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Who Killed America's Demo Scene? (vice.com) 143

Posted by EditorDavid from the warez-are-they-now dept.
Jason Koebler shares Vice's analysis of demoparties -- "gatherings where programmers showcase artistic audiovisual works, known as demos, after a day- or days-long coding marathon that is part bacchanal and part competition" -- starting with a visit to New York's Synchrony. I had arrived just in time to catch the end of a set by the electronic musician Melody Loveless, who was at a folding table near the front of the room writing code that generated the music. These sorts of live coding performances have been a staple of demoparties -- gatherings organized by and for the creative computing underground -- for decades... Demos are often made by teams of programmers and are almost always rendered in real time (as opposed to, say, an animated movie, which is a pre-rendered recording). Demoparty competitions, or compos, are generally divided into categories where demo submissions must adhere to certain restrictions. For example, some compos only allow demos that were made on a Commodore 64 computer or demos that were created using under 4,000 bytes of data. In every case, however, the point of the competition is to push computing hardware to its limits in the service of digital art...

Given the abundance of digital art institutions in New York -- Eyebeam, Rhizome, LiveCode.NYC, and the School for Poetic Computation -- the lack of demoparties is conspicuous and in stark contrast to the European demoscene, which boasts dozens of annual demoparties, some of which attract thousands of participants. With this discrepancy in mind, I tagged along with the Synchrony crew this year in pursuit of an answer to a deceptively simple question -- who killed the American demoscene...?
The article traces the demo scene back to the "cracktros" which introduced pirated Commodore 64 video games (and their associated "copyparties") on floppy disks in the 1980s. Eventually this even led to police raids, but "The crackdown on software piracy was not evenly spread throughout Europe, however. Countries like the Netherlands, Greece, Finland, Sweden, and Norway didn't have strict software piracy laws, if they had any at all, which allowed the warez scene to flourish there." And by the early 1990s games "became a taboo when the community started defining its borders and aggressively distancing itself from other communities occupying the same computer hobbyist domain," wrote Markku Reunanen, a lecturer at Aalto University, in 2014.

Vice adds that "Although the demoscene has many elements in common with the warez scene from which it emerged, it differentiated itself by emphasizing technically challenging aesthetics. Whereas software cracking was largely pragmatic and gaming was about entertainment, the demoscene was about creating computer art that was difficult to produce at the level of the code, but also visually and aurally pleasing to consume. It was, in short, a competitive form of digital art.... Today, the fundamental aspects of the demoscene are the same. Demoparties are still organized around a competition and remain an almost exclusively European phenomenon. Demosceners still police the boundaries of their discipline vis-a-vis gaming and some sceners continue to work exclusively with retro machines like the C64 and Amiga."
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Who Killed America's Demo Scene? More

Who Killed America's Demo Scene?

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  • well (Score:3)

    by hjf ( 703092 ) on Sunday May 19, 2019 @09:45AM (#58617930) Homepage

    Probably the fact that Commodore 64s (and Amigas) have been long gone.

    Also demos ran mostly on PAL C64s which were slightly faster due to their lower framerate.

    No one ever really cared about PC demos.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The 8 and 16 bit scenes were always a lot stronger in Europe. There was also a big push in many European countries to promote computer skills to children in the early 1980s, which included a lot of BASIC.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Mashiki ( 184564 )

        The scene in NA was just as big as in Europe. The difference was the amount of distance required to get to a scene event put it out of reach except for people who had the money. Give you an example, it's was trivial to travel from or to London, Stockholm, Helsinki or Berlin if you're in Europe. There were even backpacking groups that would simply walk/hitchhike from event to event. It's much harder to travel to or from Huston, Indianapolis, Vancouver or Toronto. We're not talking about national borders,

        • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Give you an example, it's was trivial to travel from or to London, Stockholm, Helsinki or Berlin if you're in Europe. There were even backpacking groups that would simply walk/hitchhike from event to event. It's much harder to travel to or from Huston, Indianapolis, Vancouver or Toronto. We're not talking about national borders, we're talking of traveling 800-2500km in one direction.

          A funny example you have there.
          The shortest route by car (including a few ferries along the way) between Helsinki and London happens to be around that 2500km, one direction..

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Mashiki ( 184564 )

            The shortest route by car (including a few ferries along the way) between Helsinki and London happens to be around that 2500km, one direction..

            Give you bonus points if you figure out why people didn't transit from Helsinki to London for the demo scene but picked middling cities. Two points if you remember what era it happened in.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Shinobi ( 19308 )

          Uh, we frequently travelled distances like that for demo parties. Hell, one guy had to travel like 800-900km inside Sweden, just to get to the demo parties in Uppsala or Stockholm. The parties further south in Sweden of course required even more travel. Also, the BBS demo scene was large here in europe too, because that was how many intros, demos and utilities were distributed.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Shinobi ( 19308 )

            Oh, forgot to mention, those distances were one-way. He of course had to return home to Luleå too.

    • Re:well (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 19, 2019 @10:15AM (#58618050)

      A big part of what makes demos impressive is what can be done on limited hardware. On an early PC or especially on a Commodore 64, hardware was really limited. You say nobody really cared about PC demos, but I'll never forget the Second Reality [youtube.com] demo by Future Crew. Given the video and processing hardware at the time it was just mind blowing, and the music and graphics were synced which was novel for a demo at the time. Similarly, what people could do with the C64's limited colour palette and sound was impressive. Actually, here's a C64 version [youtube.com] of the Second Reality demo.
      FWIW, I mostly remember the C64 demos (and their long lists of shout-outs). It was an interesting era to learn about computing.

      • Yeah, now the primary skill required to do something that looks good on a computer is art skills. Having strong technical skills doesn't help you much.

    • Re:well (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Ashthon ( 5513156 ) on Sunday May 19, 2019 @10:16AM (#58618056)

      No one ever really cared about PC demos.

      I suspect PC demos were much more widely viewed than C64 demos, largely thanks to the internet. Farbrausch [farbrausch.com] in particular got lot of coverage due to there astoundingly efficient 64KB demos. fr-019: poemtoahorse [farbrausch.com] was especially famous, but some of their other demos are equally impressive.

      I suspect the problem is not due to a lack of interest, but a lack of skills. Demos should be a showcase of programming skill, but few people these days have the low level skills required to produce work to the standard of Farbrausch. They've never had to worry about getting programs to run with extreme resource limitations, and have no experience with assembler, so don't know where to begin.

      I also suspect free software projects have taken a lot of resources away from the demo scene. Prior to widespread internet access you couldn't effectively collaborate with other people on software projects, so you wrote a demo on your own and showed it off at a demo party. With the internet it's now easy to find free projects to contribute to, so instead of writing demos people are doing that working on other things.

      It was fun while it lasted, but times change.

      • I suspect PC demos were much more widely viewed than C64 demos, largely thanks to the internet.

        Nope. PC demos were probably more widely viewed than other demos, because there's more PC software. They used to commonly accompany cracked software (the aforementioned 'cracktros') and play before install.

        The platforms with the strongest demoscenes were the C64 and Amiga, though, and those platforms are sufficiently long-dead that the scenes have faltered, that's most of the actual story.

        The rest of the story is that 3d graphics have made us jaded, demos aren't impressive any more.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Megol ( 3135005 )

      No one ever really cared about PC demos.

      Hate to break it to you but you are probably infected by a brain slug.

    • Lol they're not gone.
  • When you are appealing to an audience that has no money, it's hard to get your event paid for because the audience you are catering to has no money. Unfortunately those people who lease venues have an entirely different approach to business, filled with words like profit, ROI and $/sq ft. This is generally incompatible with broke-ass hippies.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The lack of money is what drove the scene in Europe, i.e. software piracy. Also the fact that people couldn't afford new computers so made the most of what they had.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Megol ( 3135005 )

        The demoscene split from the warez scene in the early 80's. Many demosceners work in the games industry and don't want their work pirated, this is also not a new thing with e.g. DICE created by ex demosceners in the early 90's, Starbreeze Studios created by ex sceners in the late 90's.

  • Coding is no longer an art (Score:5, Insightful)

    by alternative_right ( 4678499 ) on Sunday May 19, 2019 @09:52AM (#58617956) Homepage Journal

    During the early days, coders were pioneers. Now, all the big dragons have been slayed, and what matters is whether or not your project succeeds and becomes enduring. Instead of showing off knowledge of intricate internal systems, programmers are focused on code that integrates into economic, political, cultural, and social systems. Even more, many people know how to code now, and so demonstrating mastery of coding itself is not that impressive, where demonstrating the ability to make an enduring product -- even if an unpaid one, as in FOSS -- is.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Shinobi ( 19308 )

      That's... Not quite correct. Many people in the demo scene today are accomplished professionals in software development, and many companies also keep an eye on demo parties like Revision, Assembly etc, to spot talent to recruit.

  • Not difficult to pin blame (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I was heavily involved with the PC demo scene in the early 1990's - knew a number of video game developers before they became famous. For me, I stopped because I got a real job and started a family. I didn't have to prove myself anymore and I no longer had the time nor energy to stay up for days straight trying to perfect code or background music (Scream Tracker, anyone?).

    So who killed the demo scene in America? I blame Microsoft, Apple, Google, and every other company that delivered easy-to-use technolog

  • Hardware (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 19, 2019 @09:58AM (#58617982)

    Demo's were only amazing when the hardware and restrictions were fixed, and challenging. Once 3D accelerators starting doubling in speed every year, as did memory and CPU performance, there was no way to impress anyone with your skills as a developer. If your demo was not impressive, just wait 6 months and add hardware.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Megol ( 3135005 )

      *sigh*
      Demos still can be pushing the hardware and making new effects however seeing that may require knowing something about the state of hardware and software. It's fine that you can't understand this, just watch it as an unusual video instead, you don't even need to own top of the line hardware as new releases are soon on youtube.
      But if something's not impressive and you wait 6 months - then it's even less impressive.

      • You cant push the hardware like that any more, no matter how you want to wave it away without really tackling of the issue.

        Let us know when you have the instruction set for any video cards shaders, let alone are capable of actually getting the code onto the card and then using it. No, I do not mean glsl and other shader languages. Those arent the instruction sets. Those are intermediate languages. Even when they "look" like assembler. Even different models of video card of the same generation use instruc

  • Remember worlds fairs, and remember when EPCOT and Tomorrowland had lots of "upcoming tech" demos that made it so cool to be in?

    They stopped. Because they were a buffet for theft.

    The idea of doing a demo before you've 1) got the product made enough to be able to file the patent, and 2) got the product made enough that you're only a few days/weeks from selling, died because other companies would see the demo, quickly mock up the UI, get to market first AND get the patent paperwork filed first, and then sue y

    • Re:Software Patents killed it, too. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Quarters ( 18322 ) on Sunday May 19, 2019 @10:41AM (#58618142)

      I'm not sure you understand the types of demos referred to in the article.

      • That's what makes it such a great comment. Missed the point, but it is still all true!

        Those are the reasons why demos in general are no longer a thing. Why would it not apply to art demos? It was hard to do them, but now you can write more complicated software that does all the hard work for you; in fact, such tools are built into the graphics hardware these days. People can copy you without even knowing what your code does, without knowing what algorithms the code is displaying the results of; there was a

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Those are not the type of "demos" referred to in this article.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Xenious ( 24845 )

      Man I totally miss the glory days of EPCOT.

  • Hardware just got too good. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bluescrn ( 2120492 ) on Sunday May 19, 2019 @10:09AM (#58618024)
    It was always impressive to see people push the limits of a C64, Amiga, or 386-486 PC. And an individual or very small team could make something (a game or demo) that pushed those limits as a hobby project.

    These days... hardware is so good that there's almost no limit to what's possible - other than time/money/talent. It takes teams of 200+ a couple of years to make a AAA game, which are probably the closest it gets to pushing the limits of modern hardware. Demo contests became much more about the art and graphic design than the coding. And the music side became less interesting without the limitations of earlier platforms.

    For a while, limited-size demos created a more constrained challenge. 64KB demos in particular were exciting for a while. But one group, Farbrausch, kind of got too good at that, building and iterating tools+tech for procedurally generating 3D content, releasing some amazing 64KB demos, and nobody can really compete...
    • somebody else "beating them to it" or doing it better never phased them. And if you want limitations there's a billions phones out there and no shortage of retro computers to code for.

      • somebody else "beating them to it" or doing it better never phased them.

        True. I write my math-art demos for the sake of experimenting and learning. I try to work from first principles, avoiding extensive tutorials etc. because I want the joy of discovering techniques myself. For example ray tracing and lighting/shading. I often look up other people's techniques later for comparison, and in many cases my solutions are almost the same, given they start with the same physical ideas.

        As others have noted, the scene is dead partly because of the easy libraries and applications. In

        • You can also limit yourself to certain technologies while using modern hardware. For example, I'm trying to see how far I can get with plain OpenGL, exploiting it to do more general computation without OpenCL/Cuda/Vulkan etc. One reason is that I want to be able to run live shows with older hardware, but it's also a generally nice challenge.

          Are you banging on and abusing the old fixed function pipeline, or just writing shaders?

          If the former, tell us more because THAT is far closer to what the demo scene was about than the later.

          • Are you banging on and abusing the old fixed function pipeline, or just writing shaders? If the former, tell us more because THAT is far closer to what the demo scene was about than the later.

            Fair point. I'm using modern OpenGL (around 3.0) but saying it is about just writing shaders is far from the whole picture. It's a bit like saying that optimizing CPU code for speed is all about a fast inner loop, disregarding all the logistics of memory access and other I/O. OpenGL is much more limited than that (if you want full GPU performance) and all the interesting challenges are outside the shaders.

            It's true that I'm kind of halfway between the modern/general/accessible and the challenging. I star

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Shinobi ( 19308 )

      That's not a problem for the demo scene at all. They keep pushing the limit, or just move to virtual hardware platforms. Or, they can do like some people did for the Wild compo at Revision this year, build a display out of programmable LED lighting strips. https://youtu.be/FCBA9CilTfE?t... [youtu.be]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by GuB-42 ( 2483988 )

      These days... hardware is so good that there's almost no limit to what's possible - other than time/money/talent. It takes teams of 200+ a couple of years to make a AAA game, which are probably the closest it gets to pushing the limits of modern hardware.

      Demos and game engines push the hardware in a different direction.
      Games are driven by designers and artists, engines are just tools to serve them, and people who make engines go to great lengths making them as generic and unobtrusive as possible. For example, if rain is called for, ideally, there is just a box to check and the engine adjusts the physics accordingly, adds droplets and puddles, etc... no matter what the scene is.
      Demos are different. They often start with an effect and build the scene around i

  • I think people are just working too much (Score:3)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Sunday May 19, 2019 @10:19AM (#58618066)
    when I was a lad I spent my summers however I wanted. I spent a summer doing dumb crap in basic on a C64.

    My kid did summer classes every year to keep up with the 4.0 GPA needed to get into her 300 level courses. College has gotten crazy competitive. There's not enough good paying jobs to go around and thanks to student loan debt you need to make a mint right out of college because 1/4 of your income is going to the classes you needed to get that job.

    Once you're in your Junior Year of high school if you're bright enough to code demos you're also smart enough to know you need to be busting your ass to stay ahead of the grind that is the rest of your life. Barring a sea change in our economy that's only going to get worse. Meanwhile Europe & the Nordic states still have single payer healthcare and well funded schools, so it takes some of the pressure off.
    • +1 Interesting.

      Further, I would guess that most of the C64 demo-ers either grew up with (or almost grew up with) such limited machines. Well, these people are middle-aged now, and have probably moved on, with no one behind them to take their places - no one grows up with that machine anymore. My nephew might not even remember what a C64 is (we'd play "Ghostbusters" when he was little).

      It reminds me of the hobby of "working on cars". That was SO popular when I was a kid, that I looked to do/be like

  • What did demos demo? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dan East ( 318230 ) on Sunday May 19, 2019 @10:41AM (#58618148) Journal

    The point of demos were... to demonstrate. Generally these demonstrated new clever hacks or hardware tricks that resulted in something beyond what most thought was possible on that hardware. Usually they were visual (sine scrolls, clever blitting tricks that resulted in more colors being displayed at once than was supposedly possible, etc) and sometimes audio related (like getting 16 unique audio channels out of 4 discreet hardware channels).

    The ultimate purpose was then bragging rights, which lead to some sort of inclusion in a group or perhaps paid work on some game project.

    Now, in the modern era, we've got a number of things going on that has quashed the demo scene.
    1) Hardware is so powerful that clever hacks that eek out a little more performance don't result in anything significant enough to be notable.
    2) Movies and AAA games have taught us to expect that anything is possible to be rendered via CGI, so there isn't anything we can see at this point that we haven't seen in some derivative already, or that would see that we would think was "impossible" to have produced.
    3) Well defined libraries sit on top of our hardware (Open GL, for example), which confines behavior to a standard set.
    4) Game development is now done by teams of hundreds (if not thousands) typically using software engines that were written by others that were developed incrementally over many years.
    5) Whatever cool new things are happening are being done within #4, in a tightly controlled IP environment. If there was some new capability, it would not be demonstrated for the sake of just that capability, no individual name recognition would be attached, etc, but it would be integrated into some specific game and perhaps used to further promote that game.

    • Yup, the demo scene was entirely based on the fact that on consumer-level hardware, it was difficult to generate photo-realistic imagery and animation, and CD-quality sound.

      That hasn't been the case for, what, 20 years now? At least? Your average smart-phone is nearly as powerful as a Playstation 3, these days. What is there to push? Graphics/sound have plateaued in a lot of ways - the real trick to making "pretty graphics" is how much time/money you have to spend on artists to create them.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sad_ ( 7868 )

        that is why current demo parties mostly concentrate on retro hardware, 8/16 bit computers and/or plain pentium (or less) DOS.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Turmio ( 29215 )
      Umm if you read the post again you'll notify it's not about demo scene being dead. It's alive and well in Europe. The question is why not in the US.
    • half the demos on the amiga were by pirates :)

  • It was huge in Europe, but they clearly possess a completely different mind-set and intellect for this kind of advanced programming. Just comparing the quality of the few American demo scene releases with European releases from the same time period shows an astounding difference in technical quality. The techniques and programming skill simply was not present.

    The American PC demo scene these days is doing a bit better though, but still cannot really compare to the European scene.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Probably because no one has heard of it.

      This sounds similar to why America isn't as good at soccer / football as most countries versus size / income. Well, we have 50 other sports we're good at. Your country plays mainly two games? Great, I hope you're pretty good at those games.

      Doesn't sound like a problem at all.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • The US Demoscene was fairly strong initially but remained mostly distributed, not organizing parties or else the BSA would get you.

    However, any reference to US Demoscene stuff is being routinely memory-holed by the 1984 implementing wickedpedian delitionists.

    In the early 2000's through early 2010's I'd frequently see Tweets & IRC noise complaining some US demoscene stuff being removed from wikipedia. Here's one I could find, https://twitter.com/molotovbliss/status/506826145531047936 (twitter search is

    • The US Demoscene was fairly strong initially but remained mostly distributed, not organizing parties or else the BSA would get you.

      However, any reference to US Demoscene stuff is being routinely memory-holed by the 1984 implementing wickedpedian delitionists.

      Then why was the US Demoscene so unsuccessful at getting mainstream media to write about it? Had reliable sources covered the US Demoscene, the deletionists would have had no grounds.

  • I had a brief stint in the early 1990s demo scene of Finland, mostly making tracker music. 20+ years later, I started making math art and soon discovered it also has its own scene in the form of Bridges [bridgesmathart.org] and other organizations. It feels like the demoscene for grownups in many ways. Most people come from a math/science/teaching background, so the focus is not so much in fast code, but the general spirit is the same.

    You could say the demo scene has grown up in other ways. For example, some of the early sce

    • You could say the demo scene has grown up in other ways. For example, some of the early sceners in Finland started game companies.

      The american demo groups as well. Back in the day the most popular U.S.A. group was certainly Renaissance, and those guys moved onto bigger and better things.

      But the narrative is that there wasnt an American demo scene... funny how after Renaissance, everyone was using Trans PMODE, and in fact some still do! How a non-existent demo scene can have just a long lasting multi-decade effect... is magical and not be be question!

  • OMG memory lane! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by doubledown00 ( 2767069 ) on Sunday May 19, 2019 @07:36PM (#58620510)
    Demos. Holy shit.

    You'd set your 14.4 modem (or 38.4 if you were a big swinging dick) to connect at 9:00 p.m. and start downloading that whopping 2 MB file. It would take most of the night. In the morning you would wake up, run to your computer, unzip the file, and run it.......only to get an error that you didn't have enough available memory. So you'd spend half the day editing your config files to strip out drivers, unload modules, and other things to try and get to the 600k available conventional memory.

    Finally success! For your time and effort you were rewarded with kickin' techno and the finest scrolling text and graphics that 256 color pallets could provide (assuming you had a super VGA video card and a Sound Blaster. Otherwise NO DEMO FOR YOU!)

    Ah, good times.
    Look subby, I have fond memories of The Party and all. But Demos were a niche of a niche even back in the day.
    Demos were easily supplanted by fast network connections yielding unlimited porn.

    • 2MB? Man were you late to the demo scene. I remember demos which actually listened to Uncle Bill when he said 640k ought to be enough for anyone.

      • 2MB? Man were you late to the demo scene. I remember demos which actually listened to Uncle Bill when he said 640k ought to be enough for anyone.

        My frame of reference is 1992 - 1993ish. Sure, they had 640k demos......but they sucked comparatively.

  • That was a very special time and it wasn't meant to last - we had enthusiasm and the tech was new.

  • The North American demo scene wasn't really ever alive.

    The (lack of) population density and travel costs for parties crippled it greatly compared to Europe.

    Other factors played in but mostly those.

    It was and still is really difficult to find the right mix of people with the right skills and personality with such a low population density. There's the internet and BBSes but it nothing like hanging out and hacking on stuff over a few weekends in the same room to motivate everyone.

  • as i understand during the time the demo scene started in Europe, the IBM compatible PC was already a dominant system in the US.
    in Europe we still held on to our 8 and 16 bit machines because nobody could afford a PC, not did we want to (CGA and bleeps vs what an Amiga could do? hell, even a C64 looked superiour) and it was just these systems that really flourished in the demo scene.

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