In April 1990 the German magazine Amiga Joker explained to its readers how the Amiga’s cracking scene was ranked. At the top, wrote its scene reporter, Dr. Freak, were the “big three”, Vision Factory, Paranoimia and Quartex. They had, in translation, “the best crackers and originals at hand” and so brought out the lion’s share of new cracked games, and they had the bulletin-board trade almost to themselves. Quartex had been going for less than two years. It cracked games, put its intros in front of them, and also made demos, one of which, Substance, was still listed among the Amiga’s landmark productions in 1997.
Fast facts
- Formed: summer 1988, according to the scene database Demozoo.
- Platform: Commodore Amiga; later Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance.
- Known for: cracks and crack intros of Amiga games; the demo Substance (1991).
- Rivals: Vision Factory, Paranoimia, Crystal, Skid Row and others.
Among the big three
Scene charts, published in disk magazines, ranked the groups. Demozoo records Quartex as the best group in the first issue of the Eurochart, in November 1989, and still in the top ten in January 1991. The name had reached well beyond the scene. In January 1990 the Italian magazine K, writing about a proposed law against software piracy, imagined police knocking at the door of a pirate’s bedroom and the “immediate disappearance of tags like ‘Quartex’ and ‘Beastie Boys’” (in translation).
The police were a real risk, as Amiga Joker’s column made plain. It said police had been hunting pirates harder for some years, and that newcomers who took no precautions were easy prey, while the leaders of the top groups had the routine not to get caught. “Whoever wants to survive in this guerrilla war,” it said in translation, “must always stay a nose ahead of their pursuers.”
Cracked games reached paying customers too. In August 1992 an Austrian reader told Amiga Joker that he had ordered Apidya from a mail-order dealer. His copy would not run, so he sent it back to be repaired, and when it came back and he started it, the screen showed “an intro by the cracking group Quartex” (in translation). He had, he wrote, paid 500 schillings for a pirate copy. Game developers expected the groups. The team behind Abandoned Places left a message in their game’s files: “Cracked by Quartex or Cracked by Scoopex or Cracked by Skid Row or Cracked by <here is your name>!”
Substance and the demos
Quartex was a demo group as well. According to Demozoo, it co-hosted a copy party in Newcastle, England, in 1990 with The Silents and Mayhem. Its demo Substance followed in April 1991. By that summer British public-domain libraries were selling it, and one listed it in Amiga Shopper as a new Quartex demo that was “MEGA”. In November 1991 Amiga Joker called it “a particularly impressive work by Quartex”, and in 1992 Amiga Format advertisements described the disk as fractals and 3D. In 1997 the Italian Amiga Magazine, listing the productions that had made the Amiga demo scene’s history, included “Substance by Quartex, code by Corto, music by Moby” among those of 1991.
The group was still entering competitions in 1994. AmigaWorld looked at two entries in the small-demo competition at The Party 1994, limited to 40 kilobytes, one of them by Quartex, and judged that their size was “more impressive than their contents”. The Quartex entry’s 3D section, it said, used “black-and-white wall tiles against a harvest-orange backdrop”.
Members moving on
Groups at the top of the scene lost members as often as they gained them. Demozoo records that in November 1991 several members, some of whom had come from Crystal and Paradox, left to form Nemesis. Two others, Paleface and Seen, left to found Melon Dezign as the demo arm of Crystal. Quartex kept going: in June 1992 Amiga Joker still placed it in the chart’s top ten, behind Skid Row, Crystal and others. Crystal’s supplier, 2tuff, looking back, counted Quartex among the groups that fetched their originals from the same place as he did, and said Crystal still beat them to most games.
Demozoo lists Quartex releases on the Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance in the early 2000s, and productions under the name as late as July 2020.
Sources
- K (Italy) vol. 2 no. 13, January 1990: on the proposed piracy law.
- Amiga Joker (Germany), April 1990: Dr. Freak’s scene column, the “big three” and the police.
- Amiga Shopper issue 4, August 1991: public-domain library advertisement for Substance.
- Amiga Joker (Germany), November 1991: public-domain column, Substance.
- Amiga Format issues 31 and 32, February and March 1992: public-domain library advertisements for Substance.
- Amiga Joker (Germany), June 1992: Dr. Freak’s scene column, the chart.
- Amiga Joker (Germany), August 1992: readers’ letters, the pirated Apidya.
- AmigaWorld vol. 11 no. 4, April 1995: Peter Olafson’s round-up of 3D Amiga programs, the Quartex entry at The Party 1994.
- Amiga Magazine (Italy) issue 94, November 1997: history of the Amiga demo scene.
- Codetapper, “An interview with 2tuff of Crystal” (web, secondary): http://www.codetapper.com/amiga/interviews/2tuff-of-crystal/
- Codetapper, “Hidden messages in Amiga games” (web, secondary): the message in Abandoned Places.
- Demozoo, group entry for Quartex (web, secondary): formation, chart placings, the Newcastle party, Substance, Nemesis, handheld releases. https://demozoo.org/groups/1430/