STS's part
Here it comes at last : the second issue of aLiVe! I have to admit I was
inactive for a while and now we have too many articles. As a matter of fact
this issue is about half the size it was a couple of hours ago. The removed
articles and eil2 reviews will be found in a special issue that should be out
by the end of the week so check it out fellows ! I'm a bit tired now and since
Chris wrote quite a long editorial, I'm gonna let him entertain you while I'm
putting the final touches to this issue.
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CiH's *Barely* Alive! post-EIL editorial Bit!
WARNING! This text has been thrown together in a hurry!
It's the day after the party, well a couple of days after, and I'm unpacking
my bags, boggling at the activity levels on the DHS site and bulletin
boards, not to mention the size of some of the demo downloads. (But hey,
quality doesn't come cheap!) And Sebastien asked for me to write my part of
the editorial for this second issue of Alive!
So here I am...
The big Easter coding parties over the years have always shown the next
major steps that are being taken in Atari demo making. The competition
viewing screens acting like a crystal ball for what we're going to be seeing
more of over the next year or so. So why not consider the following...
We start our tale in 1993, with the first Fried Bits Party. Not the most
obvious place to illustrate the point perhaps, but the first decent Multi-
part demo 'Warum', kicked out by those brilliant Austrian Falconeers, Lazer,
came along. By 1994, at the second Fried Bits, rewarmed versions of Warum
were being churned out quite routinely by the rank and file groups, but
Lazer were still leading the pack with the first really heavy-duty epic
megademo for the Falcon called 'Ungto' (Alright, 'Autowaschen Verboten' if
you insist!) From this, you can possibly see where some of the inspiration
for the hard disk breaking 'Obnoxious' megademo came from a year later!? The
1994 Fried Bits was also notable for the Mugwumps 'Psychedelic Knockout'
trance demo, which had design repercussions of its own a year later, and
more of which shortly!
1995, and the ever so memorable third Fried Bits party came, with a whole
new level of ambition and professionalism in Falcon demo design. Lazer took
the Mugwumps multimedia idea to new heights, and the 'Lost Blubb' demo is
still a classic, providing demo entertainment to the unitiated, even today.
Meanwhile, EKO and Avena were taking great interest in the complex art of
making 3-D worlds. The DSP on the Falcon was the next place where great
things were expected, with EKO taking the lead here, with their wonderfully
smooth flat-shaded but multi-faceted alternate realities.
Things stagnated a bit in the following year, the Symposium '96 was notable
for a falling away in the number of 'big' demos, but here, the trend was for
more excitement in smaller packages, where the first really good 4k intros
were seen. We fondly recall Lazer's last outing in a 3-D space in 4K, not to
mention a strong wireframe presence from tSCc, and of course, the 'Crash and
burn in hell' Godtro from those cold and cheerless christian coders Spirits.
This set the scene for future 4K releases of ever greater ambition,
culminating in a lot of full demo scale productions in the latter 1990's.
Around this time, a lot of the old crews swept themselves away. The Atari
scene was navel-gazing, instead of paying close attention to its monitors,
and was concerned it was 'dying'. It took another lone coding hero, Tat, at
the Easter Siliconvention '97 party, to snap them out of their stupor, with
the first really convincing DSP-based 3-D demo with added textures to make
it to release. I am, of course, talking about 'Sonoluminescenz'. These were
the new heights to which the rest of the scene had to aspire to overtake
now! Were they up to it?
They ducked the challenge for a bit. 1998 saw the interesting, but not
traditional Easter Alternative party in snowy Finland, where the main
interest was for an obscure 8-Bit system called MSX (which could kick a fair
bit of ass itself to be fair!) One of the people who ducked the challenge
was Tat himself, who announced his retirement from the scene in 1998. It
would seem that the best early chance of challenging the supremacy of 'Sono'
had gone, we would have to wait a while for the rest to catch up.
In 1999, the first Error in Line party saw that there was still a lot of
active Atari sceners out there. For this party, the "humble" ST was the
recipient of the best demos. From the hands of Defjam of Checkpoint, who was
practically the only coder working on the ST at a Falcon-dominated Symposium
'96, came the greatest ST megademo since the 1993 'Froggies over the Fence'.
Most of the other better demos were written for the ST too, the Falcon
getting some fair to reasonable productions, but seeming to stand still on
this occasion.
Last year saw a shift of interest to Poland, where the SV2000 didn't quite
manage to live up to its potential. The releases were interesting and had a
lot of potential to really rock, but suffered from a tendency to be half-
finished, and for their coders to give up in mid-code. Was this the real
death of the Atari scene? But straws were in the wind, with Sqward of the
Mystic Bytes showing it was still possible to push the limits of the Falcon,
and Mind Design to start using some new techniques such as MP2 replay and
accelerator hardware.
But now, the second Error in Line proves that 2001 is a GREAT year for Atari
demos! People who were quiet for years suddenly spoke out with their latest
releases. The greatest surprise of the party, was the brain-blasting DSP-
bending tour-de-force by Escape, which even overshadowed the monster 3-D
productions from the Swedish side of the scene! The future has two co-
existing possibilities, one of which shows total mastery of the basic Falcon
hardware, and the other making better use of expanded hardware. The only
concern is the currrent low state of ST releases (although they got their
own great megademo from the best that the oldschool French scene had to
offer !) EIL part 2 was surely the revenge of the Falcon!
We know what is expected for the next time, greater quality, ever more
kicking effects, more DSP 3-D, even better music. The challenge has been
set, as always, BEAT DIS!
The Atari scene rises from the dead once again, may it still have many
years left in it!!
CiH - For Alive! Mag - April 2001.
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