The Demoscene -- an Overview

In the 90s the demoscene was really quite exciting. Second Reality was groundbreaking and opened my eyes to what was possible on our pokey old 486s (plus it was awesome to show off to your friends). Going to demo events and realising there were plenty of fellow hackers in Australia doing cool stuff, and having a chance to hack along with them was also a lot of fun. Good times.

"The demoscene" can also refer to the largely overlapping subculture of tracker [1] musicians. There're a few well known electronic artists still using trackers today, like Venetian Snares [2], Bogdan Raczynski, and enduser.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracker_(music_software)

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjAwxG3q3Yo

The problem is that everyone doing demoscene stuff got jobs and is getting paid for it now. Look at crysis, etc. No one cares about programming dick waving contests anymore, it's all about who can get a job at Microsoft. If it doesn't benefit your resume, no one cares for it. I personally became a computer science major because I wanted to write demos. After about four years is when I really started to get it as far as graphics goes and even though now I have an idea how effects are done, I feel like there's still so much to learn to keep up with what guys in these demo groups like farbrausch and fairlight do. The learning curve for doing this kind of stuff is pretty high. Not only do you have to know programming, but some kind of library like DirectX or OpenGL, shader languages and all the linear algebra behind the effects.

I remember the feeling I had when Unreal came out.

I was hacking the VGA registers to optimize my bitblt to the maximum, all in assembler, and I felt I knew pretty well what was going on inside my computer. Then I ran this demo and it did stuff that I knew wasn't possible with my hardware. Quite mind blowing..