“Scoopex and Silents are two of the best teams,” Amiga Shopper told its readers in May 1991. That spring British public-domain libraries were selling Scoopex’s Mental Hangover, and one of them advertised it as “The BEST demo ever”. In Poland the magazine Bajtek assumed its readers knew the group already: every Amiga owner, it wrote in 1990, knew Red Sector’s legendary Megademo and “the original ideas of Scoopex”. The group began in Austria as a cracking crew. Within two years it had members in Britain, Sweden and Finland, and its Finnish and Swedish members had made a demo that the group still calls the first trackmo. Scoopex has kept going ever since: it won The Party’s Amiga competitions in the late 1990s and is still releasing Amiga productions today.
Fast facts
- From: Austria, with sections in Britain, Sweden, Finland and France over the years.
- Active: founded in 1988; first release January 1989; still active.
- Platform: Amiga, with occasional releases on other machines.
- Best known for: Mental Hangover (1990); My Kingdom with Haujobb and Alien 2, Amiga demo winners at The Party in 1997 and 1998.
- Members included: Ranger and Shark the Master (founders), the artist J.O.E., the Finnish coder Slayer and artist Reward, the Swedish musician Uncle Tom, the cracker N.O.M.A.D., the Austrian coder Antibyte and the Swedish coder Photon, who later ran the group.
From Megaforce to Scoopex
Scoopex grew out of Megaforce, a mainly Austrian group that cracked games and made demos on the Commodore 64 and the Amiga. Photon, who later organised Scoopex, describes the moment in The Story of the Amiga in Pixels: “Police had just clamped down on piracy and one of the C-64/Amiga groups targeted was Megaforce.” The group’s own online history says Megaforce’s leader, Ranger, then decided “to put the group to rest and get on with a fresh start”. With Shark the Master he founded Scoopex in 1988, and most of the Megaforce members moved across. The first Scoopex demo came out in January 1989, coded by Crazy Typer with graphics by J.O.E.
The new name had no reputation, and Ranger set out to build one. “In the early years Ranger’s word was always the law,” the member TMB recalled. The group’s releases came quickly: cracks, intros, and pack disks that collected other groups’ demos, the Rangerpacks. Divisions followed. The British group Share and Enjoy joined first, and made a Megademo with Scoopex; some of its members went on to form Anarchy. A Swedish section released one demo, B.I.G., in 1989. That October the crackers’ newsletter Cracker Journal announced “Scoopex Finland is born”, and the Finnish section’s demo Seven Sins came out the same month.
Mental Hangover
At the Swedish Elite Easter Conference in Gothenburg in April 1990, the Finnish section’s Mental Hangover won the Amiga demo competition. Slayer wrote the code, Reward drew the graphics and Uncle Tom wrote the music. Megademos of the time ran as separate parts with a pause to load between them. Mental Hangover loaded from the disk while it played, as one continuous show. Scoopex’s history calls it the start of a new kind of demo, the trackmo, and a disk-magazine chart voted by sceners placed it first among demos that November. The demo’s own entry tells its story.
It was a peak for the group’s first generation. The cracker N.O.M.A.D. joined from Slipstream-UK in 1990 and released more than thirteen major cracks under the Scoopex name before moving on. Slayer announced a sequel to Mental Hangover, World of Wodka, but never finished it. Reward left for the Finnish group Complex around the end of 1991, and Ranger handed the group to Trade. Photon’s account says Ranger left when “1993 became 1994”; the group’s website says he retired in 1992.
Demos only
In the 1990s Scoopex dropped the cracking. “In 1993–98, we abandoned the cracking scene and became a demogroup only,” the Austrian coder Antibyte told Photon. His own trackmo, Pha-Q, came out at the end of 1993 and was in British PD libraries by the spring. In 1993, Photon writes, Scoopex organised a party called CeBIT ’93 in Germany, “together with and sponsored by none other than Commodore”.
The late 1990s were the group’s most successful years in competitions. The organisers’ results for The Party in Denmark put My Kingdom, made with the group Haujobb, first in the Amiga demo competition in December 1997, and Scoopex’s Superautodrome first in the Amiga intros. A year later Scoopex won both again, with Alien 2 and the 40K intro 1000%. The Danish magazine Amiga Advis called Scoopex “the scene’s grand old group” and noted that it had taken both first places, “just like last year”. 1000% was Antibyte’s work: twelve parts and three soundtracks in 40 kilobytes. Photon writes that Scoopex was voted best group in the disk-magazine charts from April 1998 to September 2000. In the same years it worked with other groups on disk magazines, among them Seenpoint, which reached its ninth issue in 1999.
Later years
After 2000 the releases slowed. In 2006 a new organiser, SIR, restarted the group with an internal newsletter and a new website, and he later handed over to Photon. As Photon tells it, Scoopex never moved to the PC: “It is accurate to describe the Scoopex narrative as largely an Amiga story.” From the early 2010s, Photon writes, people who had left “for Real Life” came back to the machines of their youth, and the scene for the original Amiga chipset grew again. The group’s productions from these years include a 2014 intro for the Amiga conversion of Where Time Stood Still and a 2016 rotozoomer for the original Amiga chipset, Grade My Waterbear. The group’s website still posts news of Scoopex releases in 2026.
Sources
- Amiga Shopper issue 1, May 1991, public-domain column: “Scoopex and Silents are two of the best teams”.
- Amiga Shopper issue 2, June 1991: public-domain library advertisement, “SCOOPEX MENTAL HANGOVER The BEST demo ever”.
- Bajtek (Poland) issue 11, 1990: scene column on the Amiga: Red Sector’s Megademo and “oryginalne pomysły SCOOPEX-u”.
- Photon, “Scoopex and the Demoscene”, in Chris Wilkins and Roger M. Kean, The Story of the Amiga in Pixels (Fusion Retro Books, 2017), pp. 82–88: Megaforce and the founding, the first demo, Ranger, TMB’s recollection, the divisions, N.O.M.A.D., Antibyte’s recollection, CeBIT ’93, 1000%, the diskmag charts, the 2006 restart and later productions.
- Scoopex, group history, “1988 – 1990”, “1990 – 1992” and “1999 – 2000” (web, secondary): the founding, Mental Hangover and trackmos, World of Wodka, Reward and Ranger’s departures, Seenpoint. https://www.scoopex1988.org/history.html
- Swedish Elite Easter Conference 1990, results compiled from Robert Hed’s party report in Digital issue 3/90 and Brainstorm’s diskmag Zine issue 5 (web, secondary). https://www.pouet.net/party.php?which=161&when=1990
- Amiga Format issue 58, April 1994: PD demo reviews, Pha-Q.
- The Party 1997, results (web, secondary copy of the organisers’ file): Amiga demo and Amiga intro competitions. https://files.scene.org/get/parties/1997/theparty97/results.txt
- The Party 1998, results (web, secondary copy of the organisers’ file): Amiga demo and Amiga 40K intro competitions. https://files.scene.org/get/parties/1998/theparty98/results.txt
- Amiga Advis (Denmark) issue 1/99, January 1999: report and official results from The Party 8.
- Demozoo, group entry for Scoopex and its production entries (web, secondary): Cracker Journal reports, sections, credits and dates, and the Crusaders Eurochart placing for Mental Hangover. https://demozoo.org/groups/361/