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Hacker News Hacker NewsIt 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.
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.
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.
This scene isn’t dead; we should just look beyond 3D glitter. See File Pilot [1] for another compact, clever example.
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!
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.
"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
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...
There are many groups and parties to mention, but for those interested have a look over at: https://www.pouet.net/toplist.php
https://assembly.org/en/articles/assembly-summer-2025-demosc...
/hollowone^oftenhide
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 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!
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.
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.
Is it hackathons?
that was probably over 15 years ago.
Interview with Japanese Demoscener 0b5vr
- 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.
