"The scene is dead" has become a meme by now. For example the "new talent" Meteoriks award is introduced with "For a scene that has been dead since 1999, our walking dead are pretty fresh".
It is well alive. Sure, we still see some of the same people from 1989, and the average age is certainly going up, but it absolutely doesn't mean we aren't seeing new blood. Styles change, technical achievement is usually seen in the sizecoding or "wild" competitions, while PC demos tend to be more cinematic and focused on art. We are seeing new things, like livecoding shaders and fantasy consoles. Of course, the Amigas and other oldschool platforms are still there, with new tricks being discovered year after year.
There are still regular demoparties. Revision, the successor to Breakpoint and Mekka Symposium is doing well year after year. With the addition of some online events like Lovebyte.
Things come and go, but there is no sign of the scene really being dead. Heck, we even seen older demosceners bring their children to the parties, with some of them already doing cool stuff.
Computing in general is /huge/ now. X is dying is funny in tech. By raw number of participants has it ever really changed? Take MUDs for example, I remember my MUD days. There are still hundreds of active MUDs. Is X really dying? Who knows.
I remember playing MUDs in high school because my system admin blocked all online games, but didn't block telnet. I credit it with my high speed typing and finally getting better than 50/50 at spelling. I'm towards the later part of my thirties. Just checked out their website and they still seem to be alive and well. Don't even require telnet anymore, lots of browser or desktop apps to do what a telnet terminal did
I think one of the difference between stamp collecting and the demoscene is that while stamp collecting was quite big for a time, the demoscene has always been a niche thing.
For a time the demoscene looked bigger than it was, mostly because of all the cracks. But for the people who actually produced stuff or went to demoparties or even just seek out productions that weren't cracks, it has always been a small world, like a few thousands of active people worldwide.
I think there's still people hacking around doing cool stuff.
Things like PICO-8, etc.
It's much harder to throw a big party these days in general, and especially so about technical niches. Hack Club is popular with youth, but much more about smaller gatherings.
PICO-8 is super fun way to explore the joy of constraints.
Over the summer, we hosted a vibecoding PICO-8 game jam in Amsterdam. It wasn’t a demoparty but we nevertheless had some amazing demoscene folks show up with c64s and example demos. We attracted a handful of teenagers and had nearly equal gender balance—and made some really creative games. We definitely experienced some hateful online vitriol about vibecoding (eg “you are the human equivalent of cancer”) but that was to be expected—this event was almost deliberately about the tension between deep understanding and rapid iteration cycles. I found the tension between vibecoding and demoscene to be really enjoyable and productive.
I went to a coin/stamp shop not too long ago to kill some time downtown and the guy said basically nobody cares about stamps anymore. Still plenty interested in coins.
With the decline of interest in stamp collecting, are the prices of rare stamps and collections also depreciating?
Or maybe the prices are even higher because the few who are interested know that stamps are forever a thing of the past, and in a way that makes them more unique and have timeless value.
In my experience the old computer nerd communities don't do much to help get young people that would be interested into it. A lot of the discussion online mainly just consists of reminiscing about how amazing the '80s were.
Documentation is also in something of a state—the big video game consoles (NES, SNES, Genesis..) all have plenty of free, modern high quality guides teaching you how to program them from nothing, understand all the hardware, etc.. then look at the '80s computers (*especially* the Amiga) and it seems to mainly be scattered around old book scans and wiki articles assuming varying levels of pre-existing knowledge of the hardware. Strangely enough a lot of the best documentation seems to be from YouTube tutorials (I guess because you can see what they're actually doing). It sounds wrong to call it "stuck in the past" but I guess that would be the best way to describe it.
This isn't really about the scene specifically but it's somewhat related at least.
I know you can't really cause a change in an online community by complaining about it in a hacker news comment but i do think if someone savvy with the amiga wrote a guide in that style (with things like "We press build, open the rom, and wow! We have a bouncing box on the screen!") it might start the ball rolling. Would love to see it either way.
I guess part of the reason was that the consoles never had public development kits or manuals, so when the homebrew scene emerged they had to bootstrap themselves (and in the process usually created better manuals/tools than the OEMs), compared to all the home computers where of course they were always available and nobody felt a reason to rewrite them all.
Palm OS is getting livelier by the year. There's a number of younger folks getting into it, with some creating new apps, and it's been ported to new hardware.
My guess is that as time goes on, more development knowledge will be captured/OCRed into machine-searchable archives that will help the beginners. Using emulated/virtual development tool chains is also a lot less resource-intensive, and will help newcomers who don't know how to set these things up on their own.
Much love for the demo scene, where it all began for me, pulling all nighters as a teenager writing 68k assembler in asmone on the amiga.. phreaking calls to euro BBS, writing trainers and intro for games, scanning 1800 numbers for diverters/PBX systems to exploit, pulling all your best assembler graphics routines together for your crew's newest demo for release at all-weekend demo/LAN parties.. normal teenage activities, right?! :D
I would love more outlets for creative coding, I feel like neocities is a bit like that. That said there isn't really a scene or real sense of community (AFAIK). I mean someone liked something I uploaded once, but I never interacted with them again.
Cohost had fun vibes like that as well, but I guess it's no longer with us. Same with Glitch, but admittedly I didn't use it in the last few years, but it was my go to option for hosting a snippet of unserious HTML. "HTML in the park" does seem like one fun IRL outlet for this kind of thing, I found out my city has one and I want to go to it.
Admittedly none of these were really demo scenes or places where creative coding was exclusively fostered, but creative coding and demo-like-scenes communities probably exist but are more likely some obscure discord server.
~I've begun to set up creative coding events in my city just due to this. I'd love to join an online community to show stuff off, I always find places like twitter end up feeling like you're shouting into the void.
It's not about loads of people commenting and liking your work, just finding a place to actually discuss it would be fantastic
I recently starting dabbling in live coding and found it to be really hard and fun and technical and creative. And while I'm not really that comfortable in Discord, I did find the community welcoming and helpful.
TOPLAP is the one I’m most familiar with and it is nicely organized by live coding env/lang. There are some other servers listed here: https://github.com/toplap/awesome-livecoding
The demo scene inspired me to keep my next‑gen terminal [0] tiny: it is under 5MB (Mac download was once 900 KB) and my aim is to get all downloads down to ~1MB. If demosceners can do it, regular indie devs really have no excuse.
This scene isn’t dead; we should just look beyond 3D glitter. See File Pilot [1] for another compact, clever example.
> If demosceners can do it, regular indie devs really have no excuse.
Demosceners and indie devs are working under different constraints. For demosceners, the file size (4kb, 40kb, etc.) is the goal. For devs, especially those making a tool that you download and install, extreme size constraints seem unnecessary (although avoiding bloat is always good).
Instead, it seems to me that primary constraints for indie devs should be things like being easy to maintain, well documented, easy to use, easy to fix bugs, easy for other people to work on and extend. Small size should be a secondary target rather than primary.
Of course, one of the advantages of being indie is that you can set whatever constraints and targets you like for yourself.
For me, one of the greatest examples of this style is Reaper[0]. A completely functional professional audio DAW in a 12 to 20MB download (depending on your architecture and OS).
On one hand, seeing multiple megs described as slim makes me want to pinch myself, because that’s very far from my understanding of reality. On the other, today these apps always seem to include a bespoke toolkit of some description (as both File Pilot and Reaper demonstrate), whereas slim golden-age Windows apps leaned very hard on the GDI/USER/COMCTL one, and those libraries are quite hefty.
(Unlike, say, the Visual Basic IDE, which had two custom toolkits—the one the apps used and the one the IDE did—or Office, which AFAIU included three or four divergent versions—for Access, for Word and Excel, for VBA apps, and for the VBA IDE, with the last two being effectively identical to the respective VB ones, though I don’t know if the IDE and the Word/Excel ones were actually different. And that’s not counting IE’s toolkit, which basically displaced USER controls in HTML forms by the time of IE6. None of these count as slim, is my point.)
But what really makes me wonder here is how File Pilot manages to display what looks in the screenshot like a shell item’s (file’s) full context menu using its custom styling.
My impression was that the atrocious and discordant two-level Explorer context menu Microsoft is pushing in Windows 11 was because the traditional (Windows 95-era) way to provide context menu items with was to write a shell extension (an Explorer plugin, which would get loaded not only into the bloody system shell but also into every app that used common file dialogs) that would get called when the menu was being built. And that callback interface was built around the assumption of menu items being traditional HMENUs (and allowed the shell extension to set up arbitrary drawing routines for the items it added). So changing the toolkit that Explorer used for context menus away from USER was essentially impossible, and even styling it differently from Windows 95 was fraught (I do remember seeing the occasional flat-gray menu item on Windows XP with Luna enabled). There was an attempt to transition to more declarative context menus around (IIRC) Windows 7, but evidently adoption wasn’t good. And thus the Windows 11 Explorer was forced to use the embarrassing hack of initially showing the declarative context menu, drawn using its new toolkit, then grafting the real one, drawn using USER, onto it as a submenu.
And yet.
File Pilot draws the full context menu with a look very similar to Explorer’s preferred one.
Extending the user shell was always for the benefit of Microsoft first, and for the rest of us second. Companies who tried to add serious advanced functionality through that found out that they were not really welcome, even though in theory everything was object-oriented, loosely coupled, language-agnostic, yada yada. It probably was mainly a solution to decrease the amount of territory wars over code inside Microsoft, and let teams work independently without demanding synchronous fixes.
We shouldn't forget that half of the documentation on how everything should work was only released after anti-trust investigation and pressure from courts.
By that time, Windows had already switched to shiny fresh undocumented technologies.
You should remember that a lot of software around the Millennium simply re-implemented latest fashion trends (Office controls, XP styles, etc.) on their own in not quite exact ways, not just because programmers back then wore skins, and ate raw meat, and feared nothing, and because such third party toolkits were available commercially, but also because official interfaces to do the same were not offered until later releases (or sometimes ever). I vaguely recall discussions of teams within Microsoft sometimes doing the same, resulting in Office controls sharing no code with common controls used by the rest of the system which look exactly the same.
The irony is that web browsers, being the most popular kind of application, and interfaces built on top of their technology simply ignore the native interface toolkits, and do everything independently, which is even more extreme than some old school custom paint handlers. A lot of work has been spent on re-implementing native look and behaviour there, multiple times.
One of the examples of actively supported applications interfacing with shell object hierarchy without using system dialogs I can name is Tixati, which needs to have file picker(s) at hand inside its own dialogs. It's not open source, but it has been using GTK, custom controls, and probably some sauce on top. Given the user complains about its performance or missing items, and regular appearance in change log over the years, I'd say it's a wrestling game for the author. At the moment the tree is lazily populated at the first appearance, which is fine, but not unnoticeable.
It is a bit hilarious that showing a list of file names in some directory is a trivial example on using system-provided iterators for the novice programmers, but adding icons matching those that Explorer shows (handling links and other special files, special directories, non-filesystem-based locations which still have files user might want to choose in them, etc) to that list suddenly becomes a nightmare.
Regulars devs don't need an excuse, they have a good reason: their optimization targets are different. The people that turn their work into their salary, and mostly the people who buy into those software, don't go away because of how large the thing is, so, why sacrifice other goals, to further this particular goal?
"If demosceners can do it" is not a good argument to talk about software, because demosceners are the cream of the software crop, when it comes to the specific thing that the demoscene is all about. It's like saying if racers can make that corner doing a 100, regular drivers have no excuse. Or I'm greatly misunderstanding your point.
Filepilot looks great. I wouldn't pay, as Double Commander serves me just fine, but an 1.8 MB download is impressive. DC is 10 MB in comparison. Still perfectly fine.
That video's great because it breaks down how Psygnosis managed to get 12 layers of parallax scrolling at 50fps and 128 colors on-screen. I never really loved the game as much as (say) Blood Money, but it was an awesome accomplishment in the same way demoscene demos were!
I was never part of the scene, but I did write code for a couple of demos and had friends in various groups. I just wasn't much interested in making non-games, and no one I knew were interested in making games. Made me sad later when I learned how many people from the demo scene had ended up in the games industry. If I had know that as a teenager I would have happily done more boring demo coding just to have a path into game dev later. Well, kind of ironic considering everyone I met in the scene were loudly proclaiming how lame it was to play games.
In hindsight I would have loved something like the 2010s game jams and indie games culture to have existed in the early 1990s. Guess this just proves how much of a lamer I was.
In all fairness, the conditions that saw the demo scene rising are so remote to be almost incomprehensible to the new generation.
"You see, when a cracking crew beat the protection of a new game, they would upload their hacked version to an elite BBS and repackaged it with a little intro and a trainer. They had to be very creative and skilled, often working directly in assembler, in order to achieve impressive imagery and chip music while still fitting on the same 1.4MB floppy."
I love it when they would rewrite portions of the game with better compression tech then the original devs in order to get room for their cracktros or just make it a better download from BBS or later Internet.
I think the conditions of the demoscene arising were a software interface that consisted of coding, and people's first experience with a computer was
10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD!"
20 GOTO 10
RUN
This piqued the interest of curious youth, who then were further enabled by a hardware interface where you could write a value into an area of memory, which would then appear as a pixel on screen.
Exactly this. Whenever I talk about how I got started in computer art over 40 years ago, I always mention the fact that a screen back then was a one-way device: TV network to you. Basic home computers HAD to plug into the TV, and to a kid, this was magic and freedom.
The scene is not what it used to be, but it's still alive and will remain for decades. We "old-timers" were lucky to be around the 90s when the demo groups and parties were on full swing.
Perhaps its the lack of appeal, in the past,
the idea that you could squeeze performance into
an old machine was cool, but the gap between
current hardware and "demoscene limits" feels like
artificially crippling: if you have 64GB of ram, the
appeal of 64KB demo is far less than if you have
a 64MB 486DX. It would be far more cooler, that instead
of ancient hardware and artifically limited PCs, they would run demoscene
on embedded stuff like Raspberry PI and modern microcontrollers,
that would align with current DIY trends instead of chasing retro clout.
The problem with 64kb intros is not the availability of 64gb of ram, it's that the level of work for something really impressive requires you to have a really advanced toolset, and even then there are stumbling blocks.
The stuff I've written for 64k intros:
- Rendering system (software renderers in the 90s and latest a non-RTX raytracing systems with global illumination), these alone is kinda what people write or wrote MSc thesis works on.
- SDF based effects/rendering (this is what 4k intros often focus on apart from music, here it becomes an addition to the above toolset).
- Often some keyframing/skinning systems, either customized or imported from Blender(now) or in the past 3dsmax, lightwave,etc. (and matching the keyframing maths of the tools), the kind of shit that made game industry companies adopt 3rd party engines because it's hard to get correct (luckily for demos with small teams we can avoid some pitfalls of the formats).
- A modular softsynth (with sequenceing, genrerators and filters) with a MDCT based compressor (think MP3 like compression)
- Texture and image via generators and filters.
- A few generations of visual editing tools to have visual editing of various things listed above.
(Yes, some people have created more abstract things in 64k intros but those don't push the envelope as much imho).
Oh and once all that is done, nobody will run it because...
- The exe compressors used to make things small have been adopted by malware writers and antivirus programs will flag everything because antivirus software just profiles the unpacker routines.
(4k writers have less of an issue with this because the 64k compressors are more drop-in whilst crinkler that's used for 4k's is a custom linker that will have less of a profile and requires custom build steps).
As for Raspberry PI's, there has been compos to target them and phones but the capability of a Raspberry PI and phones is close enough to a PC that you're not really constrained in any pracitcal way apart from needing to push it onto that machine.
On that tangent however Pico-8 and similar pseudoconsoles have been popular since they often provide a simple IDE environment that let's people get straight to it and have a clear recgonizable restriction level.
The point of the limits is the challenge though, not just nostalgia. I don't agree that a 64KiB demo is any less impressive on a modern machine than it was back then. On the contrary, moving to something like the latest Pi means there isn't much point in having the limit at all - and those competitions already exist, e.g. a PC "demo" (as opposed to "intro") isn't usually limited to a specific size.
Seems the modern corollary to the demoscene is TouchDesigner programming. I always thought it would be such a neat thing for demosceners to jump to TD and work with other forms of art like live dance and live music. The fact you can have body tracking, hand gesture recognition and also have it react to sound seems like the next step in demoscene stuff.
Yeah, I remember reading an interview with one of the few big demosceners, and they said that to compete in the highest leagues, you need editing tools to build these impressive scenes.
After all the most talented musicians and visual designers often were not the same people, and every artistic pursuit involves a lot of iteration.
To be fair groups tended to build the tools themselves, not to take away from their achievements, but once the tools are done and public (like the ones you shared), a lot of the challenge and point of competition is gone.
Tooling also tends to create a moat between 'users' and 'developers', the former of which lack the low-level knowledge to transition into the latter.
Looks like plenty of attendance, lots of elementary through high school age attendees. Lots of families bringing their children. Site's got 1000's of pictures of evidence.
Maybe the scene has change in a way they don't especially want to attend over the years, yet it does not seem to be "dying". This post on LinkedIn claims Summer 2023 had 25,000 attendees. Seems healthy.
I feel like the massive popularity of tiny fantasy consoles like pico-8 is a pretty good sign that at least the ethos of the demoscene is live and well
The best period of my life as a programmer. I've never stopped feeling nostalgic for the demoscene of the 80s and 90s. When we used to fight between Amiguys and Atarists. The Amiguys always won, of course. In fact, there was no real point to flamewar about. They had almost everything. And us Atarists? Well... we had a 68000 at 8 MHz, a MIDI port, a budget several hundreds of $ less... and even more ingenuity to get the best out of our machines (hey, let's defend ourselves as best as we can). But when the despicable PC reared its ugly architecture, suddenly we were the best of friends.
I must also confess my sacrilege, Amiguy: a buddy gave me his Amiga 500. Shortly after, the floppy drive on my STe broke down. So I took apart the one from the Amiga and put it in my ST... I wasn't even sure it would work, but it did. Now you can beat me up... but calm down. It's not like the Amiga's drive was its strong point, was it? I couldn't have done that with the Copper and its friends, and sure I wish I could have!
The only people who still pitch demoscene dead are those with unrealistic expectations or who just returned and are surprised it’s still alive, ran by a number of 40+ people while they remember themselves joining at the age of 15. But the conversation about new generation is missed by solid 20 years and all of us who just stay focused on producing don’t waste time on rants, only to have 5 mins on hacker news that by default won’t get the idea of demoscene anyway. Way too many different scenes here to focus only on one that finally turned into a hobby, not a life changing experience.
To me one of the problems in modern demoscene is that modern PCs (especially GPUs) are so ridiculously powerful that full fat PC demos struggle to fully take advantage of it, at least in a way that is apparent to viewer. To me it feels like the emphasis has shifted more on the content side than purely techical excellence.
Sizecoding is another matter, and arguably the more interesting side of the scene these days. But it is kinda sad that we need artificial restrictions to make things interesting rather than trying to exploit every drop of perf you can squeeze from the computer.
It's a kind of a coding competition, indeed. The goals and the circumstances differ from a hackathon. The demoscene events are not for coding, although I'm sure it happens, but rather for showing off the work that was prepared beforehand. Usually these works are multimedia, so visuals and sound go together, but the main focus is the visuals, the rest of it is supportive. Works are nominated in different categories, which are usually set up to be very restrictive, for example, the work should be a single 32-bit Windows executable, no additional files, and the EXE should not exceed a certain byte size. The point of all this is to create the most impressive work within the restraints.
Wrt/ terminology, one submission of such a work is a "demo", and "demoscene" is the name for the culture itself (people, events, submissions, associated works like websites).
For an easy example, the all-time most popular work is this one: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=30244 (according to the site's own ranking). You can download the software to run yourself, or you can watch a youtube recording of it, which is much more accessible. The entirety of this work (visuals, music) is compiled into a single 177k executable.
This is referring to demo parties specifically. Let's not forget the social aspects of them though. Yes, a selected few went to parties to "compete" in their chosen art, some might have even taken them quite seriously. But they were the minority.
The bulk of the attendees just went for fun and company, and did not create anything. Demoparties _were indeed_ parties back in the 90s, with people playing games, drinking and socializing in general. You could argue these were like rave parties, only a bit quieter and much friendlier / inclusive (ok, maybe I am biased, but it certainly felt that way).
It was lacking in one aspect though - not many girls attended, and so as time passed these parties were becoming less attractive. But that did not stop anyone going home and downloading and admiring the products of demosceners, who did all this basically in their free time, for not much (if at all) compensation.
> The demoscene events are not for coding, although I'm sure it happens
How to tell you've never been to a demo party without saying you've never been to a demo party.
I jest, but scrambling to implement the last effect before the deadline, or fix some stupid last minute bug was certainly typical at the events I was at. And you see this in a lot of the prods which released post-party "proper" versions.
There were also parties which had "live" competitions, where a theme would be announced at the party and you had then just a few hours to make a demo. Obviously wouldn't do it from scratch but typically coding would be involved, if for nothing else to tie the effects together.
But yeah, the main demos and intros would primarily be made well in advance.
Guilty, I never have been! But, if you contrast it with a hackathon, the objective of the event is the showing off part, not the preparation part. Prep is at least months of work. Whereas the point of a hackathon is to create somethere during the event.
People creating interesting visuals in a very, very small computer program; often with some artificial constraints. Often it was put together with cracking scene, I guess the skills involved used to be similar (lot of low level hacking?).
My personal involvement with this scene is nil - I always just saw some interesting thing playing with crack.exe that I got from some dubious source, thought "huh it's neat", and went on with my life.
I have no idea what are the constraints do they have in 2025, or what platform do they even target. How are you gonna do demos on iOS that's all locked from top to bottom and you can't even run anything without involving Apple in the process?
I wanted to say earlier when first reading this that I got like 15 minutes in without any explanation of what this scene was, and it felt like that might be a reason for a scene to die, if someone like me who got his first Commodore 64 in 1986 and has been alive for nearly half a century with interest in what this sounded like had never heard of it, outreach and publicity to new folks must not be great.
But Wikipedia says this is primarily a European thing, so I guess that's why.
That's a very narrow definition, really. In general demos have neither much to do with shaders (except insofar that you have to write shaders to do 3D on GPUs), nor are they size-limited in general; only certain subtypes are.
The procedural music aspect doesn't get enough love. There's an amazing amount of DSP like stuff going on in the background. Most people focus on the visuals though
Physically, demos and game development have advanced far beyond where they were at the beginning of the demoscene, but now people no longer come together.
Game engines and devices have become accessible to everyone, and people are constantly inventing new things. For example, just look at the number of algorithms and new gameplay mechanics now compared to 10 years ago.
In 2012, I created a live coding platform and spent a lot of time thinking about why live coding didn’t become more popular than traditional coding. Live coding came about 10 years before React, which became reactive because you no longer had to press F5 every time you updated the HTML (I worked on the first version of React Webpack, which was doing server-side rendering).
Later, after going through a startup accelerator, the puzzle finally clicked for me.
Companies and businesses began making serious money from video games, discovering lots of talent in the wild indie dev and demoscene space. The best talents were like raw gems and this eventually scaled into an industry.
Now, the best innovations are being patented and presented at SIGGRAPH and the game engine market is massive.
Of course, amid all the flashiness and white-collar presence, it’s hard to spot the demosceners, but they’re behind every game. They’ve just been hired by corporations and their talent no longer expresses itself in the same way.
Unfortunately, companies provide very little support for the demoscene, which is why we don’t see the same explosive growth here as we do in games, graphics or AI.
I remember one case where a guy was hired to animate King Kong’s face for a movie and he spent two years hand-animating every single emotion.
I wonder what kind of demos he might have created during that time if the corporation hadn’t hired him and forced him into repetitive work.
I don't really think it's fair to compare game engines with the demoscene. The demoscene is really about exploiting hardware to the fullest extent and that's not really an economic advantage when you get new GPUs every year that are 50% to 30% faster. now, creative hacks can increase performance several hundred percent, but is this sustainable for a product? probably not. certain hacks are very specific and that reduces your market. they’re usually non-portable, fragile, or locked to very specific architectures. That doesn’t scale across consoles, PC variants, or mobile. So in a market context, the value of raw ingenuity is absorbed into engine pipelines or middleware, not showcased in standalone demos.
Now that is to say a demo can't be portable, for instance I've run several older demos on my computer. I've also had instances where demos wouldn't run on my computer. Imagine if that was a game that I bought. Or imagine if it was anstracted to such a point that the feature is just not available dynamically. For instance of particle effect became 100 times less impressive.
yeah, companies wants little effort for bigger effect. They want maintainable code, etc. Clever hacks are not really welcome.
Now that PC's are so powerful, you look for algorithms optimisation. And although it requires a ton of cleverness as well, it's much more documented than obscure hacks. You learn that at school.
> And the younger generation, having received access to gigabytes of RAM and storage, simply couldn't care less about being super lean and fast.
It's interesting I often attribute this to VCs and their desire for growth over efficiency (let alone profitability). I find myself having to reel in my desire to challenge myself to identify the most efficient way possible, even if it only saves a few dollars.
Never occurred to me it was generational and not related to VCs
From my perspective these evolved into game jams. I feel like if you only count competitions for old, outdated platforms these won't be getting as many new comers as other platforms that are common place and easy to develop for. Hosting them purely via the internet made them more accessible.
And they’ve lost. Everyone and their cousin uses Electron editors while showing up to FOSDEM on their MacBooks to discuss kernel development.
It’s already long over. We’re just starting to notice. The EFF is baffled - why do they yell in a void now, when just a decade ago they stopped SOPA/PIPA with dramatic effect?
The free internet and the communities that support it have lost their voice and their cultural support. Interesting. It couldn’t possibly be because they stepped beyond common sense and became an echo chamber amongst themselves… right?
(There are many things popular on HN, heresy to question, that even I as a participant emphatically do not support, and I’m sure I’m not alone. I’ve learned hinting at these views gets downvotes and bad faith feedback… so it’s hard to cry at the growing irrelevance. It’s deserved.)
Vim and emacs have definitely lost the main mindshare, but development on those projects is still very strong. Their main focus has never been on mass adoption, so how can you really compete with projects whose main goal is to eat the world?
There was a well attended talk "We lost the war" at the CCC congress twenty years ago. There are many reasons one can come up with why. It was always an uphill battle. You seem to delight in the current state of affairs due to other political concerns.
The most recent Stack Overflow survey have vim at 25% and neovim at 14% for the question "Which development environments and AI-enabled code editing tools did you use regularly over the past year, and which do you want to work with over the next year?" Even more interesting is that for the 2023 survey Vim and Neovim were at 22.3% and 11.8% respectively.
If the goal is to get more than 50% usage statistics then yeah, you can say they lost, but are dev tools only valid/useful/viable if they have a majority of developers using them? I say they've had tremendous success being able to provide viable tools with literally zero corporate support and a much smaller user base.
Across the world the balance between conformism and dissent is getting heavily tipped toward the conformism. Subcultures that are dissent from the mainstream cultures are thus getting toned down.
This is actually really exciting - it means in somewhere in the next 5-10 years we'll inevitably (well, hopefully if the cycles of history are anything to go by) see a bunch of new dissenters rise up with their associated subcultures - and the mass diffusion of the Internet will help them find their people regardless of which country they live.
i've attended a (very small and local) demo presentation and Q&A once and, of course, asked whether the demo scene was dead. the presenter said the demo scene has been declared dead for years already.
While correct for many parts this article gets a few things wrong imho,
- People in the early 90s probably weren't there so much for the demos as for the swapping (ie game copying), it was called copy-parties before it was called lan or demoparties.
--> As such , the numbers of really active sceners was probably about the same all through the 90s up until 2000, the decline in some areas was probably more a function of money being available to talented people as well as the internet overtaking reasons for gatherings (being copying or gaming)
- "The farting around with 6502's (C64) and blitters(Amiga)" is partly a Swedish thing. (related to the mentioned Dreamhack lan/esport-parties)
--> Those who never left and/or are return-ees (people with grown kids) are heavily into those retro-machines because they were a tad older and grew up with that and always held that special place for them. The last large Swedish demo-generations are still tied up in their careers and/or kids and haven't really begun returning (if they ever will thatis).
- The actually somewhat eventful story of Dreamhack (And the early demise of the Swedish demoscene rejuvenation)
--> Swedish sceners started earlier to get adopted into commercial endeavors, but the death-knell was that a deadly discotheque fire in Gothenburg had happened a few weeks before the 1998 Dreamhack event, rowdy sceners were thrown out since a nervous organization didn't dare have any scandalous behavior after pressure from teen parents with sceners subsequently deciding to start boycotting Dreamhack. Once that rift had happened and quality suffered there was never any real push about keeping the demoscene as a part of their lan-focused culture with an eventual total demise happening.
I think cultures have thresholds, we tried and actually managed some rejuvenation while some of us in that last large Swedish generation was still in our 20s (however as the article points out, it was a trickle and we were probably too few with the wrong focus perhaps), now in our 40s we're probably not going to be inspiring any teens directly.
Also the engagement threshold, as many from our generations are now established professionals (like from people that designed the EA-Frostbite engine,etc) the quality put out as "side-projects" are still enormously more adept than what beginners can approach, yet feeble compared to the pure engineering effort managed by the professional game making tools.
Sure you can easily partake, but it's probably demotivating knowing that what you make has such a long way to go (we feel it ourselves).
Will it die out totally? I was actually more worried 5-10 years ago, kids need creative outlets and the entire AI-storm that might make some demotivated will also create more unemployment for capable people, and after all, the golden eras were during times when kids were getting talented but couldn't find jobs for those talents.
"The scene is dead" has become a meme by now. For example the "new talent" Meteoriks award is introduced with "For a scene that has been dead since 1999, our walking dead are pretty fresh".
It is well alive. Sure, we still see some of the same people from 1989, and the average age is certainly going up, but it absolutely doesn't mean we aren't seeing new blood. Styles change, technical achievement is usually seen in the sizecoding or "wild" competitions, while PC demos tend to be more cinematic and focused on art. We are seeing new things, like livecoding shaders and fantasy consoles. Of course, the Amigas and other oldschool platforms are still there, with new tricks being discovered year after year.
There are still regular demoparties. Revision, the successor to Breakpoint and Mekka Symposium is doing well year after year. With the addition of some online events like Lovebyte.
Things come and go, but there is no sign of the scene really being dead. Heck, we even seen older demosceners bring their children to the parties, with some of them already doing cool stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFXIGHOElrE
https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=59105
Revision 2012 though...
Yes? The point is that it was already "dead" back then yet here we are in 13 years later and guess what it's still not actually dead.
62K impressive.
Computing in general is /huge/ now. X is dying is funny in tech. By raw number of participants has it ever really changed? Take MUDs for example, I remember my MUD days. There are still hundreds of active MUDs. Is X really dying? Who knows.
I remember playing MUDs in high school because my system admin blocked all online games, but didn't block telnet. I credit it with my high speed typing and finally getting better than 50/50 at spelling. I'm towards the later part of my thirties. Just checked out their website and they still seem to be alive and well. Don't even require telnet anymore, lots of browser or desktop apps to do what a telnet terminal did
The demoparty I help host is doing a "the scene is undead" theme this year since it is on Halloween.
Exactly; it’s like model railroads or stamp collecting. Never truly dead!
(I mean this with deep sarcasm.)
I think one of the difference between stamp collecting and the demoscene is that while stamp collecting was quite big for a time, the demoscene has always been a niche thing.
For a time the demoscene looked bigger than it was, mostly because of all the cracks. But for the people who actually produced stuff or went to demoparties or even just seek out productions that weren't cracks, it has always been a small world, like a few thousands of active people worldwide.
I think there's still people hacking around doing cool stuff.
Things like PICO-8, etc.
It's much harder to throw a big party these days in general, and especially so about technical niches. Hack Club is popular with youth, but much more about smaller gatherings.
PICO-8 is super fun way to explore the joy of constraints.
Over the summer, we hosted a vibecoding PICO-8 game jam in Amsterdam. It wasn’t a demoparty but we nevertheless had some amazing demoscene folks show up with c64s and example demos. We attracted a handful of teenagers and had nearly equal gender balance—and made some really creative games. We definitely experienced some hateful online vitriol about vibecoding (eg “you are the human equivalent of cancer”) but that was to be expected—this event was almost deliberately about the tension between deep understanding and rapid iteration cycles. I found the tension between vibecoding and demoscene to be really enjoyable and productive.
I went to a coin/stamp shop not too long ago to kill some time downtown and the guy said basically nobody cares about stamps anymore. Still plenty interested in coins.
With the decline of interest in stamp collecting, are the prices of rare stamps and collections also depreciating?
Or maybe the prices are even higher because the few who are interested know that stamps are forever a thing of the past, and in a way that makes them more unique and have timeless value.
In my experience the old computer nerd communities don't do much to help get young people that would be interested into it. A lot of the discussion online mainly just consists of reminiscing about how amazing the '80s were.
Documentation is also in something of a state—the big video game consoles (NES, SNES, Genesis..) all have plenty of free, modern high quality guides teaching you how to program them from nothing, understand all the hardware, etc.. then look at the '80s computers (*especially* the Amiga) and it seems to mainly be scattered around old book scans and wiki articles assuming varying levels of pre-existing knowledge of the hardware. Strangely enough a lot of the best documentation seems to be from YouTube tutorials (I guess because you can see what they're actually doing). It sounds wrong to call it "stuck in the past" but I guess that would be the best way to describe it.
This isn't really about the scene specifically but it's somewhat related at least.
I know you can't really cause a change in an online community by complaining about it in a hacker news comment but i do think if someone savvy with the amiga wrote a guide in that style (with things like "We press build, open the rom, and wow! We have a bouncing box on the screen!") it might start the ball rolling. Would love to see it either way.
I guess part of the reason was that the consoles never had public development kits or manuals, so when the homebrew scene emerged they had to bootstrap themselves (and in the process usually created better manuals/tools than the OEMs), compared to all the home computers where of course they were always available and nobody felt a reason to rewrite them all.
Palm OS is getting livelier by the year. There's a number of younger folks getting into it, with some creating new apps, and it's been ported to new hardware.
My guess is that as time goes on, more development knowledge will be captured/OCRed into machine-searchable archives that will help the beginners. Using emulated/virtual development tool chains is also a lot less resource-intensive, and will help newcomers who don't know how to set these things up on their own.
the 80's were amazing :-)
I was there and they weren't.
Much better times today, imo.
I was a kid and there were Tron, Star Wars, video games, personal computing, hacking culture, etc. Those defined new things and point of views.
Sure we had thermonuclear war threats and a bit of AIDS. But that was basically all.
But as far as my craft is concerned (coding) there's no question about it, everything is so much easier now !
Much love for the demo scene, where it all began for me, pulling all nighters as a teenager writing 68k assembler in asmone on the amiga.. phreaking calls to euro BBS, writing trainers and intro for games, scanning 1800 numbers for diverters/PBX systems to exploit, pulling all your best assembler graphics routines together for your crew's newest demo for release at all-weekend demo/LAN parties.. normal teenage activities, right?! :D
absolutely positively right
(been there, done that, got several t-shirts :-) )
I would love more outlets for creative coding, I feel like neocities is a bit like that. That said there isn't really a scene or real sense of community (AFAIK). I mean someone liked something I uploaded once, but I never interacted with them again.
Cohost had fun vibes like that as well, but I guess it's no longer with us. Same with Glitch, but admittedly I didn't use it in the last few years, but it was my go to option for hosting a snippet of unserious HTML. "HTML in the park" does seem like one fun IRL outlet for this kind of thing, I found out my city has one and I want to go to it.
Admittedly none of these were really demo scenes or places where creative coding was exclusively fostered, but creative coding and demo-like-scenes communities probably exist but are more likely some obscure discord server.
I would argue dwitter is demoscene reinvented for the internet age.
https://x.com/KilledByAPixel/status/1925252647520444719#m
That is fantastic, except the trees are clearly not pines [1]. It's ... Scrolling Spruces [2]!
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spruce
Do you know of any good twitter lists to get an idea of who’s interesting to follow?
~I've begun to set up creative coding events in my city just due to this. I'd love to join an online community to show stuff off, I always find places like twitter end up feeling like you're shouting into the void.
It's not about loads of people commenting and liking your work, just finding a place to actually discuss it would be fantastic
Hard agree on twitter feeling like you’re shouting into a void
I recently starting dabbling in live coding and found it to be really hard and fun and technical and creative. And while I'm not really that comfortable in Discord, I did find the community welcoming and helpful.
What discord's are good for live coding/creative coding?
TOPLAP is the one I’m most familiar with and it is nicely organized by live coding env/lang. There are some other servers listed here: https://github.com/toplap/awesome-livecoding
HTML in the Park is one of my favourite events in Toronto! Great crowd, I highly recommend attending yours or setting one up if nobody runs one.
The demo scene inspired me to keep my next‑gen terminal [0] tiny: it is under 5MB (Mac download was once 900 KB) and my aim is to get all downloads down to ~1MB. If demosceners can do it, regular indie devs really have no excuse.
This scene isn’t dead; we should just look beyond 3D glitter. See File Pilot [1] for another compact, clever example.
[0] https://terminal.click
[1] https://filepilot.tech
> If demosceners can do it, regular indie devs really have no excuse.
Demosceners and indie devs are working under different constraints. For demosceners, the file size (4kb, 40kb, etc.) is the goal. For devs, especially those making a tool that you download and install, extreme size constraints seem unnecessary (although avoiding bloat is always good).
Instead, it seems to me that primary constraints for indie devs should be things like being easy to maintain, well documented, easy to use, easy to fix bugs, easy for other people to work on and extend. Small size should be a secondary target rather than primary.
Of course, one of the advantages of being indie is that you can set whatever constraints and targets you like for yourself.
For me, one of the greatest examples of this style is Reaper[0]. A completely functional professional audio DAW in a 12 to 20MB download (depending on your architecture and OS).
--
On one hand, seeing multiple megs described as slim makes me want to pinch myself, because that’s very far from my understanding of reality. On the other, today these apps always seem to include a bespoke toolkit of some description (as both File Pilot and Reaper demonstrate), whereas slim golden-age Windows apps leaned very hard on the GDI/USER/COMCTL one, and those libraries are quite hefty.
(Unlike, say, the Visual Basic IDE, which had two custom toolkits—the one the apps used and the one the IDE did—or Office, which AFAIU included three or four divergent versions—for Access, for Word and Excel, for VBA apps, and for the VBA IDE, with the last two being effectively identical to the respective VB ones, though I don’t know if the IDE and the Word/Excel ones were actually different. And that’s not counting IE’s toolkit, which basically displaced USER controls in HTML forms by the time of IE6. None of these count as slim, is my point.)
But what really makes me wonder here is how File Pilot manages to display what looks in the screenshot like a shell item’s (file’s) full context menu using its custom styling.
My impression was that the atrocious and discordant two-level Explorer context menu Microsoft is pushing in Windows 11 was because the traditional (Windows 95-era) way to provide context menu items with was to write a shell extension (an Explorer plugin, which would get loaded not only into the bloody system shell but also into every app that used common file dialogs) that would get called when the menu was being built. And that callback interface was built around the assumption of menu items being traditional HMENUs (and allowed the shell extension to set up arbitrary drawing routines for the items it added). So changing the toolkit that Explorer used for context menus away from USER was essentially impossible, and even styling it differently from Windows 95 was fraught (I do remember seeing the occasional flat-gray menu item on Windows XP with Luna enabled). There was an attempt to transition to more declarative context menus around (IIRC) Windows 7, but evidently adoption wasn’t good. And thus the Windows 11 Explorer was forced to use the embarrassing hack of initially showing the declarative context menu, drawn using its new toolkit, then grafting the real one, drawn using USER, onto it as a submenu.
And yet.
File Pilot draws the full context menu with a look very similar to Explorer’s preferred one.
How?..
Extending the user shell was always for the benefit of Microsoft first, and for the rest of us second. Companies who tried to add serious advanced functionality through that found out that they were not really welcome, even though in theory everything was object-oriented, loosely coupled, language-agnostic, yada yada. It probably was mainly a solution to decrease the amount of territory wars over code inside Microsoft, and let teams work independently without demanding synchronous fixes.
We shouldn't forget that half of the documentation on how everything should work was only released after anti-trust investigation and pressure from courts.
https://www.geoffchappell.com/studies/windows/shell/index.ht...
By that time, Windows had already switched to shiny fresh undocumented technologies.
You should remember that a lot of software around the Millennium simply re-implemented latest fashion trends (Office controls, XP styles, etc.) on their own in not quite exact ways, not just because programmers back then wore skins, and ate raw meat, and feared nothing, and because such third party toolkits were available commercially, but also because official interfaces to do the same were not offered until later releases (or sometimes ever). I vaguely recall discussions of teams within Microsoft sometimes doing the same, resulting in Office controls sharing no code with common controls used by the rest of the system which look exactly the same.
The irony is that web browsers, being the most popular kind of application, and interfaces built on top of their technology simply ignore the native interface toolkits, and do everything independently, which is even more extreme than some old school custom paint handlers. A lot of work has been spent on re-implementing native look and behaviour there, multiple times.
One of the examples of actively supported applications interfacing with shell object hierarchy without using system dialogs I can name is Tixati, which needs to have file picker(s) at hand inside its own dialogs. It's not open source, but it has been using GTK, custom controls, and probably some sauce on top. Given the user complains about its performance or missing items, and regular appearance in change log over the years, I'd say it's a wrestling game for the author. At the moment the tree is lazily populated at the first appearance, which is fine, but not unnoticeable.
It is a bit hilarious that showing a list of file names in some directory is a trivial example on using system-provided iterators for the novice programmers, but adding icons matching those that Explorer shows (handling links and other special files, special directories, non-filesystem-based locations which still have files user might want to choose in them, etc) to that list suddenly becomes a nightmare.
Regulars devs don't need an excuse, they have a good reason: their optimization targets are different. The people that turn their work into their salary, and mostly the people who buy into those software, don't go away because of how large the thing is, so, why sacrifice other goals, to further this particular goal?
"If demosceners can do it" is not a good argument to talk about software, because demosceners are the cream of the software crop, when it comes to the specific thing that the demoscene is all about. It's like saying if racers can make that corner doing a 100, regular drivers have no excuse. Or I'm greatly misunderstanding your point.
Filepilot looks great. I wouldn't pay, as Double Commander serves me just fine, but an 1.8 MB download is impressive. DC is 10 MB in comparison. Still perfectly fine.
Early access for a terminal... $60 for a (year subscription???) file explorer... I expect more MBs if I'm paying for these things!
That got a loud laugh from me. Also joining early access for a set period grants you a lifetime license - check the fine print :)
Tiny files and tiny text?! What can't this person shrink
I was just walking down demoscene memory lane yesterday. Some of my favorite demoscene demos were Amiga ones (playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPdB_zdyMbM&list=PLwds84NCmJ...), which lead me to "The Greatest Video Game Tech Demo Ever," Shadow the Beast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovwFjgAFhOs
That video's great because it breaks down how Psygnosis managed to get 12 layers of parallax scrolling at 50fps and 128 colors on-screen. I never really loved the game as much as (say) Blood Money, but it was an awesome accomplishment in the same way demoscene demos were!
I was never part of the scene, but I did write code for a couple of demos and had friends in various groups. I just wasn't much interested in making non-games, and no one I knew were interested in making games. Made me sad later when I learned how many people from the demo scene had ended up in the games industry. If I had know that as a teenager I would have happily done more boring demo coding just to have a path into game dev later. Well, kind of ironic considering everyone I met in the scene were loudly proclaiming how lame it was to play games.
In hindsight I would have loved something like the 2010s game jams and indie games culture to have existed in the early 1990s. Guess this just proves how much of a lamer I was.
In all fairness, the conditions that saw the demo scene rising are so remote to be almost incomprehensible to the new generation.
"You see, when a cracking crew beat the protection of a new game, they would upload their hacked version to an elite BBS and repackaged it with a little intro and a trainer. They had to be very creative and skilled, often working directly in assembler, in order to achieve impressive imagery and chip music while still fitting on the same 1.4MB floppy."
blank stare
I love it when they would rewrite portions of the game with better compression tech then the original devs in order to get room for their cracktros or just make it a better download from BBS or later Internet.
In fairness, Fitgirl still does something similar, and continues to repack games to this day
I think the conditions of the demoscene arising were a software interface that consisted of coding, and people's first experience with a computer was
10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD!"
20 GOTO 10
RUN
This piqued the interest of curious youth, who then were further enabled by a hardware interface where you could write a value into an area of memory, which would then appear as a pixel on screen.
Exactly this. Whenever I talk about how I got started in computer art over 40 years ago, I always mention the fact that a screen back then was a one-way device: TV network to you. Basic home computers HAD to plug into the TV, and to a kid, this was magic and freedom.
The scene is not what it used to be, but it's still alive and will remain for decades. We "old-timers" were lucky to be around the 90s when the demo groups and parties were on full swing.
There are many groups and parties to mention, but for those interested have a look over at: https://www.pouet.net/toplist.php
https://files.scene.org/
https://assembly.org/en/articles/assembly-summer-2025-demosc...
Perhaps its the lack of appeal, in the past, the idea that you could squeeze performance into an old machine was cool, but the gap between current hardware and "demoscene limits" feels like artificially crippling: if you have 64GB of ram, the appeal of 64KB demo is far less than if you have a 64MB 486DX. It would be far more cooler, that instead of ancient hardware and artifically limited PCs, they would run demoscene on embedded stuff like Raspberry PI and modern microcontrollers, that would align with current DIY trends instead of chasing retro clout.
The problem with 64kb intros is not the availability of 64gb of ram, it's that the level of work for something really impressive requires you to have a really advanced toolset, and even then there are stumbling blocks.
The stuff I've written for 64k intros:
- Rendering system (software renderers in the 90s and latest a non-RTX raytracing systems with global illumination), these alone is kinda what people write or wrote MSc thesis works on.
- SDF based effects/rendering (this is what 4k intros often focus on apart from music, here it becomes an addition to the above toolset).
- Often some keyframing/skinning systems, either customized or imported from Blender(now) or in the past 3dsmax, lightwave,etc. (and matching the keyframing maths of the tools), the kind of shit that made game industry companies adopt 3rd party engines because it's hard to get correct (luckily for demos with small teams we can avoid some pitfalls of the formats).
- A modular softsynth (with sequenceing, genrerators and filters) with a MDCT based compressor (think MP3 like compression)
- Texture and image via generators and filters.
- A few generations of visual editing tools to have visual editing of various things listed above.
(Yes, some people have created more abstract things in 64k intros but those don't push the envelope as much imho).
Oh and once all that is done, nobody will run it because...
- The exe compressors used to make things small have been adopted by malware writers and antivirus programs will flag everything because antivirus software just profiles the unpacker routines.
(4k writers have less of an issue with this because the 64k compressors are more drop-in whilst crinkler that's used for 4k's is a custom linker that will have less of a profile and requires custom build steps).
As for Raspberry PI's, there has been compos to target them and phones but the capability of a Raspberry PI and phones is close enough to a PC that you're not really constrained in any pracitcal way apart from needing to push it onto that machine.
On that tangent however Pico-8 and similar pseudoconsoles have been popular since they often provide a simple IDE environment that let's people get straight to it and have a clear recgonizable restriction level.
The point of the limits is the challenge though, not just nostalgia. I don't agree that a 64KiB demo is any less impressive on a modern machine than it was back then. On the contrary, moving to something like the latest Pi means there isn't much point in having the limit at all - and those competitions already exist, e.g. a PC "demo" (as opposed to "intro") isn't usually limited to a specific size.
Attiny85 with 512 bytes of ram and eeprom is perfect for this! You can get like five of these on AliExpress for a couple USD/EUR.
Seems the modern corollary to the demoscene is TouchDesigner programming. I always thought it would be such a neat thing for demosceners to jump to TD and work with other forms of art like live dance and live music. The fact you can have body tracking, hand gesture recognition and also have it react to sound seems like the next step in demoscene stuff.
A lot of recent demos use https://www.notch.one/ or https://github.com/tixl3d/tixl
More https://github.com/psykon/awesome-demoscene
Yeah, I remember reading an interview with one of the few big demosceners, and they said that to compete in the highest leagues, you need editing tools to build these impressive scenes.
After all the most talented musicians and visual designers often were not the same people, and every artistic pursuit involves a lot of iteration.
To be fair groups tended to build the tools themselves, not to take away from their achievements, but once the tools are done and public (like the ones you shared), a lot of the challenge and point of competition is gone.
Tooling also tends to create a moat between 'users' and 'developers', the former of which lack the low-level knowledge to transition into the latter.
Don't know what the author is talking about.
Assembly, Summer 2023: https://assembly.galleria.fi/kuvat/Assembly+Summer+2023/Perj...
Assembly, Summer 2024: https://assembly.galleria.fi/kuvat/ASSEMBLY+SUMMER+2024/PERJ...
Looks like plenty of attendance, lots of elementary through high school age attendees. Lots of families bringing their children. Site's got 1000's of pictures of evidence.
Maybe the scene has change in a way they don't especially want to attend over the years, yet it does not seem to be "dying". This post on LinkedIn claims Summer 2023 had 25,000 attendees. Seems healthy.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lassinummi_assembly-summer-20...
Minor edit: Also, still have all the results and competitions each year. Demo, 1k Intro, 4k Intro, Short Film, Dance Music, Freestyle Graphics, ect...
Results, Summer 2023: https://assembly.org/en/events/summer23/posts/assembly-summe...
Results, Summer 2024: https://assembly.org/en/articles/assembly-summer-2024-compet...
I feel like the massive popularity of tiny fantasy consoles like pico-8 is a pretty good sign that at least the ethos of the demoscene is live and well
The best period of my life as a programmer. I've never stopped feeling nostalgic for the demoscene of the 80s and 90s. When we used to fight between Amiguys and Atarists. The Amiguys always won, of course. In fact, there was no real point to flamewar about. They had almost everything. And us Atarists? Well... we had a 68000 at 8 MHz, a MIDI port, a budget several hundreds of $ less... and even more ingenuity to get the best out of our machines (hey, let's defend ourselves as best as we can). But when the despicable PC reared its ugly architecture, suddenly we were the best of friends.
I must also confess my sacrilege, Amiguy: a buddy gave me his Amiga 500. Shortly after, the floppy drive on my STe broke down. So I took apart the one from the Amiga and put it in my ST... I wasn't even sure it would work, but it did. Now you can beat me up... but calm down. It's not like the Amiga's drive was its strong point, was it? I couldn't have done that with the Copper and its friends, and sure I wish I could have!
That's the perfect excuse for getting a floppy-emulator with an SD or USB slot, of which there are several models. :)
The only people who still pitch demoscene dead are those with unrealistic expectations or who just returned and are surprised it’s still alive, ran by a number of 40+ people while they remember themselves joining at the age of 15. But the conversation about new generation is missed by solid 20 years and all of us who just stay focused on producing don’t waste time on rants, only to have 5 mins on hacker news that by default won’t get the idea of demoscene anyway. Way too many different scenes here to focus only on one that finally turned into a hobby, not a life changing experience.
/hollowone^oftenhide
> all of us who just stay focused on producing don’t waste time on rants
English is not my main language, so I don't understand the nuance. Does this imply that this is your first rant on HN in 20 years?
No. If somebody rant about not having new generations on demo scene today then that one missed the time window for such rant by solid 20 years.
To me one of the problems in modern demoscene is that modern PCs (especially GPUs) are so ridiculously powerful that full fat PC demos struggle to fully take advantage of it, at least in a way that is apparent to viewer. To me it feels like the emphasis has shifted more on the content side than purely techical excellence.
Sizecoding is another matter, and arguably the more interesting side of the scene these days. But it is kinda sad that we need artificial restrictions to make things interesting rather than trying to exploit every drop of perf you can squeeze from the computer.
I didn’t know what the demo scene was before I read this. I still don’t.
Is it hackathons?
It's a kind of a coding competition, indeed. The goals and the circumstances differ from a hackathon. The demoscene events are not for coding, although I'm sure it happens, but rather for showing off the work that was prepared beforehand. Usually these works are multimedia, so visuals and sound go together, but the main focus is the visuals, the rest of it is supportive. Works are nominated in different categories, which are usually set up to be very restrictive, for example, the work should be a single 32-bit Windows executable, no additional files, and the EXE should not exceed a certain byte size. The point of all this is to create the most impressive work within the restraints.
Wrt/ terminology, one submission of such a work is a "demo", and "demoscene" is the name for the culture itself (people, events, submissions, associated works like websites).
For an easy example, the all-time most popular work is this one: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=30244 (according to the site's own ranking). You can download the software to run yourself, or you can watch a youtube recording of it, which is much more accessible. The entirety of this work (visuals, music) is compiled into a single 177k executable.
> It's a kind of a coding competition, indeed.
This is referring to demo parties specifically. Let's not forget the social aspects of them though. Yes, a selected few went to parties to "compete" in their chosen art, some might have even taken them quite seriously. But they were the minority.
The bulk of the attendees just went for fun and company, and did not create anything. Demoparties _were indeed_ parties back in the 90s, with people playing games, drinking and socializing in general. You could argue these were like rave parties, only a bit quieter and much friendlier / inclusive (ok, maybe I am biased, but it certainly felt that way).
It was lacking in one aspect though - not many girls attended, and so as time passed these parties were becoming less attractive. But that did not stop anyone going home and downloading and admiring the products of demosceners, who did all this basically in their free time, for not much (if at all) compensation.
> The demoscene events are not for coding, although I'm sure it happens
How to tell you've never been to a demo party without saying you've never been to a demo party.
I jest, but scrambling to implement the last effect before the deadline, or fix some stupid last minute bug was certainly typical at the events I was at. And you see this in a lot of the prods which released post-party "proper" versions.
There were also parties which had "live" competitions, where a theme would be announced at the party and you had then just a few hours to make a demo. Obviously wouldn't do it from scratch but typically coding would be involved, if for nothing else to tie the effects together.
But yeah, the main demos and intros would primarily be made well in advance.
Guilty, I never have been! But, if you contrast it with a hackathon, the objective of the event is the showing off part, not the preparation part. Prep is at least months of work. Whereas the point of a hackathon is to create somethere during the event.
Yeah I was just reminded of the panicked coding I witnessed at the events I went to.
Thank you. Whoever you are. I guess I could have googled it, but I love that you took the time and energy to respond.
You are very welcome! Sometimes, a hand-crafted answer just hits different. Have a nice day!
Wikipedia can probably explain it best: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene
People creating interesting visuals in a very, very small computer program; often with some artificial constraints. Often it was put together with cracking scene, I guess the skills involved used to be similar (lot of low level hacking?).
My personal involvement with this scene is nil - I always just saw some interesting thing playing with crack.exe that I got from some dubious source, thought "huh it's neat", and went on with my life.
I have no idea what are the constraints do they have in 2025, or what platform do they even target. How are you gonna do demos on iOS that's all locked from top to bottom and you can't even run anything without involving Apple in the process?
If it doesn't exist already, there really should be an iOS Safari WASM scene. :)
I wanted to say earlier when first reading this that I got like 15 minutes in without any explanation of what this scene was, and it felt like that might be a reason for a scene to die, if someone like me who got his first Commodore 64 in 1986 and has been alive for nearly half a century with interest in what this sounded like had never heard of it, outreach and publicity to new folks must not be great.
But Wikipedia says this is primarily a European thing, so I guess that's why.
A demo is basically "let me show off something cool and amazing that shouldn't be possible re: graphics and sound."
One great analogy I heard somewhere -- if videogames are prose, demos are poetry.
The very broad definition is people who write artistic shaders frequently limited to a binary size, sometime 4kb, sometime 16.
That's a very narrow definition, really. In general demos have neither much to do with shaders (except insofar that you have to write shaders to do 3D on GPUs), nor are they size-limited in general; only certain subtypes are.
The procedural music aspect doesn't get enough love. There's an amazing amount of DSP like stuff going on in the background. Most people focus on the visuals though
Definitely!
Physically, demos and game development have advanced far beyond where they were at the beginning of the demoscene, but now people no longer come together. Game engines and devices have become accessible to everyone, and people are constantly inventing new things. For example, just look at the number of algorithms and new gameplay mechanics now compared to 10 years ago.
In 2012, I created a live coding platform and spent a lot of time thinking about why live coding didn’t become more popular than traditional coding. Live coding came about 10 years before React, which became reactive because you no longer had to press F5 every time you updated the HTML (I worked on the first version of React Webpack, which was doing server-side rendering).
Later, after going through a startup accelerator, the puzzle finally clicked for me. Companies and businesses began making serious money from video games, discovering lots of talent in the wild indie dev and demoscene space. The best talents were like raw gems and this eventually scaled into an industry.
Now, the best innovations are being patented and presented at SIGGRAPH and the game engine market is massive. Of course, amid all the flashiness and white-collar presence, it’s hard to spot the demosceners, but they’re behind every game. They’ve just been hired by corporations and their talent no longer expresses itself in the same way.
Unfortunately, companies provide very little support for the demoscene, which is why we don’t see the same explosive growth here as we do in games, graphics or AI.
I remember one case where a guy was hired to animate King Kong’s face for a movie and he spent two years hand-animating every single emotion. I wonder what kind of demos he might have created during that time if the corporation hadn’t hired him and forced him into repetitive work.
The market.
I don't really think it's fair to compare game engines with the demoscene. The demoscene is really about exploiting hardware to the fullest extent and that's not really an economic advantage when you get new GPUs every year that are 50% to 30% faster. now, creative hacks can increase performance several hundred percent, but is this sustainable for a product? probably not. certain hacks are very specific and that reduces your market. they’re usually non-portable, fragile, or locked to very specific architectures. That doesn’t scale across consoles, PC variants, or mobile. So in a market context, the value of raw ingenuity is absorbed into engine pipelines or middleware, not showcased in standalone demos.
Now that is to say a demo can't be portable, for instance I've run several older demos on my computer. I've also had instances where demos wouldn't run on my computer. Imagine if that was a game that I bought. Or imagine if it was anstracted to such a point that the feature is just not available dynamically. For instance of particle effect became 100 times less impressive.
yeah, companies wants little effort for bigger effect. They want maintainable code, etc. Clever hacks are not really welcome.
Now that PC's are so powerful, you look for algorithms optimisation. And although it requires a ton of cleverness as well, it's much more documented than obscure hacks. You learn that at school.
It's dying because the home amateur PC is on its last legs.
And the cracking scene has now to grapple with hellish online activation.
And then many workflows have become sort of professional or moved to the web altogether.
And the younger generation, having received access to gigabytes of RAM and storage, simply couldn't care less about being super lean and fast.
There's really no future for the scene.
> And the younger generation, having received access to gigabytes of RAM and storage, simply couldn't care less about being super lean and fast.
It's interesting I often attribute this to VCs and their desire for growth over efficiency (let alone profitability). I find myself having to reel in my desire to challenge myself to identify the most efficient way possible, even if it only saves a few dollars.
Never occurred to me it was generational and not related to VCs
This saddens me. The idea of the demoscene really resonated with me, and I was curious about making stuff and joining.
Then go and do it. As the article says, a lot of the scene is very open to newcomers today.
Nothing stopping you! Keep the flame alive :)
Dunno about state of the scene insights, but earlier this week this submission got some positive attention here.
Interview with Japanese Demoscener 0b5vr
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45137245
From my perspective these evolved into game jams. I feel like if you only count competitions for old, outdated platforms these won't be getting as many new comers as other platforms that are common place and easy to develop for. Hosting them purely via the internet made them more accessible.
This feels like a discussion about the demoscene amongst people who have not been to a demoparty in 20 years.
Perfect timing, this was released yesterday. Minecraft on a 16mhz 68030
https://youtu.be/nHsgdZFk22M?si=HVFlgllY6sPld4v3
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The EFF types and HN reader types are also dying subcultures.
I was just thinking the other day, I haven't read a vim vs emacs flame-war in years.
The vim and emacs guys had to join forces to flame the greater evil - Electron-based editors.
A noble fight if ever there was one.
And they’ve lost. Everyone and their cousin uses Electron editors while showing up to FOSDEM on their MacBooks to discuss kernel development.
It’s already long over. We’re just starting to notice. The EFF is baffled - why do they yell in a void now, when just a decade ago they stopped SOPA/PIPA with dramatic effect?
The free internet and the communities that support it have lost their voice and their cultural support. Interesting. It couldn’t possibly be because they stepped beyond common sense and became an echo chamber amongst themselves… right?
(There are many things popular on HN, heresy to question, that even I as a participant emphatically do not support, and I’m sure I’m not alone. I’ve learned hinting at these views gets downvotes and bad faith feedback… so it’s hard to cry at the growing irrelevance. It’s deserved.)
Vim and emacs have definitely lost the main mindshare, but development on those projects is still very strong. Their main focus has never been on mass adoption, so how can you really compete with projects whose main goal is to eat the world?
neovim community is very active.
There was a well attended talk "We lost the war" at the CCC congress twenty years ago. There are many reasons one can come up with why. It was always an uphill battle. You seem to delight in the current state of affairs due to other political concerns.
Big tech no longer cares about appearing to be revolutionaries fighting for good and ppl are disillusioned
The most recent Stack Overflow survey have vim at 25% and neovim at 14% for the question "Which development environments and AI-enabled code editing tools did you use regularly over the past year, and which do you want to work with over the next year?" Even more interesting is that for the 2023 survey Vim and Neovim were at 22.3% and 11.8% respectively.
If the goal is to get more than 50% usage statistics then yeah, you can say they lost, but are dev tools only valid/useful/viable if they have a majority of developers using them? I say they've had tremendous success being able to provide viable tools with literally zero corporate support and a much smaller user base.
Now it’s flamewars over AI agents.
It's thought leaserships over AI agents.
Aren't they progressed to Windows vs Mac and further up along timeline, to Claude vs ChatGPT?
It's because Neovim just crushed both...
Across the world the balance between conformism and dissent is getting heavily tipped toward the conformism. Subcultures that are dissent from the mainstream cultures are thus getting toned down.
This is actually really exciting - it means in somewhere in the next 5-10 years we'll inevitably (well, hopefully if the cycles of history are anything to go by) see a bunch of new dissenters rise up with their associated subcultures - and the mass diffusion of the Internet will help them find their people regardless of which country they live.
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Indeed, and they used to be almost unified. Not so much anymore.
What's EFF?
Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit championing the hacker ethic.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation
https://www.eff.org/
The first death was definitely the arrival of 3D accelerators and shaders. It's never been the same since.
Shoutout to everyone who were at The Party '92, best experience ever for a young computer nerd.
i've attended a (very small and local) demo presentation and Q&A once and, of course, asked whether the demo scene was dead. the presenter said the demo scene has been declared dead for years already.
that was probably over 15 years ago.
I'm seeing a lot of AI being demoed recently ...
While correct for many parts this article gets a few things wrong imho,
- People in the early 90s probably weren't there so much for the demos as for the swapping (ie game copying), it was called copy-parties before it was called lan or demoparties.
--> As such , the numbers of really active sceners was probably about the same all through the 90s up until 2000, the decline in some areas was probably more a function of money being available to talented people as well as the internet overtaking reasons for gatherings (being copying or gaming)
- "The farting around with 6502's (C64) and blitters(Amiga)" is partly a Swedish thing. (related to the mentioned Dreamhack lan/esport-parties)
--> Those who never left and/or are return-ees (people with grown kids) are heavily into those retro-machines because they were a tad older and grew up with that and always held that special place for them. The last large Swedish demo-generations are still tied up in their careers and/or kids and haven't really begun returning (if they ever will thatis).
- The actually somewhat eventful story of Dreamhack (And the early demise of the Swedish demoscene rejuvenation)
--> Swedish sceners started earlier to get adopted into commercial endeavors, but the death-knell was that a deadly discotheque fire in Gothenburg had happened a few weeks before the 1998 Dreamhack event, rowdy sceners were thrown out since a nervous organization didn't dare have any scandalous behavior after pressure from teen parents with sceners subsequently deciding to start boycotting Dreamhack. Once that rift had happened and quality suffered there was never any real push about keeping the demoscene as a part of their lan-focused culture with an eventual total demise happening.
I think cultures have thresholds, we tried and actually managed some rejuvenation while some of us in that last large Swedish generation was still in our 20s (however as the article points out, it was a trickle and we were probably too few with the wrong focus perhaps), now in our 40s we're probably not going to be inspiring any teens directly.
Also the engagement threshold, as many from our generations are now established professionals (like from people that designed the EA-Frostbite engine,etc) the quality put out as "side-projects" are still enormously more adept than what beginners can approach, yet feeble compared to the pure engineering effort managed by the professional game making tools.
Sure you can easily partake, but it's probably demotivating knowing that what you make has such a long way to go (we feel it ourselves).
Will it die out totally? I was actually more worried 5-10 years ago, kids need creative outlets and the entire AI-storm that might make some demotivated will also create more unemployment for capable people, and after all, the golden eras were during times when kids were getting talented but couldn't find jobs for those talents.
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