Demo or Die (1995)

The source code (+data) of Second Reality by Future Crew from 1993 is available under an open source license: https://github.com/mtuomi/SecondReality

It consists of 32K lines of assembler, 24K lines of C and 2K lines of Pascal.

Here is a video of the demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iw17c70uJes

Whoa! Blast from the past, I remember that original article from when WIRED was young and fresh. The demoscene laid a pretty solid foundation for me, I learned so much ranging from assembler programming, art, graphics and composition. I am proud to have been part of the demoscene and the sharing culture.

For ancient Nineties tech culture trivia fans: this piece was written by Dave Green, who subsequently left Wired UK[1] (which is the source of this article) to edit the mildly noted British geek newsletter periodical NTK[2]

[1]: https://www.spesh.com/danny/wireduk/

[2]: http://www.ntk.net/

d.

Demos are available at:

https://scene.org

https://www.pouet.net

https://www.demozoo.org

Many demos reek of bashful teenage spirit and childlike wonder. May the flame never die!

Never read this before, thanks for submitting.

Demos are what got me interested in programming back in my teens and in the mid-late 90s I attended what few North American demo parties there were (NAID, Spring Break, and later Pilgrimage), even competing in and winning one (Spring Break '99).

It's been great to see the scene is still active and while things have changed dramatically with insanely powerful GPUs and mature 3D graphics APIs, not as defined by the hardware limitations as it was back then, it's still a really interesting space. I highly recommend getting involved.

If you're interested in the demoscene I would suggest taking a look at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/

Created by Jim Leonard / Trixter and he's done an excellent job. Selected demos from PC and Amiga with top notch production. I highly recommend Volume 3.

The first demo I've seen it was Stash 64 from The Black Lotus (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqOaDLmJNgE) and i got totally catched by this. I started going to all demoscene parties and i organized a big party in my country.

I read Whiplash by Joi Ito and Jeff Howe (MITP), in which Joi talked about "demo or die", and credited Nicholas Negroponte as the source of that phrase, but apparently not: NN - "Somebody else actually coined the term “demo or die” and I am not sure who. It might’ve been Muriel Cooper, because I arrived one day at her lab and saw it written on a wall clock where all the numbers had been taken out and were replaced with the letters, “demo or die.” I thought it was pretty good." (https://www.wired.com/beyond-the-beyond/2019/05/nicholas-neg...)

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I want this kind of tech enthusiasm back.