demoscene

/demohseen/ [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
hacks 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 demogroups emerged, they
started to have compos 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/.
