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Spaceballs

The Norwegian group behind State of the Art

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A Norwegian Amiga demo group from Halden, named after Mel Brooks' film. It won The Gathering in 1992 with Wayfarer and The Party in 1992 with State of the Art, whose dancers were traced from videotape, and it was still winning Amiga competitions in the 2010s and 2020s.

In 1992 a Norwegian group named after a Mel Brooks comedy won two of the year’s big Amiga demo competitions. Wayfarer won at The Gathering in Norway in April, and at Christmas State of the Art won at The Party in Denmark. The second demo made Spaceballs known well beyond the scene. Its dancers were traced from videotape, British public-domain libraries listed it among their best-sellers, and in 1994 CU Amiga called Spaceballs “still the best demo crew”. More than thirty years later the group is still entering Amiga competitions.

Fast facts

  • From: Halden, Norway.
  • Active: from 1988; still releasing in the 2020s.
  • Platforms: Amiga, with a Commodore 64 demo in 2002.
  • Best known for: State of the Art, winner at The Party 1992, and its successor 9 Fingers (1993).
  • Members included: Dark Helmet (founder), Lone Starr, President Screw, Yoghurt, Vinnie, Travolta, TMB Designs, and later Slummy, Useless, Duck-Hunter and lug00ber.

Halden

According to the scene database Demozoo, Spaceballs began in 1988 as one person, Dark Helmet, in the town of Halden. Lone Starr joined the same year, and more members were recruited locally over the next two years. Most of them took their handles from Mel Brooks’ 1987 film Spaceballs: Dark Helmet and Lone Starr are its villain and hero. The group’s first listed productions date from December 1990, and in June 1991 its demo Spasmolytic came fifth at the Amega Party.

1992: two wins

At The Gathering in April 1992, held in Norway by the groups Deadline and Crusaders, Spaceballs’ Wayfarer won the demo competition. Andromeda, another Norwegian group, came second with D.O.S. Demozoo credits Wayfarer’s code to Lone Starr, with an end part by President Screw.

At The Party in Aars, Denmark, that December, State of the Art won the Amiga demo competition with 585 points to 354 for the runner-up. Lone Starr and another coder built it around dancers filmed on videotape and turned into vector outlines by a tool Lone Starr spent five months writing. TMB Designs, who had just joined from The Silents, drew the graphics, and Travolta wrote the rave soundtrack. Spaceballs musicians also entered The Party’s music competition: Vinnie’s Sidewinder came eleventh.

Many sceners thought a winning demo should compute its effects in real time, and State of the Art played back recorded animation. The arguments that followed are told in the demo’s own entry. In Britain, where public-domain libraries sold demos by post, it appeared in the libraries’ best-seller lists through 1993. Amiga Format wrote that it was “set to light up Amigas everywhere”.

1993: R.A.W. and 9 Fingers

In April 1993 Spaceballs’ Mobile: Destination Unknown came third at The Gathering, behind Kefrens’ Desert Dream. At the same party, Demozoo records, the group took in the makers of the disk magazine R.A.W.; the fifth issue, a few weeks later, announced the change. R.A.W. ran the group’s own account of State of the Art, and the Norwegian games developer Funcom advertised in it for sceners to hire.

That December Spaceballs helped organise The Party 1993 in Herning, alongside The Silents and Lemon. Its entry, 9 Fingers, went back to dancers traced from video, with better graphics, on two disks. It came fourth in the Amiga demo competition with 1,512 points, behind Complex’s Origin, Virtual Dreams and Fairlight’s Full Moon and Sanity’s Arte. British magazines rated it highly. CU Amiga found it “even better than the original”, and a caption in Amiga Format’s demo feature called it “a lesson in how to produce a fantastic rave demo. Funky and fun.” A 2015 retrospective in The Amiga Book says the title came from the programmer hurting a finger during development and finishing with nine.

Later years

Membership changed through the mid-1990s, and the Spaceballs name kept winning. State of the Art 2, released at The Gathering in 1996, placed third in the wild competition there, according to Demozoo. Slummy became the group’s main coder in the later 1990s. His demos won the Amiga demo competition at The Gathering three years running: Supermonster in 1999, Hypnopolis in 2000 and Powergod in 2001, and Spaceballs’ Scrimm won again in 2002. Not everyone was convinced. The Danish magazine Amiga Advis found Supermonster neither super nor monstrous, and suggested that Spaceballs had lived off its name and the fact that The Gathering was held in its home country.

Spaceballs carried on after most of the scene moved to the PC, still writing for the Amiga. Norwegian Kindness won the Amiga demo competition at Datastorm in Sweden in 2011. Disiplin, an Amiga intro coded by Slummy with music by lug00ber, came second at Revision in Germany in 2024, 16 points behind the winner.

Sources

See also

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