[also `demo scene'] A culture of multimedia hackers located primarily
in Scandinavia and northern Europe. Demoscene folklore recounts that
when old-time {warez d00dz} cracked some piece of software they often
added an advertisement in the beginning, usually containing colorful
{display hack}s with greetings to other cracking groups. The
demoscene was born among people who decided building these display
hacks is more interesting than hacking -- or anyway safer. Around
1990 there began to be very serious police pressure on cracking
groups, including raids with SWAT teams crashing into bedrooms to
confiscate computers. Whether in response to this or for esthetic
reasons, crackers of that period began to build self-contained
display hacks of considerable elaboration and beauty (within the
culture such a hack is called a {demo}). As more of these
{demogroup}s emerged, they started to have {compo}s at copying
parties (see {copyparty}), which later evolved to standalone events
(see {demoparty}). The demoscene has retained some traits from the
{warez d00dz}, including their style of handles and group names and
some of their jargon.
Traditionally demos were written in assembly language, with lots of
smart tricks, self-modifying code, undocumented op-codes and the
like. Some time around 1995, people started coding demos in C, and a
couple of years after that, they also started using Java.
Ten years on (in 1998-1999), the demoscene is changing as its
original platforms (C64, Amiga, Spectrum, Atari ST, IBM PC under DOS)
die out and activity shifts towards Windows, Linux, and the Internet.
While deeply underground in the past, demoscene is trying to get into
the mainstream as accepted art form, and one symptom of this is the
commercialization of bigger demoparties. Older demosceners frown at
this, but the majority think it's a good direction. Many demosceners
end up working in the computer game industry. Demoscene resource
pages are available at http://www.oldskool.org/demos/explained/ and
http://www.scene.org/.
[glossary]
[Reference(s) to this entry by made by: {compo}{copyparty}{demo}{demoeffect}{demogroup}{demoparty}{dentro}{intro}{screen}]