10. Parties and websites

Today is lesson 10 of Introduction to demoscene. In this lesson we want to focus on how the demoscene is organized and what the shape of its communication and exchange looks like.

We've been able to get a general idea of how the demoscene is organized through the previous lessons: much of the content about the demoscene is collected and organized on some dedicated websites, and the people in the demoscene mainly meet offline to present, communicate, and compete. As we have mentioned in the first lesson, there are two forms of enthusiasts gathering and communicating in the demoscene: online forums and offline parties.

Since the demoscene accompanies almost the whole process of personal computer popularization, significantly before the Internet became popular in the mid-1990s, the demoscene, while identified as a digital cultural phenomenon, is not entirely a internet cultural phenomenon. In many cases, cyberspace, such as online forums and websites, was not the primary place of the demoscene. In a context where "digital culture" is equated with "internet culture" in many contexts today, the demoscene constitutes a stark counterexample that digital culture does not necessarily depend on the Internet for its existence.

The Formation of Demo Parties

Before the Internet became popular, offline parties were the first place where the demoscene took place. To this day, one of the most important activities of the demoscene, the demo compo, still takes place mainly at parties held offline.

The starting point of demo parties was the legalization of copy parties, a process that took place around the early 90s. At that time, the Internet was still far from popular, and printed materials and dial-up BBS were the main means of communication for the participants of the demoscene during this period. A good source is the "Got Papers" website, which has a large collection of printed materials from the demoscene, which provides a glimpse of the real state of the demoscene in the 80s and 90s.

One of the most helpful parts of the Got Papers is the party invitations and flyers, through which we can understand the identity of the party organizers and their working methods. Also, in these materials we can see that parties in the 1980s and early 1990s were often referred to as "copy parties," confirming the connection between the demoscene and the warez community I mentioned in lesson 3. The Warez community was one of the first organizers of underground computer parties whose main purpose was to invite enthusiasts to copy and distribute their cracked software at the parties.

In addition to the time and location of the party, many of the party flyers included a map of the area around to make it easier for enthusiasts in other cities to find the party. Some invitations will also mention that they can provide space for sleeping bag camping, while others will mention the drinks and beverages prepared by the organizers for the visiting participants as well.

Some gatherings as early as 1988, such as Sweden's Vortex 42 Computer Meeting 1988 began to mention that the gathering would host competitions, and after 1990 Demo compos became more common. More detailed competition categories such as demo (program) competitions, image competitions, music competitions, etc. also appeared in many gatherings.

One of the major changes in the early 1990s was the legalization of parties, with many organizers of previous copy parties moving to "legal parties" and stating explicitly that cracking was discouraged and that "piracy on your own risk". The core of the parties shifted from software cracking and copying to demo programming, showcasing and competitions.

An important reason for this change was the police crackdown on software piracy. Got Papers also archives a set of documents called Marty/Radwar's House Search, provided by Marty, a member of the famous Commodore 64 software cracking group Radwar Enterprises 1941. These files documented a police search of Marty's house in late 1989, including the confiscation of 1,157 floppy disks. It was the legal risks and conflicts with the police faced by these late-80s crackers that contributed to the shift from copy parties to demo parties.

In late 1991, a milestone of demo parties, The Party, was successfully held in Aars, Denmark, and its organization, contest rules, and prize money set served as a model for a series of demo parties that followed. The digital video first wild demo, Global Trash II, which we mentioned in lesson 6, was also launched at this party.

Europe: the high ground for demo parties

Today, the most popular demo parties are basically in Europe, I did a simple statistic on pouet.net, and we found that in the last five years, if we don't count purely online competitions like Lovebyte, the party with highest number of releases are Revision from Germany, CAFe from Russia, Assembly from Finland, Assembly from Finland, Silly venture from Poland, and Evoke from Germany.

Party	Location	Year	Releases
Lovebyte	Netherlands (Online only)	2022	221
Lovebyte	Netherlands (Online only)	2021	204
Revision	Germany	2019	162
Revision	Germany	2021	155
Revision	Germany	2020	145
Revision	Germany	2018	124
Revision	Germany	2022	100
Intro Creation Competition	Germany (Online only)	2019	78
Intro Creation Competition	Germany (Online only)	2018	70
Assembly	Finland	2018	67
CAFe	Russia	2019	67
Assembly	Finland	2019	58
Evoke	Germany	2019	55
Silly Venture	Poland	2019	55
Outline	Netherlands	2021	50
Evoke	Germany	2018	46
Silly Venture	Poland	2018	45
Outline	Netherlands	2020	44
Silly Venture	Poland	2020	44
Function	Hungary	2018	43

During the development of demo parties, some of them gradually merged with LAN Parties, where games and e-sports are the main topic. For example, The Gathering party in Norway, which will be mentioned later, and Assembly in recent years have shown the trend of integration. If we go through the Assembly party website today, the party not only incorporates games and e-sports, but also includes cosplay and live content in the pan-gaming field.

The German demo party Revision is currently the largest pure demo party that that discourages gaming and one of the few that explicitly refuses gaming at the party in the rules. Revision has hundreds of demos released each year. In order to accommodate as many entries as possible, the organizer has also designed more detailed categories, such as 4K demo, Amiga computer demo, etc., often combined with other types of compos in recent years.

Silly Venture in Poland is also one of the richest demo parties in terms of entries, and has been held for more than 20 years since 2000. Since Atari 8-bit and Atari ST are more popular in Poland, Silly venture participants also place more emphasis on the features of Atari computers.

Germany's Revision, Finland's Assembly and Poland's Silly Venture are currently the top three demo parties in terms of the number of productions, and their host countries have all currently listed their demoscene as national intangible cultural heritage.

In addition to the above three countries, some other European countries also have demo parties that are more than ten years old, such as the Netherlands' Outline party, Hungary's Function party, Russia's CAFe (Kazan Computer Festival) and DiHalt party, and so on. The demo parties in different countries have different focus on computer platforms due to the different digital history of their host countries: SillyVenture in Poland focuses more on Atari computer platforms, while Outline in the Netherlands sees more MSX computer works.

The most prominent computer at the Russian parties was the ZX Spectrum, which, as we mentioned in the fourth lesson, is the most popular 8-bit computer in Russia due to the economic level and the history of computer popularity, somewhat like the Famiclone based computers in China. Also Russian-specific BK0010/11M computers can be found at the Russian CAFe and DiHalt gatherings.

Since demo parties are heavily concentrated in Europe, demos are sometimes referred to as "eurodemo", i.e. "European demos" in the famous Jargon File. We can also find an explanation of the word "demo", which mentions that demos "Often called eurodemos outside Europe, as most of the demoscene activity seems to have gathered in northern Europe and especially Scandinavia." In recent years, however, the term "eurodemo" has become less common than it once was, as the demoscene has spread its influence in the Americas, Australia and Japan.

What are demo parties all about?

Next we look at what activities are included in a demo party. Usually a compo is the centerpiece of a demo party. Smaller gatherings, such as the Russian DiHalt, have a schedule consisting entirely of competitions and no concerts, lectures, etc.

For medium-sized demo parties, such as Revision and Evoke Party in Germany, there will be lectures and keynote speeches, as well as live music performances, in addition to demo competitions.

Usually a big screen is set up in the main venue of the demo party, and the entries are displayed on the big screen to the audience, while the organizer of the event also sets up a temporary website for the audience to vote, and all the results are decided by the audience's votes.

The demo party will also make use of some of the demoscene's online infrastructure, such as the SceneSat which is the demoscene's own live website.

As will be mentioned later on the website, SceneSat was initially just an online radio station about demo scene music, but now it also offers live video streaming and archiving of demo parties. SceneSat has also released its own music record series, The Sound of SceneSat, which can be found on many music streaming services, so even people who don't know demoscene may have come across them through music.

Of course, for large demo parties, such as Assembly, there will also be games, cosplay, and other activities, so there is no set program for demo parties, and they can be configured "on demand".

Global party events

Although Western Europe and Northern Europe are considered the core regions of the demoscene, there are still well-organized demo parties in Eastern European countries, although the history of these parties is not as long as those in Western Europe and Northern Europe, but the enthusiasm of local hobbyists to organize and participate is no less than in other countries.

For example, the organizers' dedication and rich content is apparent from the website and the organization of the Demobit party in Slovakia. 2019 Demobit party received more than thirty entries, and the competition items also cover various sub-categories of demoscene, such as Amiga, PC, Wild Demo, etc. Demobit also set up a "One Scene Compo" for newcomers, a category that only allowed demos with a single effect to participate, encouraging newcomers to participate by reducing the complexity of their work.

I personally attended the 2017 Demosplash gathering in Pittsburgh, USA, which is hosted by the Carnegie Mellon University Computer Club and is currently the most attended demo party in the US. It is usually held between October and November each year.

Tokyo Demo Fest is the only demo party in East Asia. It also probably the only demo party where Chinese enthusiasts have joined the offline compo, with Shanghai-based enthusiast EvilRyu having attend the offline compos at Tokyo Demo Fest 2018. The Tokyo Demo Festival also has rich content, adding a live coding compo to the list of traditional compos, as well as lectures and live DJ/VJ music performances during the two-day party.

7DX is a demo party organized by the Computer Engineering Department of Bogazici University in Turkey, which was held for 14 parties from 2002 to 2015. 7DX, together with Demosplash, shows that outside of Western and Northern Europe, universities often play an important role in organizing demo parties and spreading the culture of the demoscene.

Flash Party is a demo party held in Argentina. It have been around in South America for a long time, with two parties held in 2005 and 2007, and after a hiatus of more than eleven years, it has been held continuously again since 2018. With over 100 entries for the 2021 Flash Party, we can see from the number of entries that South American enthusiasts are passionate about demo parties.

Australia's Syntax Party is also a demo party that has been running for over a decade. Both oscilloscopes and writing projectors have been present at the Syntax Party. From the above examples we can find that today demo parties are not only happening in Europe, but have become a global computer culture phenomenon.

Demo parties: the "revolving door" of the gaming industry

In Europe, many game professionals have had the experience of participating in demoscene and demo parties. The impact of demo parties on the games industry has been noted by European academics, and the 2014 article "Assembling a game development scene? Uncovering Finland's largest demo party", published in the Italian games research journal G|A|M|E in 2014, examined the connection between the Finnish Assembly demo party and the games industry. The paper cites the 2009 paper "Computer Hobbyists and the Gaming Industry in Finland", which states:

Saarikoski & Suominen (2009) point out how demoscene has often been portrayed as a movement of “altruistic multimedia hackers fighting their way through the harsh realities of the entertainment business” (p. 30). Following this line of thought, our analysis begins by exploring the commercial aspects of Assembly. Interestingly, the interviews effectively debunk the romanticized accounts by highlighting how already the initial rapid growth led to readjustments toward more commercialized event. This was mostly visible through Assembly attracting sponsors already in its first year, 1992. The sponsors were mainly hardware manufacturers, some of which were offering free devices (for example sound cards) to demo builders, most likely to advertise their products.

The above paragraph points out the first category of commercial participants in the demo party, computer hardware companies. The other type of commercial participants are game companies that wish to recruit people at demo parties, and some of these companies will even recruit across borders in the demoscene.

The sudden emergence of a community of potent programmers, graphics artists, and sound designers meant also that companies, even from as far as the US, started to view Assembly as potential venue for hiring work force. Graphically more impressive than the digital games of the day, demos were seen as perfectly suitable CV for a variety of positions.

"Assembling a game development scene? Uncovering Finland's largest demo party" concludes with a summary of the Assembly party's functions in five areas: meeting point, billboard, distribution channel, training ground, and melting pot:

Our analysis has revealed a variety of functions for Assembly: a meeting point, a billboard, a distribution channel, a training ground and a melting pot. At a time when there was no formal game development education, Assembly came to act as happenstance school for graphics programming, technical virtuosity, and creativity. As a condensing crossing point, Assembly provided Finnish demoscene and its most talented programmers visibility and a popular channel of circulating works. It formed a pedestal which was observed with special interest, both by the press and talent scouts. Its significance was felt especially during the early scene, before high-speed Internet, when it was the prime opportunity for serendipitous networking, cultural exchange and skill-transfer.

Demo parties played an important role in the game industry, especially with the rise of 3D PC games in the 1990s, and many 3D game graphics techniques were pioneered or developed by enthusiasts of the demoscene, which then permeated the game industry. However, as mentioned in the text, the popularity of formal game development education in recent years has weakened the training function of demoscene. At the same time, many participants in the demoscene are purely for fun and have no interest in entering the game industry.

Nevertheless, demo parties are still probably the closest part of the whole scene to business. Assembly party has accepted sponsorship from hardware manufacturers from the very beginning. Game manufacturers recruited through the party and turned some of the enthusiasts at the demo party into professional game developers. At this point, demo parties became a revolving door between the game industry and the hacker-developer community, providing a think tank for the game industry to house a large number of "in the wild" developers.

For hobbyists looking to break into the game industry, the demoscene provides them with the opportunity to hone and demonstrate their skills, as well as showcase their skills to the game industry. This research also guides us in bringing demo parties to China in the future, as it shows us that the sponsors of demo parties will mainly come from the computer hardware industry and the game industry.

Some hardware companies have also organized demo parties, such as Nvidia's NVScene in San Jose in 2008, 2015 and 2016, and Intel Demo Compo hosted by Intel Germany in 2006, 2007 and 2008. Although no corporate held demo parties continue today, commercial sponsorship is usually present at almost all demo parties.

Impact on other types of computer parties

The influence of demo parties has spread to many venues outside of demoscene. In Europe, especially in Northern Europe, many gaming and e-sports LAN parties have evolved from demo parties, such as The Gathering in Norway, one of the oldest demo parties in history, which has continued since 1992. However, as its content focus has shifted from demos to games, The Gathering is today less used as a demo party and more considered a LAN Party, but there are still a significant number of demos released at The Gathering each year.

The Gathering is currently the second largest computer party in the world, after the Swedish DreamHack, which will be mentioned next, and in 2012 The Gathering also achieved the Guinness World Record for "fastest Internet speed" with 200Gbps of network bandwidth.

Sweden's DreamHack is currently the largest computer gathering, which started as a demo party in Malung, Sweden in 1994, and moved to Jönköping in 2001 and continues today. In 2021, it broke the "fastest internet speed" record with 1.6 Tbps. Today, DreamHack has grown into a global gaming party brand with events in Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, the US, Australia and India.

Both DreamHack and The Gathering are today gaming and eSports focused events, while both can be clearly traced back to their demo party origins. This also shows the role of the demoscene in building the infrastructure of computer culture in Europe, not only for games, but also for the various computer parties that developed from demo parties to provide a showcase for technological subcultures, such as PC modding.

Outside of Europe, some computer culture parties that are not obviously related to demoscene are also starting to include demo parties, for example MAGFest (Music and Game Festival),currently the most important game music festival brand in the United States, which has lasted for 20 years since 2002. MAGFest started to add Shader programming competitions originating from demo parties, and in 2019 and 2020 it held a complete demo party with multiple entry categories.

If we search online for videos of these computer gatherings, we will find that many of the programs are very much in the realm of variety and entertainment, and that computer culture is not as nerdy as many people think, but can be watchable and entertaining. Various computer parties are such a type of bridge connecting IT industry and cultural and creative industry.

Elements related to demoscene also appear at some cyber security conferences such as LayerOne and DEF CON. Their competition rules are different from the usual demo parties, and often with a hardware developed specifically for use as the competition platform. For example, the demo compo at the LayerOne revolved around a L1 demoscene Board developed on a Microchip PIC24 micro-controller.

DEF CON, which is also a cyber security conference, is one of the few foreign computer gathering brands that have ever entered China, and I attended DEF CON China 1.0 in Beijing's 798 Art District in 2019. One of the features of DEF CON gatherings is its electronic badges, which are themselves small game boards containing buttons and LED lights to solve small puzzle games. In Hackaday's 2018 documentary BadgeLife, this electronic badge-making activity is compared to hardware engineers' inheritance of the demoscene's competition culture.

All of the above examples illustrate the cross-disciplinary and all-encompassing influence of the demoscene on computer culture. From video games to cyber security, all areas of computer culture are permeated by the demoscene's influence. Since the demoscene is almost completely absent from China, its brief appearance in the mid-2000s has left little trace, which leads to a large cultural gap in our understanding of overseas techno-cultural communities.

Demoscene related websites

For Chinese researchers, it is a lesson that must be learned to truly understand the overseas techno-cultural demoscene. Fortunately the demoscene is equally active on the Internet and provides researchers with many resources that can be used as a starting point for research.

Resources/Databases.

Pouet.net is the site I use most often as a repository for all types of resources on demoscene. Their BBS, which is over 20 years old, documents many of the events that have happened and are happening in the scenes and is also great for posting questions related to the scene. The artwork (prods) section contains a well-organized catalog of works, most of which can be downloaded and run, perhaps the biggest limitation is whether you can find the hardware or emulator to run them.

The Got Papers site mentioned initially in this lesson is also an important research resource that holds many paper materials related to the demoscene, including correspondence, flyers, lists, etc. These materials are particularly useful for studying the scene before the widespread use of the Internet in the 1990s.

A site mentioned in many papers is CSDB, whose full name is The C-64 Scene Database, or Commodore 64 Scene Database, which archives more than 10,000 demo and crack groups, more than 20,000 community participants, over 200,000 entries, more than 2,400 events, and 2,087 BBSes.

The Amiga also has a similar scene database, the ADA(Amiga demoscene Archive). In addition to this, as mentioned in lesson 8, Amiga computers have played an important role in the development of Tracker music and chip music, and the Amiga community has a dedicated music database, namely AMP(Amiga Music Preservation), which provides a list of music compositions from various periods on Amiga computers searchable by authors, teams and countries. All works can be downloaded as MOD, S3M and XM files in Tracker format, and they can usually be played with Foobar2000 or VLC, or edited and recreated with Tracker software.

If one wish to find demo party related information, the most important resource is demoparty.net, which has been running since 2005 and keeps a lot of demo party related information, and many parties that are still in preparation or will be held soon will also post their information on this site.

Academic, research-related sites

Some scholars who are concerned with the demoscene also post their research developments on the Internet. One of the most important resources for chip music is Chipflip, which is maintained by Anders Carlsson (GOTO80) and contains articles that are usually short in length but cover a wide range of topics. In addition to the demoscene and chip music introduced in this series of courses, it also includes quite a few ASCII Art, PETSCII Art related textual graphic art content. In addition, GOTO80's personal website goto80.com also includes a lot of content related to demoscene and computer culture.

Another place to find research resources related to the demoscene is the Finnish media culture journal Widerscreen. Due to the early development and high level of the demoscene in Finland, and the fact that it has been recognized as a Finnish intangible cultural heritage, its related academic research is also relatively advanced, with many articles related to the demoscene and other technical cultures such as chip music and ASCII Art, both in English and Finnish, having been published in Widerscreen.

Another resource for researchers is the Demoscene Research website, which is an academic resource maintained by researchers from Finland, Germany, and other places.

Infrastructure sites

The last category of websites can be considered as infrastructure for the whole demoscene. For example, SceneSat is an online radio and TV station that provides video and audio streaming and archives for demoscene-related events. For the demoscene, commercial video sites like Twitch cannot be trusted, as Revision Party 2021 was banned by Twitch for no reason during its broadcast. After the ban, Revision Party chose to use the Chaos Computer Club's C3Voc (CCC Video Operation Center), which we mentioned in the second lesson, to broadcast.

Untergrund.net is a web hosting provider dedicated to the demoscene, offering free web hosting space for demoscene related projects. The Amiga demoscene archive we just mentioned, Got Papers, chiptune.com, the demo party @party in Boston, USA, and other sites are all hosted by it.

That's all for today. I believe that through this lesson, you will have a clearer understanding of the online and offline communication spaces in the demoscene.