As someone not from Europe (nor the US), this is literally the first time I've heard demoscene.
After reading Wikipedia article I'm still a little bit confused. Could someone do a ELI5?
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.