Demoscene

The demoscene is an international computer art subculture that specializes in producing demos: small, self-contained computer programs that produce audio-visual presentations. The main goal of a demo is to show off programming, artistic, and musical skills.

The demoscene's roots are in the home computer revolution of the late 1970s, and the subsequent advent of software cracking. Crackers illegally distributed video games, adding introductions of their own making ("cracktros"), and soon started competing for the best presentation. The making of intros and standalone demos eventually evolved into a new subculture, independent of the gaming and software file sharing scenes.

Concept

Screen shot from Second Reality, a famous demo by Future Crew.

Prior to the popularity of IBM PC compatibles, most home computers of a given line had relatively little variance in their basic hardware, which made their capabilities practically identical. Therefore, the variations among demos created for one computer line were attributed to programming alone, rather than one computer having better hardware. This created a competitive environment in which demoscene groups would try to outperform each other in creating outstanding effects, and often to demonstrate why they felt one machine was better than another (for example Commodore 64 or Amiga versus Atari 800 or ST).

Demo writers went to great lengths to get every last bit of performance out of their target machine. Where games and application writers were concerned with the stability and functionality of their software, the demo writer was typically interested in how many CPU cycles a routine would consume and, more generally, how best to squeeze great activity onto the screen. Writers went so far as to exploit known hardware errors to produce effects that the manufacturer of the computer had not intended. The perception that the demo scene was going to extremes and charting new territory added to its draw.

Recent computer hardware advancements include faster processors, more memory, faster video graphics processors, and hardware 3D acceleration. With many of the past's challenges removed, the focus in making demos has moved from squeezing as much out of the computer as possible to making stylish, beautiful, well-designed real time artwork – a directional shift that many "old school demosceners" seem to disapprove of. This can be explained by the break introduced by the PC world, where the platform varies and most of the programming work that used to be hand-programmed is now done by the graphics card. This gives demo-groups a lot more artistic freedom, but can frustrate some of the old-schoolers for lack of a programming challenge. The old tradition still lives on, though. Demo parties have competitions with varying limitations in program size or platform (different series are called compos). On a modern computer the executable size may be limited to 64 kB or 4 kB. Programs of limited size are usually called intros. In other compos the choice of platform is restricted; only old computers, like the 8-bit Atari 800 or Commodore 64, or the 16-bit Amiga or Atari ST, or mobile devices like handheld phones or PDAs are allowed. Such restrictions provide a challenge for coders, musicians and graphics artists and bring back the old motive of making a device do more than was intended in its original design.

History

The earliest computer programs that have some resemblance to demos and demo effects can be found among the so-called display hacks. Display hacks predate the demoscene by several decades, with the earliest examples dating back to the early 1950s.

Demos in the demoscene sense began as software crackers' "signatures", that is, crack screens and crack intros attached to software whose copy protection was removed. The first crack screens appeared on the Apple II computers in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and they were often nothing but plain text screens crediting the cracker or his group. Gradually, these static screens evolved into increasingly impressive-looking introductions containing animated effects and music. Eventually, many cracker groups started to release intro-like programs separately, without being attached to unlicensed software. These programs were initially known by various names, such as letters or messages, but they later came to be known as demos.

Simple demo-like music collections were put together on the C64 in 1985 by Charles Deenen, inspired by crack intros, using music taken from games and adding some homemade color graphics. In the following year the movement now known as the demoscene was born. The Dutch groups 1001 Crew and The Judges, both Commodore 64-based, are often mentioned as the earliest demo groups. Whilst competing with each other in 1986, they both produced pure demos with original graphics and music involving more than just casual work, and used extensive hardware trickery. At the same time demos from others, such as Antony Crowther (Ratt), had started circulating on Compunet in the United Kingdom. On the ZX Spectrum, Castor Cracking Group released their first demo called Castor Intro in 1986. The ZX Spectrum demo scene was slow to start, but it started to rise in the late 1980s, most noticeably in Eastern Europe.

Demoscene culture

The demoscene is mainly a European phenomenon, and is predominantly male. It is a competition-oriented subculture, with groups and individual artists competing against each other in technical and artistic excellence. Those who achieve excellence are dubbed "elite", while those who do not follow the demoscene's implicit rules are called "lamers"; such rules emphasize creativity over "ripping" (or else licensing) the works of others, having good contacts within the scene, and showing effort rather than asking for help. Both this competitiveness and the sense of cooperation among demosceners have led to comparisons with the earlier hacker culture in academic computing. The demoscene is a closed subculture, which seeks and receives little mainstream public interest. As of 2010, the size of the scene was estimated at some 10.000.

In the early days, competition came in the form of setting records, like the number of "bobs" (blitter objects) on the screen per frame, or the number of DYCP (Different Y Character Position) scrollers on a C64. These days, there are organized competitions, or compos, held at demoparties, although there have been some online competitions as well. It has also been common for diskmags to have voting-based charts which provide ranking lists for the best coders, graphicians, musicians, demos and other things. However, the respect for charts has diminished since the 1990s.

Party-based competitions usually require the artist or a group member to be present at the event. The winners are selected by a public voting amongst the visitors and awarded at a prizegiving ceremony at the end of the party. Competitions at a typical demo event include a demo compo, an intro compo (usually 4kB and 64kB), a graphics compo and a music compo. Most parties also split some categories by platform, format or style.

There are no criteria or rules the voters should be bound by, and a visitor typically just votes for those entries that made the biggest impression on them. In the old demos, the impression was often attempted with programming techniques introducing new effects and breaking performance records in old effects. Over the years, the emphasis has moved from technical excellence to more artistic values such as overall design, audiovisual impact and mood.

In recent years, an initiative to award demos in an alternative way arose by the name of the Scene.org Awards. The essential concept of the awards was to avoid the subjectivity of mass-voting at parties, and select a well-renowned jury to handle the task of selecting the given year's best productions on several aspects, such as Best Graphics or Best 64k Intro. This award was canceled in 2012.

Groups

PC-Demo: Interceptor by Black Maiden.

Main article: Demogroup

Demosceners typically organize in small, tightly-knit groups, centered around a coder (programmer), a musician and a graphician (graphics designer). Various other supporting roles exist and groups can grow to dozens of people, but most demos are actually created by a small number of people.

Groups always have names, and similarly the individual members pick a handle by which they will be addressed in the large community. While the practice of using handles rather than real names is a borrowing from the cracker/warez culture, where it serves to hide the identity of the cracker from law enforcement, in the demoscene (oriented toward legal activities) it mostly serves as a manner of self-expression. Group members tend to self-identify with the group, often extending their handle with their group's name, following the patterns "Handle of Group" or "Handle/Group".

Parties

Assembly 2004 – a combination of a demoparty and a LAN party

Main article: Demoparty

A demoparty is an event which gathers demomakers and provides them with competitions to compete in. A typical demoparty is a non-stop event lasting over a weekend, providing the visitors a lot of time for socializing. The competing works, at least those in the most important competitions, are usually shown at night, using a video projector and big loudspeakers.

Demoparties started to appear in the 1980s in the form of copyparties where software infringers and demomakers gathered to meet each other and share their software. Competitions did not become a major aspect of the events until the beginning of the 1990s.

Demoscene events are most frequent in Europe, with around fifty parties every year. North America has the second highest number of demoparties historically, currently with two parties per year. Most events are local, gathering demomakers mostly from a single country, while the largest international parties (such as Revision and Assembly) attract visitors from all over the globe.

Demo types

Main article: Demo (computer programming)

The demoscene still exists on many platforms, including the PC, C64, MSX, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Amiga, Atari, Dreamcast and Game Boy Advance. The large variety of platforms makes their respective demos hard to compare. Some 3D benchmark programs also have a demo or showcase mode, which derives its roots from the days of the 16-bit platforms.

There are several categories demos are informally classified into, the most important being the division between the "full-size" demos and the size-restricted intros, a difference visible in the competitions of nearly any demo party. The most typical competition categories for intros are the 64K intro and the 4K intro, where the size of the executable file is restricted to 65536 and 4096 bytes, respectively.

Influence

Although demos are still a more or less obscure form of art even in the traditionally active demoscene countries, the scene has influenced areas such as computer games industry and new media art.

A great deal of European game programmers, artists and musicians have come from the demoscene, often cultivating the learned techniques, practices and philosophies in their work. For example, the Finnish company Remedy Entertainment, known for the Max Payne series of games, was founded by the PC group Future Crew, and most of its employees are former or active Finnish demosceners. Sometimes demos even provide direct influence even to game developers that have no demoscene affiliation: for instance, Will Wright names demoscene as a major influence on the Maxis game Spore, which is largely based on procedural content generation. Similarly, at QuakeCon in 2011, John Carmack noted that he "thinks highly" of people who do 64k intros, as an example of artificial limitations encouraging creative programming. Jerry Holkins from Penny Arcade claimed to have an "abiding love" for the demoscene, and noted that it is "stuff worth knowing".

Certain forms of computer art have a strong affiliation with the demoscene. Tracker music, for example, originated in the Amiga games industry but was soon heavily dominated by demoscene musicians; producer Adam Fielding claims to have tracker/demoscene roots. Currently, there is a major tracking scene separate from the actual demoscene. A form of static computer graphics where demosceners have traditionally excelled is pixel art; see artscene for more information on the related subculture.

Over the years, desktop computer hardware capabilities have improved by orders of magnitude, and so for most programmers, tight hardware restrictions are no longer a common issue. Nevertheless, demosceners continue to study and experiment with creating impressive effects on limited hardware. Since handheld consoles and cellular phones have comparable processing power or capabilities to the desktop platforms of old (such as low resolution screens which require pixel-art, or very limited storage and memory for music replay), many demosceners have been able to apply their niche skills to develop games for these platforms, and earn a living doing so. One particular example is Angry Birds, whose lead designer Jaakko Iisalo was an active and well-known demoscener in the 90s.

Some attempts have been made to increase the familiarity of demos as an art form. For example, there have been demo shows, demo galleries and demoscene-related books, sometimes even TV programs introducing the subculture and its works.

The museum IT-ceum in Linköping, Sweden, has an exhibition about the demoscene.

Sometimes a demoscene-based production may become very famous in technical contexts. For example, the 96-kilobyte FPS game .kkrieger by Farbrausch uses procedural content generation algorithms that are quite common on today's 64K intros but largely unknown to the computer games enthusiasts and the US-based game development community.

Video games industry

4players.de reported that "numerous" demo and intro programmers, artists, and musicians were employed in the games industry by 2007. Video game companies with demoscene members on staff include Digital Illusions, Starbreeze, Ascaron, 49Games, Remedy Entertainment, Techland, Lionhead Studios, Bugbear Entertainment, Digital Reality, and Akella.

See also

• Algorithmic composition
• Computer art scene
• Hacker subculture
• Netlabel
• Minimalism (computing)

Specific platforms

• Amiga demos
• Atari demos (Atari ST)
• Commodore 64 demos
• ZX Spectrum demos
• MacHack

Websites

• Scene.org
• Mod Archive

Further reading

• Polgár, Tamás ("Tomcat") (2005). FREAX: Volume 1. CSW-Verlag. ISBN 3-9810494-0-3.
• Vigh, David and Polgár, Tamás ("Tomcat"): FREAX Art Album. CSW-Verlag 2006
• Tasajärvi, Lassi (2004). DEMOSCENE: the Art of Real-Time. Evenlake Studios. ISBN 952-91-7022-X.
• Tasajärvi, Lassi (2009). DEMOSCENE: the Art of Real-Time eBook (pdf). Evenlake Studios. ISBN 978-952-92-6129-1.
• DEMOing: Art or Craft? 1984–2002 (PDF), Write-up by Shirley Shor about the demoscene
• Green, Dave (July 1995). "Demo or Die!". Wired magazine. Retrieved 31 December 2007.
• Demoscene Research – bibliography of scientific publications about the demoscene.
• The Demoscene (PDF), Flyer by Digitale Kultur e. V. about the demoscene
• Vigh, David: Pixelstorm (PDF), – selected artworks of demoscene graphicians 2003, bugfixed 2007
• Demoscene & Paris art scene [1] – Special issue of mustekala.info webzine focused on demoscene with several articles, some only on Finnish though.
• Reunanen, Markku (2010). Computer Demos – What Makes Them Tick? (PDF). Aalto University School of Science and Technology.

External links

• demoscene.info, A webportal providing information on the demoscene
• demozoo.org, An extensive database of demos, demoscene music, graphics, demosceners and demoparties
• slengpung.com, Pictures from parties and demoscene related events
• demoparty.net, Database of past and future demoparties, location and travel info
• bitfellas.org, Demoscene community and information portal
• [2], What Is Demoscene? an introductory movie by demoscene.tv.
• Pouet.net Database of demos, with download links
• SceneSat Demoscene radio station with music from the demoscene and live shows from demoparties
• CGM UKScene Radio, Demoscene radio station featuring demoscene music created on; Amiga, Atari, C64, Spectrum and PC.