Comment by boomlinde | Hacker News Reader

Comment by boomlinde | Hacker News Reader

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The basic premise of this post is utterly wrong.

> I have another pet theory on why the demoscene died.

It didn't die. Revision hosts hundreds of sceners every year. This year over 400 entries were submitted to the competition, including 40 full PC demos and over 40 tracked/oldschool/executable music entries. Even for small, local C64/Amiga parties here you have to race for tickets to these events.

We released a C64 intro outside a competition a couple of months ago, and within a couple of days it was buried in the inflow of new C64 releases on CSDB. The C64 scene is bigger now than when I got into it 18 years ago.

> The same story goes for tracked music or chiptunes, compared to MP3s.

That didn't die either. Things don't die just because you stop pay attention to them. The notion of competing with Pixar is absurd; the terms of competition and markets are entirely different. Pixar makes movies for the mainstream to make money. Sceners make productions for sceners that may be more interesting to them than a Pixar production in an esoteric sense that the mainstream will not understand.

No need to be so harsh. You seem to be misinterpreting and misunderstanding my comment. I get it that there are still people who are trying to keep the spirit alive, and I wish them all the most of fun, but as I try to explain it is no longer the same for most of us who were there in the 80s and 90s.

"The demoscene died" is a trope that means that the original demoscene feeling is gone for many. If you got into the demoscene in 2005, I doubt you experienced it first-hand, but I am sure you have read about it.

Edit: To go into the Pixar argument a bit more: In 1993 a demo such as Second Reality could impress "normies" as much as an MTV video clip could. Remember that back then video clips were often total utter crap, and some demos were buttery smooth 50fps animations with a distinctive feel that you could not find anywhere in popular culture.

In my personal opinion, after the end of the 90s the demoscene devolved into a "L'art pour l'art" incrowd which is great fun for some of its members, but less so for the general public.

I'd like to fault the Pixar argument in yet another aspect - every Pixar video any of us have ever seen is heavily compressed. I did not appreciate how much is lost that way until I started playing real demos on the big screen as opposed to their youtube rendering.

Take Through the Cracks by Still - it is not compressable, and everyone I show it to on the big projection wall agrees that it is unlike any video they've ever experienced.

I've shown many of the more recent demos, built for modern systems with GPUs, to lots of regular people. Many of the best are still viewed as impossibly cool music videos even if the technical magic is lost on "normies". There's still plenty of people who ask me "are there any new demos out there you can send me on youtube?" Some of the artwork, music, and overall representation is first-class at levels top commercial studios develop for advertisements or movie intros etc. But it's all done by hobbyists and I think lots of people can appreciate the pure art aspect of it.

The rest of the scene is very much appreciation for doing things within various technical constraints, and any appreciation of that requires more technical understanding. Even these days, many younger software engineers have trouble understanding what it takes to make and compete one of these constrained demos because the constraints themselves are virtually impossible to fathom for people who grew up smoking GB of RAM with poorly written Python code.

The idea of writing a 4kb demo for an ancient 8-bit computer that was dead in the market more than a decade before they were even born doesn't compute until you really start walking them through the fundamental CS concepts implied.

> No need to be so harsh. You seem to be misinterpreting and misunderstanding my comment.

I interpreted you saying that it has died as a claim that it has died, not that it still thrives but—gasp—has evolved since the 90s.

> "The demoscene died" is a trope that means that the original demoscene feeling is gone for many. If you got into the demoscene in 2005, I doubt you experienced it first-hand, but I am sure you have read about it.

Presumably, that's about the extent of your involvement with the current demoscene as well. I am unable to comment on your feeling or how it disappeared. I think to some extent it simply boils down to teenagers growing up and losing interest, or not enjoying the direction of the scene. People have lamented the presumed imminent death of the demoscene for literal decades. It evolves and favored skill sets become obsolete: of course some people who were doing boot block demos for the Amiga 500 may feel alienated by the time the state of the art was 3D acceleration and shaders, just as someone doing C64 trackmos might have felt alienated once the Amiga 500 was the state of the art.

Fact remains that I can sit sweaty and drunk in a room crammed with 100 other drunk people in the middle of the summer and try to fix a fatal bug in the loader 20 minutes before deadline with two group mates standing around throwing out ideas, have an eureka moment just in time and then watch the competition results until three in the morning. I can ride on that feeling for weeks regardless of what your feeling is. If that's the demoscene being dead, I guess people weren't notified enough times despite it being a hot topic for such a long time.

Don't be afraid -- personally I am still totally amazed by new stuff coming out. Freespin/Reflex [1] for example instantly gave me the 1995 [2] chills.

The demoscene virus stuck, and I can really enjoy people doing unimaginable stuff with old and new hardware.

The way you describe the competition feeling also makes me remember similar fun at ICPC contests :)

The demoscene feeling that I have is probably a mix of nostalgia, and a sense of privilege of being part of a really weird subculture. But I also remember feeling out of touch even back then.

[1] https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=89362

[2] https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=25783

I was there and I get your meaning. I experienced the original demo scene of the 80s and 90s and the only difference I see, and the one you are pointing out, is the medium used to express this form of art has changed over the years for purely technical reasons. It all takes talent. It's just a different medium that's being worked with today than it was back then. Those of us old enough to remember the 80s and 90s also have a feeling of nostalgia that goes along with it. One day those young enough today will look back on today's demos when they are older and feel that same sense of nostalgia that we do for the 80s and 90s stuff.

I like your "medium" analogy. I think there are similar processes at work in the fine art world. There, for example, painting is considered old-fashioned by some, but a lot of contemporary artists are pushing that medium to new limits.

>"The demoscene died" is a trope that means that the original demoscene feeling is gone for many. If you got into the demoscene in 2005, I doubt you experienced it first-hand, but I am sure you have read about it.

I was in the Demoscene (US) and wrote many demos and intros in the 80's and 90's. I don't write demos anymore, because the pressure to support my lifestyle means I write code for money now, but I do get the same feeling when I watch any of the many demos put out month after month by groups that were around back when I was coding demos, and new groups that have sprung up in the decades since. It still gives me the same wonderment when a C64 learns a new trick. It hasn't lost the excitement for me at all to view an impressive new thing. If anything it's gotten better with time and there are what seems like just as many demos coming out now as there were back in the 90s. I may even fly over to Europe someday to visit a demo party.

>In my personal opinion, after the end of the 90s the demoscene devolved into a "L'art pour l'art" incrowd which is great fun for some of its members, but less so for the general public.

I'm not sure what you define as art, but there are still plenty of demos coming out that push the C64 and Amiga past any limit people thought possible. PCs have evolved and basically have no real limits now with the latest Nvidia cards, but the 64k and lower compos are where it's at on the PC, it's still very impressive what can be done in a few KB. New tricks are still being discovered. New ways to do cool new things are still emerging. It's not necessarily "art" as much as it is clever programming, but maybe some people consider clever programming to be an art?

> the demoscene devolved into a "L'art pour l'art"

It didn't, though. It just took the scene a while to adapt to the reality that you can't learn how to push a GPU over the edge in a weekend any longer. As a result, making demos also became more accessible, and more directly related to game development (and related careers.)

The result is a scene that is so broad now, it's almost impossible to keep track of it all. It's no longer just Amiga, C64 and PC.

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