What is Demoscene?

A more detailed presentation

“The demoscene is a community that creates digital art with home computers. It has its roots in the late 1970s home computer revolution and software piracy… Ultimately, the demoscene and its practices serve as examples of
the rich and unexpected ways of living with computers, never anticipated by the original manufacturers.”

““Basically, the classic media artist asks himself “What kind of technology would I need to realize my concept”, while the demoscener asks “What can I achieve with the hardware in my hands” […] Their aesthetic values are not based on infinite digital flexibility, but on the physical restrictions of computer platforms. That’s why demoscene is not about an idealistic projection of future technology, but about the creative appropriation of present hardware.”

The Demoscene is a world-wide subculture, society birthed from the revolution of the home computer of the 70s and new avenues of expression through personal computers… a way for artists to take ownership of new and emerging software, piggy-backing off of commercial software to make their marks as independent expressers…

It is the art of creating “demos” for various different software, typically software used by major game, animation, and technology companies. Demos could range from computer generated music clips, to other-worldly 3D graphical environments and abstract depictions of space and life, to still graphic photos and ascii art.

The origin of demoscene is closely tied to “software cracking” (the precursor to modern-day Piracy) of computer games. Demosceners would remove copy protection of games, and claim credit on their cracks by stamping artist tags by adding personal game-intro scenes, known as Cracktros.

Cracktros started on apple II computers in the late 70s, evolving to game consoles like the Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC. Early cracktros resembled the art of graffiti in many ways.

Eventually cracktros became THE way to flex superiority and status in the cracking community, and as this art form grew in complexity and popularity, programmers started to code and create intros as their own form, which birthed the Demoscene.

The very first Demoscene gathering was the Assembly Demoparty of 1992 in Kauniainen, Finland. It was organized by the Amiga (home computer from Commodore) Demo Groups: K(C)omplex and Rebels, and the IBM PC group Future Crew, and set the tone for the future of Demoscene gatherings, parties, and competitions.

A history of these groups
- https://demozoo.org/groups/175/
- https://demozoo.org/groups/628/

This first gathering exploded a community of demosceners.

One of the byproducts of the assemblies was the Boozembly the place for demosceners to gather and socialize, and most importantly partake and intoxicants, which were not allowed at the Assemblies. Boozembly is an important part of the OG finnish demoscene community

Demoscene Assemblies and Gatherings are called Demoparties, where demosceners come together and take part in competitions, or “compos”, presenting works of digital art and music as collective groups.

Submitting for Demoscene compos and demo-making is all teamwork, an extremely collaborative process, every demoscener an avenger of different skills.

“Graphicians and musicians create suitable pieces of art, the programmers fit all the parts together in an extensive amount of detail work to finally make it an executable program: the demo.”

demoscene.net

Competitions varied in medium as mentioned before, some computer generated music, some 3d graphic intros, and static graphics. But the most popular competitions were the ‘4k’ or ‘64k’ contests —where artists needed to confine their production files to just 4 or 64 kilobytes in size. The 4/64kb Intro and standard Demo compos were the most popular of these.

The demo that really drew me in and left me awestruck was the 64k, ONLY 64 KILOBYTES, Conspiracy intro “Beyond” by the Amiga Demogroup (1st place at State of the Art Compo of 2004). Just a beautiful capture of a naive wondering of space and time… makes me want to jump into alternative universes, get lost in the makes of time…and all of was done in a tiny file size.

Another favorite was the fr-019: poemtoahorse by farbrausch, a 64k demo from 2002.

All of the art and materials produced from demoparties, demogroups, and demosceners… All so expressive and proof of spirit and personality even through machine…. The demosceners ready to jump on creating demos… so much perfect timing in the turning point of a new era of technology…Some say Pioneer in art techniques like Gouraud shading, texture-mapping, and phong-shading.

They don’t do digital escapism like they used to…
But a lot of the styles of modern Demos still clearly take from and are inspired by older demoscene atmospheres.

“Today, things continue on in much the same way. Demo groups make demos to basically impress other demo groups and anyone else who takes an interest. Many work in the game industry for their full-time job.”
—fromwithin on reddit

Many established designers, artists, musicians, and game designers were involved in Demoscene at the height of its era, an extensive list that can be found here.

DICE was formed out of The Silents, a demoteam and many sceners work there today.
Oskar Stål (Flamingo/Light, Sweden) is the CTO of Spotify.
Magnus Sjöberg (Pantaloon/Fairlight, Sweden) is lead engine developer for Battlefield at Electronic Arts
Mikko Mononen (Memon/Moppi, Finland) is lead AI programmer at Crytek.
The late 90’s demoscene spawned quite a few semi-famous IDM-artists.
Black Dog Productions reportedly made some demos.
The label Merck released sceners and sceneroids like Lackluster (Distance/TPOLM), Ilkae, Blamstrain, Vim, Machinedrum, Frank and Bill, md (Mellow-D/TPOLM), Xhale, Crankshaft (Yolk/TPOLM), Tim Koch (Serkul/Cydonia).
Bogdan Raczynski (Karl) released on Aphex Twin’s Rephlex Records, but started in the tracker scene as Karl…

Overall, the list of demoscenes and demosceners is extremely long, most started in the early 1990s continuing to the early-mid 2000s, some continuing to the early 2010’s and even today. Hundreds upon hundreds of demos are submitted and created for every demoparty, its hard to fathom the amount of work out there…Even just the list of winners is long and extensive to go back and look at what they were.

Preserving and hosting work from compos is extremely important, and is a whole digital world in itself. Here are some of the places you can find more on the Demoscene archives —

https://www.pouet.net/index.php — main community board
https://files.scene.org/ — main archive for demos
https://demozoo.org/ — basic information on demoparties, sceners, and groups
http://www.kameli.net/demoresearch2/?page_id=16 — collection of research material on Demoscene
https://www.demoparty.net/ — map of current and upcoming demoparties
https://16colo.rs/ - archive for ascii arthttps://modarchive.org/index.php — archive for music
http://breakpoint.untergrund.net/2005/index.php (example of single compo’s site)

Demoscene was a computer-art culture that I wish I had been a part of, but I’m glad the internet makes way to get lost in it’s online archives even today.