One Bad Apple

My Guilty Fondness for the Demoscene's Most Disreputable Demo

I have a confession to make. There is a demo... well, a something... that the demoscene loves to roll its eyes at, and I adore it anyway. It is called "Bad Apple!!", it consists of black-and-white silhouettes dancing to a Japanese electro-pop song, and it has been recreated on practically every machine ever built that has a screen. Let's jump into the history of this demo and find out why so many people don't like it.

October 2023

"Bad Apple!! PV (Shadow Art)" — the shadow-play animation released by Anira's group on Niconico in October 2009 (direct link to Youtube)

Bad Apple did not start as a demo at all. It is not the product of a demogroup. It certainly was not originally released at a demoparty. It is a fan-made music video from the Japanese dōjin scene. The demoscene only adopted it later. In the beginning this adoption was enthusiastic, then it became repeated. It ended up somewhat against the scene's own better judgement.

I became so fascinated by it that I went down the rabbit hole to find out more about Bad Apple. And what a history it has!

A deep dive into the history of Bad Apple, from the Touhou chiptune to the global phenomenon (direct link to Youtube)

Touhou and the Dōjin Scene

The story begins in 1998, on the Japanese NEC PC-98 computer platform.

The one-man game studio Team Shanghai Alice, run by the composer-programmer-artist known as ZUN, released Lotus Land Story, the fourth installment of the Touhou Project series of "bullet hell" shoot-em-ups. The third stage of that game has a background theme called "Bad Apple!!", a moody little FM-synthesis chiptune at 161 beats per minute. ^[1]

Touhou has one of the most prolific fan-remix cultures in existence, and in 2007 the dōjin music circle Alstroemeria Records released a vocal remix of the track. It was arranged by Masayoshi Minoshima and sung by nomico, on their album Lovelight. ^[2] This is the version everyone knows: a driving, melancholic dance track. The lyrics are genuinely dark. They describe a person so numb and hollowed-out that they drift through time without will or feeling, wondering whether they would even notice if they turned into someone rotten. A "bad apple", so to speak. It is a psychological lament wrapped in an upbeat package, and that tension is part of why the song works so well.

Dang, do these lyrics touch me! (Even though I don't understand Japanese)

Then came the part that turned a good remix into a phenomenon. In June 2008, a Niconico user with the handle Μμ uploaded a crude storyboard for a music video and openly asked the community: would somebody please animate this? ^[3]

Several attempts followed. The one that made the difference was released on October 26, 2009, by a collaborative group led by the user Anira: a complete shadow-play animation of the storyboard. It shot to the number one spot in Niconico's daily rankings and became the first video on the platform to reach ten million views. ^[4] By now it has passed thirty million views on Niconico, and a (technically unauthorized) YouTube re-upload crossed the hundred-million mark.

In 2020, Alstroemeria Records adopted Anira's animation as the song's official music video. It was a fan video so definitive that it was retroactively canonized. ^[5]

Three and a Half Minutes of Negative Space

So what does it actually look like? (I'm sure you already watched the embedded Youtube video at the top, but I will still describe it.)

Imagine an unbroken stream of silhouettes. The video presents the heroines of the Touhou games. They are the shrine maiden Reimu Hakurei, the witch Marisa Kirisame, and a parade of vampires, ghosts, and maids. All of them are represented as pure black shapes against white, and pure white shapes against black. The figures dance, twirl, raise their iconic props (a broom, a parasol, a gohei wand), and then turn into each other.

That is probably the most central part of the animation: the transitions. A ribbon unfurls and is suddenly another character's hair. A spinning skirt becomes a clock face. The image inverts. Black becomes white. Figure becomes ground. In an instance of polarity reversal a new character is standing where the old one stood before. The whole video is one continuous chain of match cuts and figure-ground reversals, perfectly synchronized to the music. It is like a cross between shadow theatre, kinetic typography, and an Escher print.

And here is the thing that I, as someone who loves pixel art and bold graphic design, simply cannot resist: the high-contrast silhouette style is gorgeous. It does not need any color, shading, or texture. The outline animation communicates character and motion. As a piece of graphic design, Bad Apple is absolutely excellent. And I will defend that position at any demoparty (ideally before midnight while I can still argue coherently).

Ports on Everything

It is precisely these reduced aesthetics that turned Bad Apple into a good source for conversion in the demoscene. A video that consists only of black and white shapes is, from the point of view of data-compression, an invitation to a technical challenge. Potentially it is only one bit per pixel. There are huge areas of solid color. The differences between frame are mostly small over wide stretches of the video. A clever programmer could surely squeeze this onto his favorite retro machine.

As the Atari 8-bit porter Peter Dell (JAC!) put it, over the past decade and a half, Bad Apple has become the graphical equivalent of a "Hello, World!" for retro platforms. ^[6] An incomplete list of machines that have been made to play it:

• The IBM PC 5160 with an 8088 CPU, at 640×200 and 30 frames per second, as part of Trixter's legendary 8088 Domination (2014), which proved that a 1981 PC could do full-motion video if you rethink the entire problem. ^[7]
• The Commodore 64, in multiple versions, including ones streaming from the floppy drive and one absurd single-file version compressed into a 15 KB program.
• The Sega Mega Drive, ported by Stéphane Dallongeville (the creator of the SGDK development kit), with near-CD-quality audio that impressed people more than the video did. ^[8]
• The Atari 800, in Peter Dell's "Bad Apple HD", loading from a cassette tape used as a streaming device (and I love this detail).
• The ZX Spectrum, the BBC Micro, the Sega Master System, the NES, the Atari 2600, the Vectrex, the Game Boy.
• TI-84 graphing calculators, Arduinos, oscilloscopes, mechanical 18-line televisions, hard-drive actuator arms, arrays of blinking LEDs, Minecraft redstone, and Microsoft Excel.

There is an entire subreddit, r/itplaysbadapple, dedicated to documenting new machines upon which the apple has landed. The community joke is that if a thing has anything resembling a screen, Bad Apple will eventually run on it. One pouet.net commenter suggested, only half in jest, that the ports should report a standardized benchmark score so we can finally rank all hardware by its Bad Apple capability. ^[9]

My personal favorite of the entire lineage is "Good Apple" by the Russian group SandS (2018), which played the animation on a Soviet BK-0011M home computer. They actually remixed it, weaving in twists and jokes of its own. ^[10] Let's hold on to that thought for now. It will matter further down.

A "making of" the Bad Apple port on the Atari STE, showing the kind of hardware-bending work these conversions demand (direct link to Youtube)

Why the Demoscene Is Not Impressed

Now we need to be brutally honest.

Within the demoscene, Bad Apple is no longer beloved. Now it is at most tolerated, sometimes it is even ridiculed as "yet another Bad Apple port". On pouet.net you can read the open sarcasm. Under a perfectly competent Sega Master System version, one commenter pleads: "bring a good demo, not another Bad Apple". Another user called dryly congratulates the author on conversion number fifty-five million or so. ^[9]

I don't think the criticism is just snark. Bad Apple adaptations contradict the core of what a demo is. A demo, in the scene's understanding, is a real-time audio-visual program: the machine computes the imagery as you watch. Bad Apple ports compute nothing of the sort. They are video players, admittedly ingenious ones on some hardware, but still just video players. The content was rendered once, and then converted to the target platform Essentially everything since 2009 when Anira's team released the original, has been an exercise in storing and decompressing somebody else's animation. When fenarinarsa's technically impressive Atari version placed third in a demo competition in 2017, one demoscener objected bitterly on Demozoo that a 34-megabyte animation simply is not a demo, and wondered aloud what the point of the compo was. ^[11]

Many demoparty guidelines agree. Pure animation playback is explicitly forbidden in most demo compos. This is why in recent years Bad Apple ports usually end up in the "wild" category.

The deeper problem, though, is the sameness. The demoscene's whole ethos is that the platform shapes the art. An Amiga demo looks like an Amiga demo because of the copper and the blitter. A C64 demo sounds like a C64 demo because of the VIC and SID chips. The hardware constraints are their own kind of muse.

Bad Apple changes this completely: the goal of every port is to make wildly different machines produce the identical result. The better your port, the less your platform matters. The Amiga version looks like the Atari STE version which looks like the PC VGA version and the Acorn Archimedes version. It is a kind of "anti-demo". No wonder the scene is slightly fed-up. Watching your fifteenth Bad Apple is like being told the same joke for the fifteenth time. The first time, you laugh. By the fifteenth, you are either frowning or cringing.

And there is one more point: the demoscene did not even create the original it keeps re-performing. The artistry consisting of the design, the choreography, the match cuts, all belongs to the dōjin animators on Niconico. The scene contributes only the delivery mechanism. That is honorable engineering work, but it is cover-band work.

In Defense of the Apple (A Little)

Having said all that, I refuse to be entirely cynical about it, for three reasons.

First, the compression work is genuinely creative. Getting 6,500 frames of video through a 1541 floppy drive, or off a cassette tape, or into 15 kilobytes, requires exactly the kind of obsessive, hardware-bending ingenuity the demoscene celebrates everywhere else. The visuals may be imitation, but the codecs are original. 8088 Domination in particular stands as a real milestone of systems programming, whatever you think of its source material.

Second, history rhymes (as George Lucas might put it). When Spaceballs released the Amiga demo State of the Art in 1992 critics complained that it felt like a prerecorded animation rather than a real demo, because its rotoscoped dancers were traced from video footage. Today it is generally considered one of the greatest Amiga demos ever made. The line between "realtime art" and "clever playback" has always been blurrier, and more contested, than the scene likes to admit. Bad Apple is just a further down that argumentative lane.

Third, the apple can still surprise. SandS's "Good Apple" showed the way: take the meme as raw material and transform it. They add commentary, add jokes, even add platform's personality back into the picture. The moment a port stops being a faithful reproduction and starts being a remix or an interpretation, it start going back toward being a demo.

An Apple a Day...

So here is where I stand. Bad Apple the animation is a beautiful piece of graphic art with a great, devastating song. I will keep enjoying it without shame. Bad Apple the demoscene tradition is like a disreputable little ritual. It is technically demanding but artistically derivative. It squarely misses the point of the demoscene. It is like the guilty pleasure at a demoparty, like "Wonderwall" at karaoke night.

I think that is fine. Perhaps every culture needs a shared piece of folklore that everyone secretly enjoys and publicly hates. To be fair, there are hardly any platforms left that Bad Apple doesn't run on.

And if you don't believe me, here is a whole playlist of the apple landing on machine after machine after machine:

A playlist collecting Bad Apple running on a wild variety of platforms (direct link to the Youtube playlist)

Footnotes & Sources

1. "Bad Apple!!" entry on the Touhou Wiki: https://en.touhouwiki.net/wiki/Bad_Apple!! — the original track is the stage 3 theme of Lotus Land Story (1994/1998 era PC-98), composed by ZUN.
2. Alstroemeria Records, Lovelight (2007), arrangement by Masayoshi Minoshima, vocals by nomico.
3. The storyboard request was posted by Niconico user Μμ in June 2008; see the overview on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Apple!!
4. Anime News Network, "Touhou ‘Bad Apple’ Video Collection" (2010): animenewsnetwork.com — also covers the stop-motion remake from 6,566 printed stills that ended up on CNN.
5. The shadow animation was released as the official music video by Alstroemeria Records in May 2020.
6. Peter Dell (JAC!), "Bad Apple HD" for the Atari 8-bit line: wudsn.com
7. 8088 Domination by Trixter / Hornet (2014).
8. MegaBites interview with Stéphane Dallongeville on the Mega Drive port: megabitesblog.wordpress.com
9. Comments on the Sega Master System port's pouet.net page: pouet.net/prod.php?which=69393
10. "Good Apple (Bad Apple remix)" by SandS on the BK-0011M: pouet.net/prod.php?which=78066
11. Comment thread on Demozoo for fenarinarsa's Atari port: demozoo.org/productions/180988/