What is the Demoscene?

Chapter 1

The demoscene is a creative, enthusiast subculture of the computer arts. The main purpose of the demoscene is to create demos: fun, self-contained applications that present interesting music, real-time graphics and sound effects. They are a unique form of self-expression related to yet distinct from digital music videos.

Since the 1980s, demo makers have shown off their skills in programming and application design, painted and computer-generated graphics, as well as their skills in composing music or creating sound. The word "demo" is short for "demonstration" because the application demonstrates the capabilities of a computer system and the skill level of the demo's creators (and is not related to "demonstration" as a form of protest). ^[1]

Demos are freely distributed. At first, demos were shared among a small audience either on Bulletin Board Systems (BBS), or personally on disks through public domain libraries. In the past decades their distribution has moved predominantly to the web. Demos are usually installed on a computer and run locally on it to make efficient use of the computer's hardware resources. Demo libraries on Bulletin Board Systems and Mailboxes were the first archives of demos and are mostly lost due to the evanescent nature of their hosting platforms.

Today demos are developed for contemporary computer hardware, such as popular Intel-based systems that are suitable to run Windows, Linux and MacOS. But they are also created for historic, legacy computer hardware that has not been produced for many decades and is severely limited by modern standards like the Commodore 64 (1982 - 1994), the Atari ST (1985 - 1993) and, of course, the subject of this essay, the Commodore Amiga (1985 - 1996).

Pouet.net serves as a database and a social platform where demosceners can upload their demos, share information, and review each other's work. The website includes a vast collection of demos from various platforms, ranging from classic 8-bit computers to modern PCs, and it's a popular resource for both demosceners and those interested in digital art and computer history.

Despite the demoscene being predominantly a European phenomenon, at the very beginning, its precursor was part of the software piracy and cracking scene of the 1970s and 1980s in the United States. ^[2]

"Cracktro RELOADED Restricted Area" on Commodore 64
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mKG1SrCPvQ )

1.1 The Conception of the Demoscene: Showing Off as a Specialization

Let's wind the clock back to the late 1970s and ealy 1980s.

The software cracking scene originally started out on the first widely available home computer, the Apple II. This machine was successful mostly in the USA.

Even in the fledgling days of the commercial software industry, piracy was an issue. Commercial software applications and games took effort to produce and were sold for a profit. The To prevent the copying and free distribution of their software, software publishers added clever copy protection to their games and applications. Hobbyist software pirates reverse engineered the applications, found the parts of the code that were relevant to copy protection, and either deactivated this code or removed it completely. This was called "cracking", and thus the software cracking scene was born. ^[3]

In many cases the crackers also distributed pirated software themselves. The distributors called themselves "traderz" and "swapperz". Some crackers just wanted to crack the ever more intricate copy protections out of technical ambition.

Most of the pirated software consisted of games. Crackers wanted to show off that they were the first to defeat the copy protection, so they started to change the games' title screens or added their initials or a pseudonym to a game's default high score table.

This was all done in friendly competition between cracking groups. Eventually, the credits screens became more elaborate, completely taking up the loading screens, turning them into "intros" with graphics and music sometimes referred to as "cracktros". The members of cracking groups wanted credit for their effort. So they had their pseudonyms scroll across the screen together with messages to other cracking groups: these were called "scrollers".

Crackers and cracktro makers were usually young, some even in their early teens. This meant that many of the messages were full of bragging and juvenile posturing. They used cracker names like "Triad", "Ikari", "GCS" (German Cracking Service), "FCG" (Flash Cracking Group), the "Dirty Dozen" and the "Warelords". In the early days, many crackers also used three-letter acronyms because the high score tables of computer games were limited to three characters. ^[4]

Over the years, the cracking scene expanded to include different computer systems other than the Apple II like the Atari 8-bit computers, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, the Commodore 64, the Amstrad/Schneider CPC and 16-bit machines like the Commodore Amiga, the Atari ST, and the IBM PC compatibles.

Software was distributed either person to person by copying the cracked programs on cassettes and floppy disks, by mail delivery, or was uploaded to a BBS like "Sharegood Forest" for others to dial in and download the "warez", as they started to be called. Occasionally, home computer enthusiasts would meet at meetings, called "copy parties". There they would exchange copies of their cracked games and applications. At these get-togethers, they also shared their tricks of the trade and demonstrated and explained their programming tricks and cracking techniques.

When they did not meet in person, they participated in one of the first online communities, albeit connected with each other using modems and acoustic couplers to mailbox systems and BBSs via dial-up connections. On the BBSs, they not only shared software and messages, but also text files with technical how-to's and information but also cooking recipes, poems, prose and "subversive" texts like "The Anarchist Cookbook", they called these files "philez".

Both the cracking scene and the demoscene started releasing "diskmags", periodically released disk magazines with text and graphics. Free of any editorial oversight and only fueled by their enthusiasm and the quest for recognition by their peers, the writers wrote about anything they were interested in. The predominant topics were computers and software. Intro makers, crackers, graphics artists, and computer musicians shared their knowledge, tips and tricks. Often, they would write about movies, books, comics, commercial music, and anything else that struck their fancy.

As the intros grew larger in size and became more complicated, they started to rival the size of the actual games they were attached to. Programming the effects, creating the graphics, and writing the music became their own disciplines detached from the cracking skills.

Some groups started to completely focus on the intros and stopping cracking software altogether. These were the first dedicated demos: floppy disks distributed with only the demo with computer art, animation, and music.

At cracking parties, the intro enthusiasts expanded their knowledge sharing their graphics creation, music composition and effects programming. They did this not for profit but for the recognition by the peers in their niche group. They wanted to gain the respect from others who actually understood what they were doing.

At cracking parties, they held their own intro/demo competitions, voting for the most impressive demos. These were awarded prizes by individual categories like graphics, sound, music and effects.

1.2 The Scorpion and the Frog: How the Demoscene Separated from the Cracking Scene

Demos became a product in their own right, stripped of illegality by being dissociated from the cracking scene. Ironically, crackers started to crack and copy the demos made by the demo makers. Some crackers even added intros to the demos. After all, why not!?! They were hackers after all.

In his oral history of the demoscene, "Freax", writer Tamás Polgar identifies a point at which the demoscene separated from the cracking scene in 1989:

"Demogroups were only contacting each other and rarely crackers. Like there was a second scene. A known, great cracker's name was not so respected among demomakers, and vice versa. This separation was very noticeable during the 1989 Ikari-Zargon party. Ikari, thought that as the organizers of the party, they should win the demo compo so they disqualified their competitors Horizon and Oneway." ^[5]

At this cracking party, there was a large contingent of demo makers who participated in the competition. Polgar describes how the organizers who were all exclusively from the cracking scene simply rigged the competition for chief-organizer Ikari to win.

"There was nothing wrong with it for crackers as they were 'unknown' groups, and Ikari was a living legend - the top elite of the scene. Anyway, they were just demos. This outraged the demosceners and the organizers were furiously bashed in many diskmags and demo scrollers."

Just like in the story of the scorpion and the frog, at the Ikari-Zargon party in 1989, the crackers had "hacked" the competition to their advantage and made the demo makers lose with their submitted works. What did they expect? They were crackers.

Demo makers had long had fun making the animations, graphics and music of the intros as part of the cracking scene but not actually cracking any software. They decided to only make their demos and share them with people interested in them. Since the demos were their own creations, there weren't any issues of legality (beyond the occasional use of unlicensed samples in the music or digitized stills from films). They were interested in creating their own art, sharing it and gaining the recognition of their peers and admirers.

Therefore the demoscene became a separate subculture.

"We are Demo" by Offence, Fairlight, and Noice on the Commodore 64
(Source: https://youtu.be/2XUxT2pyDos )

1.3. Tribalism by Computer System: The Fragmented and Independent Demoscene

Another use of the word "demo" in the computer industry in the 1980s was for retail point-of-sale demonstrations of a computer's capabilities. Computer shops would have their machines on display and run graphical demonstrations on them for customers to see how capable they were. Sometimes these demos were produced by the computer manufacturers, though often shop owners used demos from the demoscene because they were much more impressive and pushed the limits of the computer hardware much further than even the manufacturers had thought possible.

One particularly famous demo was the "Bouncing Ball" or "Boing Ball" by Dale Luck and R.J. Mical from Commodore. It featured a red and white checkered sphere that bounced in front of a blue background, demonstrating the capabilities of the Amiga's hardware for rendering and animation. It became quite iconic and even started to be used as a secondary logo of the Amiga itself.

"Bouncing Ball" by Dale Luck and R. J. Mical
(Source: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=27096 )

The technology of home computers advanced at a rapid pace. The 8-bit machines of the early part of the decade were succeeded by the far more capable 16-bit generation. All systems were bespoke hardware and completely incompatible with each other. Popular home computers for the creation of demos needed to have some graphics and sound capabilities: a text-only computer was not well suited for animation, graphics and music. Coders definitely had to know their way around the hardware. They didn't use a high-level programming language like Pascal or Basic. To eke out the last bit of performance from the computer they used assembly code, the last human-readable programming code before one resorts to pure machine code composed of ones and zeroes.

Creating demos began to require the participation of multiple people, including artists, musicians, and coders, not unlike creating a computer game. At the time, the various members of a demo group had to own the same computer system for their component parts to be compatible with each other and be able to be combined in a single demo.

Due to the still comparatively high costs, very few people owned multiple computer systems. You were proud of what you owned and some people became even so fanatical about their computer system of choice that they wanted to prove other computers were worse than theirs. Demo makers wanted to show off the strengths and capabilities of the machines they owned. This led to a sort of "techno-tribalism" or "postmodern tribes" where demo groups competed with each other not only on their machine of choice but also between computer systems. The demo makers would try to stretch the limitations of less capable computers by mimicking some of the technical achievements of later and more modern machines.

While crackers and intro/cracktro makers worked on many systems, the demoscene rapidly expanded on the Commodore 64, the most popular machine of the 1980s. As its name suggests it has 64KB RAM and its central processing unit (CPU) is a MOS 6510, a variant of the MOS 6502, which runs at a clock speed of paltry 1MHz . Without employing any software tricks, the C64 could display a total of 16 colors at a standard resolution of 160 x 200 pixels, though it also has a graphics mode with the higher resolution of 320 x 200 with more limited colors. To generate sound and music the C64 has a SID (Sound Interface Device) chip with three sound channels or voices. ^[6]

The Commodore 64 with floppy drive 1471
(Source: https://developer-blog.net/c64-aufstieg-und-niedergang-einer-legende/ )

The limited hardware of the C64 meant that it could not show pre-recorded animations, so demos had to render all effects on-screen in real-time. They were procedurally generated, or had the movement patterns of objects stored in memory for animated characters called "sprites" to move around the screen.