chipset again, under the names Melon Dezign and Melon, with the latest listed in 2024.
Sources
- The Party 1991, results (web, secondary copy of the organisers’ file): hosts. https://files.scene.org/get/parties/1991/theparty91/results.txt
- The Party 1992, results (web, secondary copy of the organisers’ file): Amiga intro competition. https://files.scene.org/get/parties/1992/theparty92/results.txt
- Assembly ‘93, results (web, secondary copy of the organisers’ file): Amiga demo competition. https://files.scene.org/get/parties/1993/assembly93/results.txt
- The Party 1994, official competition results (web, secondary copy of the organisers’ file): Amiga demo competition. https://files.scene.org/get/parties/1994/theparty94/results.txt
- Demozoo, group entry for Melon Dezign (web, secondary): formation, Crystal cracktros, members’ countries, productions and dates. https://demozoo.org/groups/435/
- Amiga Joker (Germany), August 1992: “Demo-Galerie”, demo of the month.
- Amiga Format issue 47, June 1993, p. 164: review of Prism.
- CU Amiga, August 1993, p. 136: review of How to Skin a Cat.
- Amiga Power issue 35, March 1994: “Things to Come” preview of Naughty Ones, with interview.
- The Australian Commodore and Amiga Review, volume 12 number 4, April 1995: demo column, review of Ninja.
- Dream (France) issue 17, April 1995: “Démomakers, la liste des groupes français”.
- CU Amiga, October 1995, p. 89: PD Scene, reviews of Baygon and Planet M.
- Amiga Joker (Germany), August 1996: review of Jimmy’s Fantastic Journey.
- Amiga Magazine (Italy) issue 94, November 1997, pp. 22–24: history of the Amiga demo scene; Melon Dezign and design, Human Target, the Desert Dream reading, Planet M.