What is Demoscene?

The demoscene is a cyberculture that emerged in the late 1970s with the spread of the first home computers. This is a direction of computer art, the main feature of which is the construction of a plot video sequence created in real time by a computer, according to the principle of computer games. Thus, the demo is a symbiosis of programming and art.

Etymology

Early synthesizers had a special “demo” or “demonstration” button, which, when pressed, launched a demo song (English demo song). Synthesizer manufacturers relied on music store customers to walk through the aisles of synthesizers for sale and choose the one that sounds better and costs less. The buyer, after the acquisition and some experience of use, understood that he could not achieve the same level of sound. This was due to the fact that the manufacturer in the competition went to some tricks, for example, especially for the demo song, switching between instruments occurred at lightning speed, or auto-accompaniment was added on top of the main melody, or polyphony effects were used, etc. As a result, demo-song sounds bright, rich and impressive. In essence, this is the original meaning of the demo: to impress the viewer and exaggerate the real capabilities of the device.

Society noticed the scene in its heyday - in the early 90s. At that moment there was no definition, therefore, in colloquial speech, the demoscene was referred to as: “computer underground”, “virtual something”, “some kind of hacking”. But, over time, the word “scene” has become stronger, which reflects the nature of the events taking place, since competitions of a cultural and creative nature are usually attributed to the “scene”.

Story

Home computers of the 1980s made it possible to work with rather complex graphics, more or less high-quality sound, which increased the demand for computer games that implemented multimedia capabilities. The first signs of the emergence of the demoscene as an underground culture were realized in short intros to electronic magazines or hacked computer games containing the logo or nickname of the intro authors and squeezing the maximum out of the computer's capabilities, and the smaller the program occupied, the better and more prestigious it was.

The demoscene originated in the early 1980s with the first 8-bit graphics microcomputers, the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64, but later spread to newer models, most notably the Amiga and IBM PC.

The classic demoscene was designed to demonstrate the capabilities of the computer and force it to perform unusual (for that period) tasks. For example, the calculation of various effects with precise reference to music in real time was carried out on the Amiga platform even before 1990. Among the works of the demoscene during its development are Spaceballs' 9 Fingers, Future Crew's Second Reality, and many others. Since 1998, 3D graphics and 3D narrative works have become the main direction of demoscene development.