Revision 2025

A Journey Through Train Chaos, Creativity, and Community

Travelling from Thessaloniki to Saarbrücken wasn't easy but for the Revision 2025 demoparty, it was absolutely worth it. Amid wonderful demos, arcade machines, bonfires, and a sea of creative minds, I found once again what makes the demoscene so unique: the awesome community of technology and art.

April 2025

Watch Revision Recap Video on Youtube

Getting to Revision isn't exactly a "piece of cake" when you're starting from Thessaloniki.

Direct flights to Saarbrücken? Forget about it. Even flights to Frankfurt am Main, the biggest airport in Germany, don't exactly land you at Revision's "doorstep". And Ryanair, while cheap, adds its own special flavor of logistical gymnastics. I found a Ryanair flight to a place called Karlsruhe/Baden-Baden Airport.

First lesson: don't trust German airport names. Karlsruhe is quite a distance away from Baden-Baden, and neither are anywhere near Saarbrücken. But it was the best option, so off I went.

After landing, public transportation became a mini-adventure of its own. In hindsight, I should have taken the bus to Baden-Baden and then a train to Saarbrücken via Mannheim. Instead, I improvised my way through various confusing transfers. Once in Karlsruhe, I caught a train to Saarbrücken, or so I thought. Smaller trains in the area, I learned, sometimes split into two separate destinations mid-route. Guess who was relaxing in the wrong half of the train when the separation happened?

Eventually, after some colorful detours, I made it to Saarbrücken. My Airbnb host, an elderly German man, greeted me warmly and then (somewhat less warmly) launched into an unsolicited rant about "gypsies", drugs, and prostitution. I politely grabbed my keys and nodded until he was done. Then I wanted to see just how conveniently the apartment was located for a trip to E-Werk, the venue for Revision.

It took me a little while to find the best way there. Ultimately, it involve a hidden road and a train-track underpass but soon, I had it figured out.

Entering the World of Revision

Revision 2025 ran from April 18^th to 21^st at Saarbrücken's E-Werk, a beautifully restored former power plant with towering red brick walls and soaring ceilings. Walking in, the entry hall crackled with energy: ticket check-ins, a beverage stand, and in one corner, a delightful array of arcade machines and a pinball table, which were never left unplayed for more than a few minutes.

Outside in the open, the food truck area had everything you could wish for: burgers, pizza, currywurst, cocktails, and vegan options, all served from colorful food trucks. During the evenings, a cozy bonfire area was set up under the cool spring skies, where people grilled sausages, shared beers, and told "war" stories from the kilobyte days of computing and when scene was young.

What a wonderful and relaxing bonfire!

Inside, the main hall was an incredible sight: Long rows of wooden tables filled with an ocean of laptops, vintage hardware, CRT monitors, weird DIY electronics, and the occasional stack of energy drinks. At the far end, a massive stage and giant projection screen stood ready for action... and action it got.

Master Boot Record's amazing show is starting!

Demos blasted across the screen, synchronized to heart-pounding music booming from the high-fidelity sound system. DJ sets kept the dance floor alive late into the night. There was a particularly electrifying concert by MBR (Master Boot Record), who delivered metal instrumentals named after ancient DOS files (config.sys!) and even covered the legendary Doom soundtrack. It was all without lyrics, just pure, powerful sound.

Above the hall, the VIP Lounge offered a more laid-back vibe for organizers and speakers, complete with a bar, soft couches and a corner with retro hardware to run the released productions before screening them.

The VIP lounge for speakers, organizers and sponsors.

Meanwhile, tucked away in their own perch was the Beamteam Control Center, a dazzling tangle of computers, mixing desks, and video/audio gear. These wizards (perhaps "wiz-nerds"?) operated fixed and roaming cameras, feeding footage to the giant screen inside and to the online livestream. Without the Beamteam, Revision simply wouldn't function.

The Beamteam, the command center that feeds the screens in the Revision venue and remote streams.

Feeling Right at Home

This was my second time at Revision, and only now could I finally manage to write about it.

The first time in 2023, it was all just too much: the overwhelming scale and creative energy. I had the same experience with Evoke in Cologne: only after my second visit could I finally step back and process it all.

And 2025's Revision did not disappoint. The feeling was pure elation. Everywhere I went, people were friendly, welcoming, and inspiring.

It is great to be back at Revision!

One of the best parts of any demoparty is always the people you end up sitting near. This year, I lucked out. Just across from me was a tinkerer from Paderborn working on a real analog computer, patched together with colorful cables in a way that made it look like it had fallen through a wormhole from an alternate dimension. It reminded me of setups like the-analog-thing. It was very hands-on, tactile, and wonderfully strange. On one side, I had a friendly visitor from Berlin, always up for a good chat. On the other, two young developers, one from France and one from Turkey, were deep into building a Linux-based demo complete with custom-made music. Watching their workflow unfold over the weekend was as cool as anything on the big screen.

A fascinating and amazing analog computer on my desk neighbors workspace.

Walking the rows, I met incredible people...

The sympathetic creators of a C64 disk magazine. They had set up multiple Commodore 64s connected to CRTs and a pumping chiptune sound system. They diligently reported about Revision for their diskmag.

The table of the crew with the C64 Disk Mag.

It was great to meet Harvey again. He is a prolific writer of retro book who set up a stand selling everything from lush coffee-table books on retro gaming art to joystick adapters and hardware expansions.

I spent some time chatting with a pair of dedicated retro computing enthusiasts who had brought along a fully functioning Macintosh IIci, complete with a rare vertical "portrait" display, the kind designed to show a full printed page in proper proportions. It was already a fascinating setup, but they weren’t stopping there. At some point during the party, they began installing a PowerPC accelerator card, with plans to run A/UX, Apple’s long-abandoned Unix-based operating system from the early '90s. It was a quiet kind of nerdy brilliance.

This was a great setup back in the early 1990s, a Macintosh IIci with a Portrait Display.

Somewhere between trying to acclimate and figuring out where the bathrooms were, I suddenly bumped into none other than PSEnough, a true legend of the demoscene. I was completely unprepared, still mentally booting up, and immediately began babbling nonsense at him like an overclocked chatbot with no filter.

But despite my awkward enthusiasm, he was friendly and gracious, and honestly, it was a huge honor just to meet him. Moments like that remind me how surreal and wonderful it is to be surrounded by the people whose work I’ve admired for years.

Among the rows of glowing screens and humming machines, I came across a small group of young manga-style artists, each deeply focused on their Wacom tablets. The illustrations they were creating were nothing short of stunning. They were bold, expressive, and full of personality. It was a beautiful reminder that the demoscene isn’t just about code and pixels; it’s also a place where visual art thrives, and where new generations are already making their mark.

Delightful manga being created digitally.

One of my favorite encounters was with a retro pixel artist who had set up an original Amiga 600 running Deluxe Paint, the legendary graphics software that shaped so much of early digital art. But this wasn’t just nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. He was using the Amiga as part of a hybrid workflow, creating assets on the classic hardware, then syncing and refining them on a modern Windows laptop using Cosmigo Pro Motion NG. I thought it was really cool how he seamlessly bridged the gap between past and present. He didn't use floppy disks or a CRT display but had a Gotek drive for USB storage, an internal IDE-to-CF adapter instead of the spinning harddrive, and a modern flatscreen display using an upscaler to convert the legacy signal produced by the Amiga. Old and new tech complementing each other! It was like watching time fold in on itself, one pixel at a time.

A wonderful setup to create music on a Commodore Amiga 1200.

And the mucisians! Unforgettable... It was amazing to see and hear how they wielded vintage machines like the Amiga and Commodore 64. These weren’t just studio setups or pre-recorded tracks. The musiciancs wrangled crunchy samples, tracker rhythms, and iconic chip sounds into full-blown musical experiences. There's something really cool and electric about that.

An Amiga game running on an emulator on a Raspberry Pi inside a telephone from East Germany where the player uses the keys to control the game. This was created by retromat.team.

Another particularly fun setup I stumbled across was run by a group who had resurrected a fully functional old-school BBS. And yes, you could actually dial into it: ready for anyone curious (or nostalgic) enough to give it a go. It was like dialing into the past and not just a static exhibit. People were active on itlike it was 1993 all over again. In a weekend full of bleeding-edge code and retro tech, this little corner of digital archaeology was a delight.

The seminar about building a retro computer cheaply with modern parts: "The Sorbus Computer - or how I built my on $10 retro computer". See the talk in this video.

Of course, after each competition presentation on the big screen, we used the Partymeister system to cast our votes, a handy online tool that made sure every voice was counted.

Taking Part: Competitions and Contributions

This year, I didn't just soak in the atmosphere, I actively participated in the Meteoriks awards, the paintover graphics competition, and the PC demo competition. (I want to kick myself in the derrière for missing the deadlines for oldschool and modern graphics. I guess I'll submit these works at this year's Evoke in August.)

Meteoriks Awards

I had the honor of being part of the jury for the prestigious Meteoriks awards and even got to present one of the prizes during the opening ceremony. (I've written a separate article about that whole experience here: From Spectator to Juror: My Tiny Role at the 'Oscars' of the Demoscene.)

At the start of the Meteoriks award ceremony Dojoe and Subi commemorated the sceners who had passed away in 2024.

Paintover Competition

The organizers gave us a base image full of abstract lines and blobs. Using my iPad Pro, Procreate, and an Apple Pencil, I painted a surreal scene over it. I had just 24 hours, it certainly was a rush job, but I was thrilled to place 5^th out of 24 entries.

On the left, the abstract image provided by the Revision folks, on the right my paintover. I call it "The Mouth and the Cats of Sauron". And yes, it is modelled after the Mouth of Sauron from Peter Jackson's "Return of the King" Extended Edition. Source: Revision and Marin Balabanov

My work was voted to rank 5 at the Revision Prize-giving.Source: Revision Prize-giving video

Here's a speedrun video of the process of creating my submission for the Paintover competition:

Watch on Youtube

PC Demo Competition

My demo, "All In Your Head", was built primarily using Procreate, Pixelmator Pro, and Tumult Hype4 for animation. I also edited sound effects from Envato Elements with Sound Studio. It was meant to include custom music, but I ran out of time. Turns out, producing even halfway decent music is... hard. The version I submitted was unfinished

Days after Revision, I polished it into something much closer to my original vision by enhancing some of the visuals, and I added my own music that I made using pre-existing synth pads, beats, and loops in GarageBand. Turns out making music in this application is really easy, but I feel that I cheated because all the talented folks at Revision were creating their music from scratch just using their incredible skills and creativity.

Here's a video of my demo "All In Your Head". I know it's silly but I like it. It's my kind of silly! (After all, my demoscene handle is Bala-Koala!)

Watch on Youtube

"All In Your Head" was visually inspired by another demo with an open head (but I forgot which one exactly) and by the excellent comic book series Locke & Key (I've never watched the TV show, though). I designed the demo to run natively in modern web browsers, demonstrating what's possible with HTML5, JavaScript, and creative tools. I might not be able to write shader-based demos like the most accomplished sceners that I admire, but as a web developer, I'm right at home with browser-native technologies. This demo is my take on what the demoscene can look like in a comic style and through the lens of modern web tools.

How I Created of "All In Your Head"

I created an animated sequence using Tumult Hype, beginning with hand-drawn artwork in ProCreate on the iPad Pro using an Apple Pencil. The idea centered on a cyborg's head with an opening at the top, from which various animated elements would emerge.

Although I had a clear mental model of what I wanted to create, I bypassed a storyboard (something I normally recommend). I opted instead to build intuitively and iteratively.

The visuals leaned into a comic-book style, featuring bold contours and expressive hatching, all in full color. I began by filling the illustrations with flat colors to give them weight and volume, and then layered in lighter hatching for subtle highlights. Once complete, I exported the assets from ProCreate and imported them into Tumult Hype on the Mac.

The premise of the demo was inspired by something I had previously seen in the demoscene.

The animation itself unfolded through relatively simple steps, but with thoughtful layering and timing that gave it the appearance of greater complexity. Objects started small and hidden behind the cyborg's head, then followed animated flight paths, scaling up as they moved. To avoid a mechanical or uniform look, I staggered their departure, giving the sequence a more organic rhythm. The process was iterative. I'd regularly return to ProCreate to create new objects, then export, import, and animate them.

Among the more complex elements were the animated snakes. I designed a snake head and a repeatable segment for the body, then animated the head along a path. I duplicated the path for each segment with slight delays, resulting in a fluid, believable slither, a snake formed out of individual components following one another.

A cartoonish rocket was a visual standout. It was the only object that did not fly off-screen. Instead, it landed next to the cyborg's head, hinting at its future importance in the animation.

To set the scene, I animated a desolate desert landscape, based on a drawing I had created earlier. The background included rocky foreground elements and clouds, each on separate layers. Inspired by the parallax scrolling in the Amiga classic Shadow of the Beast, I animated each layer at different horizontal speeds to recreate that rich, immersive depth.

This scrolling desert served as the introductory scene, and I used it to introduce the animation's title: "All In Your Head," which appeared hovering above the landscape. After this, the animation transitioned into the main scene featuring the giant cyborg head, now positioned in front of the same landscape for continuity. The previously landed rocket now sat comfortably next to the head.

"All In Your Head", the title of the demo slams into the viewers face.

I added another surreal moment: a giant reptilian foot, inspired by Godzilla, descends from above and pushes the cyborg's head downward. Again, I drew the foot in ProCreate and animated it to resemble the irreverent cut-out style of Terry Gilliam's Monty Python animations. I hope this lent the piece a playful, absurdist twist.

A tip of the hat to Monty Python.

With the cyborg now gone, the rocket took center stage. In the final animated moment, it launched from the desert, arced across the sky, and left behind the text "Marin Comics" before flying off-screen. It served as a closing signature for the piece.

The closing section of the animation.

To enhance the animation, I added lightning effects in some of the scenes to bring more life and energy to the transitions. I also integrated sound effects for the rocket, the lightning, and various flying objects using assets from Envato Elements. While Tumult Hype's audio capabilities are somewhat limited and a bit clunky to work with, I managed to make it all fit smoothly by the end.

As a final touch, I added a credits scene, complete with a scrolling message to greet some folks in the demoscene.

Although I animated everything directly in Tumult Hype and generated the accompanying JavaScript from within the application, I found it necessary to write a bit of custom code to refine the presentation. I had set the Hype animation size to 1920×1080, which works well in many contexts but in practice, I noticed that on some monitors, when viewed in a browser, parts of the animation were being obscured by the browser’s chrome (toolbars, menus, etc.).

To address this, I wrote a small script that dynamically adjusts the zoom level based on the available window width. Here’s the code I used:

function setZoomLevel(zoomLevel) {
  document.body.style.transform = "scale(" + zoomLevel + ")";
  document.body.style.transformOrigin = "top left";
  document.body.style.width = 100 / zoomLevel + "%";
}

function autoSetZoomLevel() {
  var zoomLevel = window.innerWidth / 1920;
  setZoomLevel(zoomLevel);
}

document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", function () {
  autoSetZoomLevel();
});
    

In addition to this auto-scaling behavior, I added three zoom control buttons that let users manually toggle between 100%, 75%, and 50% zoom levels as users please.

There was another thing I wanted to do. I wanted to add richness and nuance to the animation by taking advantage of CSS blend modes for color overlays and layered compositing effects. These are modes like screen, multiply, overlay, and difference. They would dramatically enhance the visual depth of the scenes I had in mind, allowing objects to interact with background elements in more organic or simply weird ways.

However, Tumult Hype does not support blend modes natively. Fortunately, I discovered the excellent HypeBlendModes library by worldoptimizer. This lightweight script enables CSS blend mode support within Hype projects, making it possible to assign blend modes to elements directly via class names or JavaScript.

Integrating the library was straightforward, and it worked flawlessly with my existing setup, even for video export. With it, I was able to apply blend modes to various animated elements, enriching their interaction with the environment, especially in scenes with lightning flashes, glowing objects, or layered atmospheric effects.

This added a subtle but impactful layer of polish to the final animation.

The Shader Showdown: The Ultimate Challenge

One of the most thrilling events at Revision was without a doubt the Shader Showdown. The competition was moderated by PSEnough and Flopine.

What is it about and why do I find it so cool? Three programmers faced off live on stage, each armed with nothing but a powerful desktop PC and their wits. Using Gargaj's Bonzomatic platform, they had to write real-time shader code from scratch, right there, on the spot, with their work projected onto the massive main screen for everyone to see.

This is the Shader Showdown: live competitive coding. For me the most impressive of all competitions. The contestants must have nerves of steel.

It wasn't just about technical skill. They had a strict time limit, intense pressure, and the added challenge of having to stay creative under the watchful eyes of a cheering audience. As lines of code turned into mesmerizing visuals and abstract animations before our eyes, it felt like magic (or at least a really awesome superpower!). Coding at home is one thing but pulling off these stunning visual feats, live, under the spotlight, with music thumping and hundreds of people watching? That's a whole different level of mastery. It remains one of the most awe-inspiring aspects of Revision for me.

After the Shader Showdown, Byte Jam started where talented sceners live-coded on the TIC-80 fantasy console on stage.

So Many Impressions

There was so much to take in. Revision isn't just about the demos. It's also the little things, the in-between moments, the odd corners, and the spontaneous scenes that make it unforgettable. From sticker-covered surfaces and the legendary toilet corridor to vinyl records and those wonderful proud typewriters, here's a visual grab bag of the strange, brilliant, and delightful snapshots that stayed with me:

The Long Way Home

Sadly, I had to leave on Sunday evening. My flight schedule meant missing out on the last concerts, night shuttles, and Monday's official Revision prize-giving ceremony.

Getting home turned into a final adventure: the trains of the Deutsche Bahn, true to form, suffered delays. I missed my connection. With time running dangerously low, I grabbed a taxi from Karlsruhe to the airport in a 130-Euro gamble but made it just in time to catch my flight back to Thessaloniki. Exhausted, relieved, and already planning my next demoparty trip.

Congratulations to the Revision team, a wonderful demoparty came to a close! Photo: viscid/neoplasia

A Great Time and a Great Community

Revision 2025 was everything I had hoped for and more!

It was a vibrant celebration of creativity, code, music, community, and absolute awesomitude! An exhausting, exhilarating, unforgettable gathering of passionate souls from around the world.

I can't wait to return. And maybe next time, I'll even make it to the Monday prize-giving too.

Happy to be back in Thessaloniki and on one of the cocktail ships after the irritating travels.

Unless otherwise stated, all photos were shot by me. I tried to anonymize as many people as possible... well, except for the demoscene "celebrities" on stage.