I can’t believe it’s been more than a year since I wrote about the Breakpoint 2007 demo party and competition. Breakpoint 2008 actually already took place last March on the Easter weekend, so the following is really just old news. However, I still wanted to share some of my favorites. This year’s motto of the competition was Digital Garden hinting at the annual Garden Show in Germany that, too, took place in Bingen at the Rhine river this year.
The demos have all been very impressive again. Some explored different ideas than the usual animations and particle- or plasma-effects in 3D. Instead they were designed around two-dimensional, scissor-cut, flower, comic-book-like or retro-Commodore 64/Amiga-looking elements.
I’m attaching a few of my favorites below with video and a link for further details and download. Demos and intros should really be experienced in real-time. These video clips can only reflect a tiny fraction of the whole experience.
A complete list of the Breakpoint 2008 entries can be found here…Enjoy!
I just read an interesting article about the Breakpoint 2007 demo-party that took place last April in Bingen on the Rhine river in Germany. Breakpoint is considered one of the biggest parties in the international scene.
For those who haven’t heard anything about demos and its scene yet, here is a brief history: It all started in the old days of home computers like Commodore 64 or Amiga, back when we used to share floppy disks and cassette tapes with our favorite games. Just like today, companies tried to stop people from sharing their favorites and invented one clever copy protection method after another. But soon somebody would find a way to crack it, proudly add a little signature to the cracked game and share it with his friends. Eventually people got together in groups and started to create breathtaking animated intros with superb music. It not only was a way to make themselves known, greet friends and show off their artistic or coding skills, it sometimes also sweetened the long time some games would take to load, especially from cassette tapes. And sometimes the animated intro would even become more impressive than the game itself.
Eventually groups started to compete against each other. Their little works of coding-art soon attracted a lot of fans, and the demo-parties were born. I was a huge fan myself…the old intros inspired me to learn assembly language on the Commodore 64, and write my first programs with a graphical user interface and a mouse-pointer you could control with the joystick. My old C64 applications were in no way as impressive as what the demo-groups produced, but they were what fired my interest in programming early on.
For many years the demo-scene’s preferred platforms were C64 and Amiga computers and it took much longer to find its way into the ibm-pc arena. Although personal computers had a much faster CPU and more memory available than a C64, it just wasn’t the right platform for demos. The hardware wasn’t suited for extensive and fast animations with graphics and sound. The sound cards for office computers were poor and people often had monochrome monitors before the first small color displays became affordable. There also was a gap between the average office user and the gaming-community.
This changed later when Soundblaster and especially the Gravis Ultrasound added superior sound to the old office computer. Sound, better and more colorful graphics paved the way for games, demos and music-software on the ibm-platform. And with better hardware the user-community began to merge and drive the multimedia capacities forward.
One popular way to create music on the ibm-computer actually originated from the Amiga world: The MOD sound format was a bit of a mix between midi-files and wave-audio. It allowed you to define wave-samples and play them as instruments in a tracker-table. These files were perfect for demo-soundtracks because they were almost as small as midi, but sounded as great as fully recorded wave-tracks. The Finland based demo-group Future Crew created Scream Tracker, at that time one of the best tools to create MOD and S3M files with up to 32 channels.
The Future Crew was probably the most prominent demo group in the early 90s. What they created with their demos Unreal and Second Reality just blew me away. Every year, Future Crew and other demo groups presented their demos at international competitions like the Assembly in Finland, The Party in Denmark and other events around. The competitions took place in several disciplines: C64, Amiga or PC, music, graphics/art, 4k intros, 64k intros and larger sized demos. The goal was and is simple: To push the limits and achieve the most impressive results possible with the hardware available. While limits are not so much given with the existing hardware nowadays, the files have to be as small as possible. But even today, hardware can matter on devices like cell-phones or Gameboy Advance.
To save space, graphics, effects and animations are not rendered into huge video-files—they are calculated live during runtime. Demos are a wonderful artistic mix of coding skill, algorithms, mathematics, physics , and 3d-graphic principles on the one side, and art, story, drama, cinematography, choreography, lights, music and sound effects on the other. They show what a computer is really capable of—something that often falls into oblivion after days of word processing, web-browsing or dealing with business applications.
After several years of working real jobs, studying, web and the “serious” code I lost touch with the demo-scene and I had no idea that it indeed continued to live on and evolve in all these years. Perhaps I didn’t think they could become even more impressive than back in the 90s. How wrong I was…
When I read that article yesterday I got curious and wanted to see what the demo scene is like today. I downloaded a few demos, and… When I started the first demo I got goosebumps all over and had tears in my eyes. What I saw there was truly unbelievable… really breathtaking! I can’t believe my old heart can still get as excited as 15 years ago. I think I have to start programming for fun again.
The following are a few examples of what they are like today. I’m not sure if this is your cup of tea, or if there are better demos out there, but I’m very impressed and think they deserve all respect.
What you get to see and hear for only 177 kilobyte is just unbelievable. It doesn’t surprise me it made the first place in the pc-demo category. The camera work including the hand-camera effects are beautiful, the scenery and animation very well done. I really liked the sound, too. There are just a few minor things that I felt offered room for improvement, but hey, it’s only 177k! It’s smaller than this blog-post… lol
This is much larger than debris above, but not any less impressive. It is an extremely beautiful demo with a great score that reminded me a bit of Porcupine Tree. I loved the aesthetics, animation and play with lights and curves, all very fluent and harmonic. Brilliant!
I saved the best for last and humbly bow before The Prophecy…I cannot believe that this demo is really only 64k! Armageddon filmed in 65,024 bytes? It is pure magic. How did they do it? I have done a bit of programming in the past, in two or three dimensions, with audio, in different languages, but this exceeds my wildest imagination. Landscapes, objects, buildings, music, animation, choreography, special effects, textures, credits…all this coded into a single file of 64k? I really would love to see a “making-of”. Check out the screenshots or watch the video clip below, or even better: download and start the intro. The live-demos look much better than youtube or google-videos.
I'm just speechless...]