I always wondered why demo scene was so culturally impactful in Europe but not in the US. I wonder if it’s due to the fact that Amiga was a lot more popular in Europe than US.
My point of view. So hacking was and stayed your main option in Europe during the 80th, 90th.
Adult me wishes she could go back and actually pay the authors of all those games but then again I think most of them weren’t even available in the US...
I started learning to program in 1985, was part of a somewhat relevant demo group, attended The Assembly '94 in Helsinki, helped organize some enocounters in my country, etc...
For one it was a “cathedral”, not a “bazaar” in the sense that it had more or less the same hardware on all models.
The hardware was nicely balanced: small enough that you could learn it all, yet complex enough to keep tweaking and pushing its limits for a long time.
It also had a long life, so you could get really good at it. People were using their 500s from the 80s well into the 90es.
Contrast with his to PCs where there was a plethora of different hardware components for CPU models, graphics and sound - a “bazaar”.
At the early stages the standardised Amiga was just much easier for the devs.
Later the PCs became so powerful that the energy moved there anyway - but I still remember the shock of the terribly messy instruction set on the PCs after switching from the nice and clean 68k.
For me personally that was when I stopped. It was simply not joyful to work with.
I thought it was just me.
We had computer clubs in many cities. Clubs had their zines. These were focal points for meeting other would-be sceners.
The demo scene was organised in groups with members spread around the country, so we would go to some of the many “copy parties” in the weekends to meet and show off coding skills or music or puzzle over reverse engineering games.
The dense European geography and good public transport was a big factor, too. Without a car and not old enough for a license, I remember taking the bus to Viborg to hang out with people from their big computer club for the weekends, some of whom had published games commercially. This was a great inspiration, too.
I certainly miss those days!
Also, note how the vast majority of demoscene groups were in Scandinavia, places with long winters.
After reading Wikipedia article I'm still a little bit confused. Could someone do a ELI5?
It dates back to when early games and software were pirated by teams. Each team would try and leave their intro video in the game as their signature, trying to one up each other.
Then it just turned into it's own form of competitive Development.
Basically you get some incredibly small amount of memory, and it's about trying to be as clever as possible to get the coolest visuals in there.
Many prominent graphics engineers were involved. Some of them even worked at studios like Pixar, making things like the vegetation systems on Brave.
And such people (as people do) tend to coagulate into a community around that interest, sharing results and techniques and overall socializing!
I'm from Brazil and wasn't even born yet at the time, but if you want to easily see a bit of what demos were, one of their "modern equivalents", so to speak, would be Shadertoy [1]. There are also videos of old demos, and I'm sure there are archives of the programs, but I haven't searched for them either.