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davrosthedalek

For me, it was Second Reality from FutureCrew. Highly recommend it. Great soundtrack, awesome scenes for the time.

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Worth mentioning that the members of Future Crew later founded Remedy, makers of Alan Wake, Max Payne, and Control.

And I think they created Futuremark (company behind 3Dmark), and some other companies.

Wow, I had no idea, but am not entirely surprised.

Anecdotally, my Pentium 3 machine (forgot what GPU it had, sadly) back in 2004 was struggling with most modern (for the time period) games that had even a hint of graphical fidelity. Max Payne 2, on the other hand, looked mindblowing and ran like butter.

So many great game studios were founded by demosceners: Rockstar North, EA Dice, Starbreeze Studios to name a few.

Second Reality will always be peak demoscene for me.

That one seemed really widely distributed, iirc we got our copy off of a CD from a computer magazine at the time. Really cool, and it ran on most people's PCs. I wouldn't be surprised if that was the first time seeing 3D rendering on PC, after Wolfenstein anyway. Actually, Wolfenstein was 1992, Second Reality was 1993; Wolfenstein had just the 3d-looking environments, Second Reality had 3D models / polygons and the like.

Not just the 3D but the other effects were pretty impressive too with second reality. It looked like an Amiga demo but ran on a plain old VGA graphics hardware which didn't have any of the dedicated graphics effects (sprites, zooming, color bars, etc.) that Amiga machines were capable of creating in hardware.

Prepare to be amazed and watch "Copper" by Surprise!Productions (1992) [1]. It has hardware zooming, vertical and horizontal copper bars, and even a horizontal wobble all on a regular VGA card (although not many cards or emulators support it)!

One interesting VGA hardware effect in this context which I have not seen in any demo, is to change the character width from 8 to 9 pixels _during_ a horizontal scanline. The trick is to use RDTSC to estimate the pixel position, with which you can create a nice wobble effect in text mode. Obviously, this requires a Pentium or higher, and at the time this became possible, text mode was rather outdated.

[1] https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=2048

"I am not an atomic playboy." -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_H._P._Blandy

Aaaah yes that was incredible. Along with panic, unreal , they were really heads and shoulders above the competition.

And don’t forget scream tracker 3 ! ( which is actually how I discovered the demoscene)

The pre-GPU era and retro computer competitions like Amiga has many jewels.

The GPU powered demos are impressive in a different way.

RSI Megademo. Lovely.

Second Reality by Future Crew, Timeless by Tran, so many good ones from this era.

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