In
good Company
When writing this editorial I couldn't avoid thinking about all
the delayed products and the fading activity of the Atari scene.
Being delayed is nothing special. Some Atari productions have
been delayed for more than 10 years. Also some games, which have
been shown as previews some years ago haven't surfaced yet. For
example there is still no release of Chuck's puzzler, the
Reservoir Gods seems to be on halt indefinitely. Concerning
demos, we lack major productions. Real demos have become rare,
only some bootsectors and a jukebox were released at this years
Outline. Even t.S.C.c. wonderboy ray appears to be in
hibernation mode. To make it short: Delays have been become
normal and the audience gets more and more used to them.
According to Paranoid it's even worse and the Atari scene is
already dead. Perhaps he is right, but I am not ready to give in
yet.
In Germany we have a saying "Gut Ding will Weile haben" and I
guess that's also true for the scene. Some say there is no point
in releasing unfinished productions. That's certainly right,
when it comes to demos. However diskmags are a different story,
since the articles age and become out of date quite fast. Alive
14 has been delayed for almost 8 month now and some of the stuff
has even been written more than 12 month ago. So ready or not,
release is overdue. At Evoke Felice and me decided to remove all
the unfinished articles and try to accomplish a party release
despite the fact that Stu's tune is only a preview and that a
few pictures were left at home. (Sorry ssb)
What will happen in the future? I am still not sure if I should
continue working on Alive since it seems I am not only having
less and less time for the scene but I am also slowly drifting
away from it. Real life is getting more important each day and
perhaps it's time to finally make a clean cut and bury the past.
Several members of the Alive Team have recently signalled that
they had similar thoughts.
The bottom line is: Diskmags have outlived themselves. Since the
rise of the WWW, zero day news, review sites and demoscene-
centered-database-driven-sites like pouet have removed the base
for diskmags. In addition the so called "Web 2.0" with it's
questionable and mostly useless BLOGs epidemic spreads like a
Virus and is adding more and more junk each day. Especially
since it has become so easy to create them. Considering the
amount of work we need to put into a diskmag with its platform
specific restrictions and a bugged shell, the question arises
if it wouldn't be better to quit or at least switch the format.
However if we close now, who will carry on? Young sceners are
rare, especially on Atari, so it seems more or less certain that
the Atari scene will die with us. Perhaps documenting it might
help to create small side note in computer history which might
outlive us. But even that is most doubtful...
Cyclone for Alive, 2007-08-11
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