doomkeeper

Recently I was talking about coding competitions with someone at work and it got me thinking about the demoscene again…

For those of you that do not know the demo scene is a collection of people “sceners” throughout the world that build “demos”. A demo could be considered to be very much like a music video, but where all the graphics are done in real time. These demos are shown at demo parties, where they are judged in a competition. There are different restrictions which will ultimately decide the type of the demo, such as 1k, 4k, 64k and unrestricted. The demo scene is basically a playground for future games programmers and has some of the best programmers on earth.

Why tell us all this Jimmy? Well… the demo scene is very dear to me as it’s what ultimately started me on this path of making videos games. I was so involved that I organized and hosted the last big UK demo party “dejavu 2k“, which was held at my university in Leicester.

Unfortunately the UK was a very quiet place for demos in those days and after university I lost all touch with the scene.

It was kind of by blind luck that I watched a demo recently by someone called ‘smash’. The name really rang a bell and I emailed the author to find out that we have both gone to Brussels together for Wired98! He told me that the Uk demo scene is now very active.

Typical! I’ve now moved to Canada!

Anyway the whole incident has got me interested to see whats going on the scene these days. So I’m going to download a few new demos and put them up these pages.

I also might blow the dust of some old graphics books and have a play at knocking something together…

In the mean time here’s a list of links to some my favorites. Many of these won’t run under windows as they were designed to run in DOS 32bit protected mode. Luckily nice people have been capturing them as videos…

2nd reality – the future crew
the secret life of Mr black – orange”
megablast – orange”
paper 64k – psychic link”
square – pulse”
toasted – cubic team”
baygon – melon dezign”

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