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Comment by swift | Hacker News Reader

Farbrausch has stood out to me for a long time as one of the strongest demo groups. They consistently produce demos that are not just technically impressive but really beautiful as well. I highly recommend checking out their back catalog if you haven't seen their work.

Another group I highly recommend is Andromeda Software Development. They are less about "check out these cool techniques" and more about putting together a cohesive, music-video-like experience. I've heard different perspectives on whether that's a good thing, but irrespective of where you come down on that they produce some demos that are really enjoyable to watch.

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As this is my personal opinion, please take it with a big grain of salt - ASD's Lifeforce is the new benchmark for demo effectiveness. It is just so beautiful.

When I first saw Farbrausch's Debris I thought it was a bit boring. After all, it's repetitive. The soundtrack is like some cheap industrial techno, and the demo itself doesn't really show off that much.... Until you realise that the whole thing is less than 200kB. An amazing feat.

There is just one experience more profound the demoscene has given me. It must have been no later than 1995 or 1996, or about the time when the Amiga and PC groups had just discovered 3D toroids, vector castles and phong shading in general. Half of the demos shown in the party had some kind of floating/rotating phongs-shaded toroid, and about a third sported a zoom-in/zoom-out view of a castle. It got pretty dull, pretty fast.

And then finally Byterapers showed off how to outdo everyone by using the same effects with better timing. On C-64. Jaw, meet floor.

ASD demos do nothing for me, the visuals are mostly nice but the music ... god awful.

You know what they say: ASD -- Amusic's Soundtrack Dump

(That said, I'm actually part of the faction who likes aMusic's weird prog-rocky compositions. And, regardless of what you think of his work, you've got to respect aMusic for being one of the very few demoscene composers who incorporate real, acoustic instruments and vocals into their work. I really can't think of any others.)

ASD's Lifeforce is the new benchmark for demo effectiveness

Wow, pretty good. I haven't followed games and the demoscene in the last few years, so modern graphics always impress me a lot.

My favorite demo is Sonnet by Threestate: http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=3282

As the coder of Sonnet that's wonderful to hear, 13 years after its original release! :)

Oh my god! You're sagacity of threestate?! I'm swooning! "melrose space" is my all-time favourite demo! To this day, I still watch it regularly, I love it so much. (As well as the other 3s ones -- like enjoying a favourite album.) Thank you!

http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=162

http://www.pouet.net/groups.php?which=65

Good to hear! I never thought people would still be looking at these things such a long time after the fact but I guess that's the internet for you :)

Btw, the things we released as threestate were a clear testament to how important design is (and more accurately in this case, the design of Steven) when you're doing demos. Before that, some of us (me, sarix, inopia) did a bunch of releases as Quad that were also fairly impressive technically but had no design and...pretty much nobody cared.

Yeah, I can't tell you how much pleasure all those demos have given me over the years, so the opportunity to thank someone directly is really satisfying to me. Thanks again. :)

I recognise your/those names from other releases (like quad, and haujobb). And like you said, others may have been more impressive technically, but it's the threestate ones that have always stuck with me, for that amazingly perfect (IMNSHO) combination of technical impressiveness, visuals, and audio.

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