Sanity | Code Like It's 198x

Sanity had a very good night at The Party in Denmark in December 1993. Its demo Arte came third in the Amiga demo competition with 1,592 points. Moby of Sanity won the music competition with Elektrik Funk, 1,284 points to the runner-up’s 632. Cougar of Sanity won the graphics competition with Dragon Sun, and Ra, who drew Arte’s graphics, came fourth. For a German group that had started nearly four years earlier making music disks, it was the peak of a run that also produced a chart-topping demo for Commodore’s own trade show.

Fast facts

From: Germany, with French members from 1993.
Active: from March 1990; main releases up to 1995.
Platform: Amiga.
Best known for: Arte (1993), third at The Party 1993; the World of Commodore demo (1992); Roots (1994–95).
Members included: Chaos and Mr. Pet (code), Cougar, Ra and Cthulhu (graphics), Jester, Moby and Virgill (music).

Beginnings

According to the scene database Demozoo, Sanity was founded in March 1990 by the coders Panther and Vindicator and a third member, Hawk. Its first releases were music disks, followed by intros and demos. Elysium (1991) came third at the Amiga Summit Convention that year, and the Italian Amiga Magazine later listed it among the notable Amiga demos of 1991.

Music was central to the group from the start. Jester, the German musician Volker Tripp, wrote tunes for many of its productions. CU Amiga profiled him in November 1993 as “one of the most admired musicians on the scene”, known “for his tunes that have graced numerous classic demos, many of which have been collaborations with the well-respected demo crew, Sanity”. His 1992 music disk Jesterday was still in British public-domain libraries’ advertisements two years later.

World of Commodore

In November 1992 Commodore held its World of Commodore show in Frankfurt, and the show had a demo competition. Sanity came second, according to Demozoo, with a demo that did not seem to have a title. CU Amiga reviewed it in March 1993 as simply “Sanity’s entry in last November’s World of Commodore demo competition”: “It’s full of original effects that leave the competition standing.” The reviewer picked out real-time 3D zooms, tunnels, dot patterns, “twisty metallic columns” and “a nice rotated bitmap routine”, backed by a “hi-nrj” soundtrack that switched to techno halfway.

The demo reached British owners through public-domain libraries, which sold demos by the disk. In May 1993 Amiga Format printed the best-seller list of the library 17 Bit Software, and Sanity’s World of Commodore was at number one, ahead of LSD’s Jesus on E’s and Spaceballs’ State of the Art.

1993

That spring Sanity released Interference, credited on Demozoo to the coders Microforce and Cosmos, the artists Cougar and Havok and the musician Virgill. Amiga Format’s PD Demo Zone was lukewarm in August 1993: “nothing special to offer apart from some superbly drawn images – most notably a horror train… and a really good human skull”. “Yeah, it’s good, but it doesn’t break any new ground.”

The group’s coders had strong views about what a demo should be. When the disk magazine R.A.W. collected opinions on the best demos of 1992, Chaos of Sanity dismissed State of the Art, which played back dancers recorded on video: Lone Starr “should get himself a videocamera and make music videos NOTHING is realtime in this prod”.

Sanity also changed shape during 1993. Demozoo records the group organising its own party, the 680xx Convention, from 30 July to 1 August, and, citing the disk magazine Chippy Town, the arrival that autumn of the artist Ra and the musician Moby from Dreamdealers, a French group. The German magazine Amiga Joker reported that Sanity had gained new members and made a “mega-demo” to welcome them. That demo was Arte, named after the French-German television channel.

Some members were moving on to games. In June 1993 CU Amiga previewed Shenandoah, a shoot ’em up from the publisher Black Legend, and noted “ex-demo members from Sanity and Exceed working on this one”.

The Party 1993

The Party 1993 was held in Herning, Denmark, from 27 to 29 December. Complex’s Origin won the Amiga demo competition with 2,340 points and Virtual Dreams and Fairlight’s Full Moon came second. Arte was third, just ahead of Spaceballs’ 9 Fingers. Sanity also entered a smaller production, Hospital Since Friday, which came fifteenth. In the other Amiga competitions the group won both music and graphics, as described above.

Arte sold well in Britain through 1994. CU Amiga gave it 90%, and it appeared in public-domain libraries’ best-seller lists, second only to 9 Fingers at one of them. The full story is in the Arte entry.

Roots

A year later Sanity brought Roots, made for the AGA Amigas (the A1200 and A4000), to The Party 1994. It came eighth with 191 points, two points behind Melon Dezign’s Ninja, in the competition Andromeda’s Nexus 7 won. The demo column of The Australian Commodore and Amiga Review explained why it had “surprisingly only managed to pick up 191 votes” for “their follow up to last year’s ground breaking ‘Arte’”: it was not finished. “The coders’ hard drive never turned up, and it contained most of the code and graphics, so the final assembly was done using odds and ends.” The reviewer still found the routines “up to Sanity’s usual high standard”, with a soundtrack by Jester.

When Amiga Joker reviewed Sanity’s latest demo in March 1995, it noted the group’s “famous ‘Demo or Die!’ motto” morphing across the screen, and a finale in which a girl turns into a Japanese comic-book girl and then into the German television presenter Thomas Gottschalk.

The finished version, Roots 2.0, came out at Black Box Symposium in April 1995, a party Sanity organised, and came second in its Amiga demo competition, according to Demozoo. CU Amiga made it Demo of the Month in July 1995 with 92%. “Sanity have produced some of the most outstanding demos on the Amiga,” it said, and this one had “nine pictures, 19 effects and two modules – all on one disk”, music that “in the usual Sanity style, syncs with perfect action”, and it ran in the older OCS and ECS screen modes, though it needed a 68020 processor.

After Sanity

Roots 2.0 is the last Sanity production in Demozoo’s list until 2016. Its members carried on elsewhere. Chaos, Dierk Ohlerich, became a member of farbrausch. In 2004 Computer Gaming World described him as a full-time game developer who had written the Werkkzeug editor behind .kkrieger, a first-person shooter that fitted into a 96K program and won its competition at Breakpoint 2004. Ra’s artwork also appeared in Virtual Dreams’ Psychedelic, second at The Party 1994, and The Australian Commodore and Amiga Review called him “arguably the best artist on the Amiga”. He later joined the group NoooN.

The name came back in 2016, when e255, a joint production by Bomb, Sanity and Dreamdealers with music by Moby, won the Alternative Platforms competition at the Evoke party.

Sources

The Party 1993, results (web, secondary copy of the organisers’ file): held 27–29 December 1993 in Herning; Amiga demo, music and graphics 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 demo competition. https://files.scene.org/get/parties/1994/theparty94/results.txt
Evoke 2016, results (web, secondary copy of the organisers’ file): Alternative Platforms competition. https://files.scene.org/get/parties/2016/evoke16/results.txt
Demozoo, group entry for Sanity (web, secondary): founding, members, the 680xx Convention and Black Box Symposium, and Ra and Moby joining from Dreamdealers. Production entries for Elysium, World of Commodore, Interference, Roots, Roots 2.0 and e255: dates, credits and placings; scener entries for Chaos (Dierk Ohlerich; farbrausch) and Ra (NoooN). https://demozoo.org/groups/146/
CU Amiga, March 1993, p. 137: review of the World of Commodore demo.
Amiga Format issue 46, May 1993, p. 170: “Top 10 Demos of the Month” from 17 Bit Software.
CU Amiga, June 1993, p. 38: “First Impressions” preview of Shenandoah.
Amiga Format issue 49, August 1993, p. 155: PD Demo Zone, review of Interference.
Amiga Format issue 59, May 1994: public-domain library advertisement listing Jesterday.
CU Amiga, November 1993, p. 124: profile of Volker Tripp (Jester).
Amiga Joker (Germany), March 1994: “Demo-Galerie”, Arte and Sanity’s new members.
Amiga Joker (Germany), March 1995: “Demo-Galerie”, review of Sanity’s new demo.
The Australian Commodore and Amiga Review, volume 12 number 3, March 1995, pp. 92–93: demo column on The Party 1994 (Roots; Ra’s artwork in Psychedelic).
CU Amiga, July 1995, p. 89: PD Scene, Demo of the Month, Roots 2.
Dream (France) issue 17, April 1995: “Démomakers, la liste des groupes français”, listing DreamDealers.
Amiga Magazine (Italy) issue 94, November 1997, pp. 22–23: history of the Amiga demo scene, list of notable demos by year (Elysium, Arte, Roots).
Jimmy Maher, The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga (MIT Press, 2012), pp. 187–190: opinions on State of the Art collected by R.A.W., including Chaos’s.
Computer Gaming World issue 242, September 2004: .kkrieger, .theprodukkt and Dierk “Chaos” Ohlerich’s Werkkzeug editor.