When Future Crew wrote its own history in the mid-1990s, one name ran all the way through it. The group had started on the Commodore 64 in 1986, and “only one member has been in the group for the whole time - Psi.” Psi was Sami Tammilehto, a coder who also wrote the group’s tools. His Scream Tracker gave PC owners a music editor of the kind Amiga musicians already had, and Future Crew’s own musicians wrote their demo soundtracks with it. On Second Reality, the group’s best-known demo, his name is on more of the credit screens than any other coder’s.
Fast facts
- Real name: Sami Tammilehto, aged 20 in October 1993.
- Group: Future Crew, from its founding in 1986.
- Role: coder; author of Scream Tracker and Advanced DigiPlayer.
- Demos: Mental Surgery (1991), Unreal (1992), Panic (1992), Second Reality (1993).
The name
Future Crew printed its members’ real names in the READ.ME file that came with Second Reality in 1993, and in its information file of 7 October 1993: “Psi, Sami Tammilehto, 20, Coder”. The demo’s own program file carries the line “Copyright (C) 1991,92,93 Sami Tammilehto”. The same list names the group’s organiser, Gore, as Samuli Syvähuoko. He joined in 1991, five years after Psi, and later co-founded Remedy Entertainment.
Scream Tracker and the group’s tools
Future Crew moved from the C64 to the PC in 1988, when its members were HAL, JPM, SIDDER and Psi, listed then as SS. In 1990 Psi released Scream Tracker 2.0, which the group called “a 4 voice music editing program inspired by the Amiga SoundTracker” and “a real success”. A tracker lays music out as a grid of notes that play recorded sound samples. (See tracker music and the Amiga’s SoundTracker, the program that started the idea.) In 1991 the group released STMIK, a kit that let other programmers play Scream Tracker music in their own programs. The complete source code of the demo Mental Surgery came with it, as a lesson for beginners.
Psi wrote a sampler too. In May 1992 the Greek magazine PC Master reviewed Advanced DigiPlayer, a shareware program for recording sounds through a Sound Blaster or Covox card and then editing them. The review names its maker as Sami Tammilehto. By October 1993 the group’s musicians were using a beta of Scream Tracker 3.0 to write their music and a beta of Advanced DigiPlayer to record their samples: “our own programs made by Psi”, the group said, “not available to the public at this time”. When fans kept asking when Scream Tracker 3 would be out, the group’s answer was that “the coder, Psi, is studying at a university, coding demos, doing commercial software and trying to spend some freetime”. It finally came out in 1994, after more than two years’ work.
Psi also brought in one of the group’s two musicians. Purple Motion said in 1999 that he knew Psi’s younger brother and ended up beta-testing Scream Tracker 2: “They (well, PSI) asked me for music for their upcoming intro ‘mental surgery’”. When the finished intro arrived, Purple Motion found himself listed as a member.
The big demos
Work on Unreal stopped for a while in 1992 when the group was asked to make an invitation intro for the first Assembly party. Psi “got the idea of making something different”, and the group built the Fishtro in about two weeks before going back to Unreal, which won the PC demo competition at Assembly ’92. He wrote most of the invitation intro for The Party 1992 with the new coder Wildfire. Wildfire put Panic together, but “lots of code was also done by Psi and Trug”, the group’s history says.
On Second Reality (1993) the three coders split the parts between them. The credit screens name Psi as coder on ten of them, Wildfire on five and Trug on three.
After the demos
The group released no big demo after 1993. In 1997 its history reported that “all of the coders are involved in the Pyramid project”, the Pyramid3D graphics chip that Trug’s company Bitboys was designing, while other members worked at Remedy Entertainment. Psi also started the engine for a Future Crew game that was never finished. It was to be based on Illuminatus, a space trading game that the Finnish magazine MikroBitti had invented as an April fool in 1989. Skaven told Time Extension in 2022 that “Sami ‘Psi’ Tammilehto wrote some very bare bones basis for an engine … but then it was all abandoned.” Little else about his later career has been published.
Sources
- “The History of the Future Crew”, the group’s own history, written by Gore with later additions, republished by apollo-X Demo Resources, December 1999 (web, secondary): Psi as the only member since 1986; the 1988 members and “SS (Psi)”; Scream Tracker 2.0; the Fishtro; The Party 1992 invitation; Panic; Scream Tracker 3; the 1997 Pyramid project. https://wayback.defacto2.net/apollo-x-demo-resources-1999-december-17/fc.htm
- Future Crew, Second Reality READ.ME and “The Future Crew Information Package” version 1.0 (FCINFO10.TXT), 7 October 1993, both included in the demo’s source release: member list with real names and ages; the programs the group used; the answer about Scream Tracker 3.0; STMIK and the Mental Surgery source; release list. https://github.com/mtuomi/SecondReality
- Future Crew, Second Reality (1993), program file U2.EXE and credits part (
CREDITS/MAIN.C) in the source release: the copyright line and the credit screens. https://github.com/mtuomi/SecondReality - PC Master (Greece) issue 29, May 1992, p. 93: review of Advanced DigiPlayer, maker “Sami Tammilehto”.
- Flux, “Interview with Purple Motion of Future Crew”, Hugi issue 15, 1999 (web, secondary): how Purple Motion joined through Psi. https://hugi.scene.org/online/hugi15/inpm.htm
- Jack Yarwood, “Flashback: The Story Of Illuminatus, The ‘Elite-Killer’ That Never Was”, Time Extension, 7 November 2022 (web, secondary): the MikroBitti April fool, Skaven’s recollection of Psi’s engine. https://www.timeextension.com/news/2022/11/flashback-the-story-of-illuminatus-the-elite-killer-that-never-was
- Jack Yarwood, “Beyond Max Payne”, Wireframe issue 64, June 2022, pp. 29–30: Samuli Syvähuoko joining Future Crew in 1991 and co-founding Remedy.