Demonstration.
Back in the dim and distant past (well, 1987 to be exact), I was a spotty, chubby, geeky teenager, and I got into something somewhat different to most other spotty, geeky teenagers of the time.
While they were all off getting drunk for the first time, desperately trying to lose their virginity and generally being all teenage and obnoxious, I was part of the Amiga demoscene.
This scene contained some of the strangest, yet most intelligent people you could have ever met. It was a world of computer hardware manuals, bad fashion sense, worse haircuts, social awkwardness, and probably the only place where someone’s two favourite bands could be Iron Maiden and Erasure. We were all misfits, but brilliant misfits.
The demoscene was born of the software piracy scene - basically, lots of guys in Germany and Scandinavia acquiring games and other software before its release in the shops (by somewhat shady means) and distributing it via the post and old-school BBSs (and the blazing speed of the 14.4kbaud modem) to the world. “Zero-day warez” was their battle cry. Demos were a statement of intent by these groups - showing everyone else in that scene how good they all were at programming, graphics and music, and at pushing the hardware of the computers of the time to their limits. These groups inadvertently destroyed the market for Amiga software, but also later gave the interactive entertainment industry some of their most gifted people.
Many of these programmers, artists and musicians later found employment within the video games industry - the very industry they were subverting by pirating games. Oh, the irony. But these people had honed their skills in a competitive environment, trying to outdo every other upstart demo group with ever-more-impressive displays of programming acumen. This gave them the edge over the more pedestrian, school-educated programmers and some of them went on to great things. For instance, several of my former group-mates had huge successes in the games business - one of them runs the company that makes all the Lego games, others programmed Micro Machines for Codemasters and worked on Tomb Raider for Eidos. Hardly small-time stuff.
Sure, we could have been out there sniffing glue, but the kids who did this wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with us - we were far too nerdy. So we gave ourselves pseudonyms, and carved out our own brand of coolness. We were nobodies to the so-called “cool” kids out there, but we were heroes to some. “Legends in our own raster-time”, we used to say. We made ourselves into characters in a digital soap opera - complete with the requisite dysfunction and feuding, all played out through the medium of the “scrolltext”. A ubiquitous and essential component of any demo, the scrolltext conveyed the personalities of those involved, provided “greets” to their friends (one of the earliest forms of digital kudos) and “fuckings” to their enemies, all in brightly-coloured, sine-scrolling characters.
I know I wouldn’t have the career I have today if it hadn’t been for my time in the Amiga demoscene. Through knowing some of these special people and being a part of many of these demoscene productions, my enthusiasm for computing (and an early example of interest-related social networking) was piqued and I’ve never looked back. Many of my former groupmates look back on this time with similarly fond memories, and as a wonderful thing that we all helped mould. Though the Amiga has long since vanished into obsolescence, its spirit lives on in those of us who used its unique abilities to shape our own fantasies.
