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Comment by avaldes | Hacker News Reader

> The demoscene is an underground computer art culture

I've seen A LOT of posts of demoscene here on HN through the years so what does "underground" means in this context? Genuinely curious.

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Not mainstream; it's a niche hobby. Most people have never heard of it, and you won't encounter anyone on the street chatting about the latest demoscene developments. You won't find TV shows about it nor regional clubs dedicated to it. While it is an art, no artist makes their living doing it. It's also not the most accessible since there's some technical skill required.

> since there's some technical skill required.

That's the understatement of the year. Check out

- 2nd Reality: at a time when Doom-style graphics were awesome

- 8088MHz: getting 1024 colours out of a CGA adapter (which is made to output 4 colours)

- 1K (or was it 64K?) demos that involve flying over procedurally generated (close to) photorealistic landscapes

The demo scene pushes the brink of what's technically possible. Or just ignores it and goes way beyond what everyone thought possible.

For the 3rd one, you are probably thinking about "Elevated", which is 4k http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=52938 There are others but it is the most famous and it was revolutionary when it came out.

I think what GP means is that even a "compofiller", a demo that is not expected to win any prize requires some technical skill.

That said, in northern Europe and post-Soviet countries it's a lot more prevalent than elsewhere.

I suppose nowadays it means "not mainstream" as many have pointed out, but historically many of these computer scenes have been called part of an "underground" simply because they're part of something illegal. The demoscene itself was born out of the warez scene, as its sole purpose was to advertise pirated software distribution groups. It branched out fast, but those scenes have always been heavily linked together.

“The mainstream comes to you, but you have to go to the underground.” - Frank Zappa

Presumably it just means "not mainstream". Which is certainly true. Because demoscene is exemplar of the "hacker mindset", it's no wonder it tends to feature on HN. But HN is not exactly mainstream either.

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