Second Reality was truly a technical marvel and arguably represented the pinnacle of the PC demo scene. It’s amazing how much influential it has been and how it continues to endure some 30 years later. Not too shabby for a group of teenagers from Finland.

(And now I feel extra old realizing the original Second Reality was released 30 years ago.)

Aside: I first watched Second Reality on my PC at the time which was a 386/40DX. I must have watched it 100 times at least. When I upgraded to a 486/66DX2 the first thing I did upon booting it up was to watch Second Reality. I was amazed at how much I had been missing before; everything ran smoother and elements that had been truncated before were now visible. Yet even when it was on my old hardware it was still completely presentable. It’s a credit to the Future Crew coders that it could run so well on such disparate hardware.

Another aside: the Second Reality source code was released on GitHub for its 20th anniversary: https://github.com/mtuomi/SecondReality

There was a great 5-part blog series to decipher it: https://fabiensanglard.net/second_reality/