MISSING IN ACTION
It's now mid August and we're right into that "summertime hole" as some
people call it. Most of us are on vacation, still working or just too lazy to
do things...
But there's more to it, some feeling in the air, as if the word "end" was
ringing in minds. I'm pretty sure this isn't time for that but surely our rate
of activity has seldom been so low !
And the problem isn't only about doing new stuff but also about COMPLETING
what we have started. Over the years we have had too many examples of projects
that never saw the light of day, even tho some were said to be completed.
Here's a non exhaustive listing of unfinished, unreleased and years delayed
demos.
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SOME SURELY NICE DEMO WE MISS AND MAY NEVER SEE IN THEIR FINAL SHAPE
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AWAKEN (Cobra) : no need to recall this story which is no old news. As you
all know the demo never went further than being a really nice collection of
screens with no gfx nor msx...
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Verdict : clearly the guys of Cobra didn't really care about their demo
anymore and that's too bad because most screens were really cool. Still the
demo died long time before reaching a solid state of completion (unlike
MOTION which seemed to miss nothing but linking).
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BINLINER (Avena) : This demo was to be the sequel to the brillian Sono demo
but Tat lost movitation due to "lack of competition" and to some personal
reasons as wellI guess. Modmate was to paint gfx and surely this demo would
have been another killer but it died in the egg as only three screens were
released. Too bad since they were just amazing !
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Verdict : there's nothing more to hope from Tat I'm afraid and that was the
end of another great crew. Get the three screens, still better than nothing
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CRUSH YOUR MIND (Positivity) : I've had that preview for a long time and I
don't know if it was spread or not, still it was in very early stage and
was composed of a 3D maze that was damn slow (esp compared to the latest
Wold3D beta by Ray/tSCc). You go walking around at a snail pace, trying to
find a few screens (maybe four, no more) among which there was a mapped
cube, a rotozoomer plus an animated video, all of average quality...
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Verdict : Development was certainly stopped due to lack of active and
motivated people since this crew is long dead. If they have other screens
is another question I can't answer right now :(
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EIL1 UNNAMED DEMO (Mind Design) : Deez and Viking have brought us a number
of quality releases over the years tho these were too short. This demo was
first delayed because of some bugs and later Deez harddrive crashed. Since
then we've had no clues about a possible release...
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Verdict : Deez went back to business lately, offering us a couple of nice
intros for Alive or realising small and nicely designed prods. He seems to
be willing to go on like this so that we can hope more things from him !
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FINALE (Extream) : back in the mid nineties there were still a lot of crews
from Sweden and Finland and Extream was one of them. They planned a huge ST
demo that was to be spread over FOUR disks ! Except for that, I never heard
more from them, nor did I see a single screen...
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Verdict : we don't even know if that demo was ever started :( Maybe it's
lying almost finished, maybe some screens could be spread, or maybe there's
absolutely nothing to see. Still I believe we have almost no chances to
ever see something about FINALE :(
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HEFTIG (Cream) : ah Heftig !! An amazing preview was shown at the Error In
Line party back in 99 and then the crew seemed to have lost all interest :(
It was meant to run on 2Mb STs and showed a lot of FX following the high
quality of DO THINGS. Is it lost forever ?
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Verdict : well I'm pretty sure now that HEFTIG will be released especially
as ULTRA (formely known as Candyman) woke up and optimised a lot of fx or
even added new ones (visit their diaries for latest news). This should lead
to a series of TWO demos, one of them expected before the end of the year !
A great pretender as long as Ultra is motivated. Keep going mate !!
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ILLUSION (Dune) : this demo won the Place To Be Again demo compo back in
1994 BUT it was never released ! Rumous say that only the party organizers
actually saw the demo and that it only ran on Falcon !? Still some excerpts
could be seen on French channel GAME ONE in a show about ST demos ! And it
really looked great and highly designed !
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Verdict : A pure mystery this demo is ! Lately ST Ghost of Sector One was
given the sources of ILLUSION as huge debugging is needed to make it run on
ST. Unfortunately this seems to be too big a task for a single man. Unless
the guys of DUNE wake up and clean their mess, there's no chance we'll see
it :(
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JACKTRO (Acf) : Last night I happened to read an interview of Tao done for
Toxic Mag 16 I think (or maybe 17 :). He mentioned this last ACF demo
saying that they "may" get back to it and finally complete it. That was
more than 2 years ago and nothing happened...
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Verdict : is it another demo, like Virtual Escape, that was 99% done and
only required some fixing ? I guess we'll never know as all contacts with
ACF have long been dead :( Maybe some drawer cleaning could bring it back
to life ? Some motivation would be needed too.
UPDATE : I've been in touch with Jacky lately and he told that the demo
was 75% completed and mostly missed gfx and msx. I know that Tao would be
ready to give a hand but A-t hasn't been seen for ages :(
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JAPEMO (Cerebral Vortex) : hmm what could I say about it ? Well Hylst came
from nowhere and announced as a first production a 4 disk demo ! Was he on
drugs or his expectations out of reach ? We will never know. Some previews
were shown and make me think that we're not missing much here...
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Verdict : don't try building pyramids on the first day coding or you'll end
up with something you cannot bring to completion ! As guest screens such as
Strider's contribution were released, it strongly implies that the project
was burried long time ago...
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MOTION (Aggression) : first due to be a 2Mb STe demo, MOTION then became a
Falcon demo. From then, nothing happened tho several parts were known to be
done. In the end, we were offered these parts separately and they looked
really cool but didn't make it a complete demo :(
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Verdict : A really nice "could have been" demo that crumpled to pieces :(
We can still enjoy it as a video courtesy of Strider but watching a Falcon
demo on PC tends to kill the good vibe...
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MUSIQUE (Excellence In Art) : I always loved EIA demos since they bore a
very high quality standard ! This time the crew was to bring us an msx
compilation but Per Almered stopped all work because of some packing
problems. We were left with a nice preview, neatly designed and "smart" as
usual. Unfortunately he stopped doing things on ATARI at that point...
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Verdict : since the crew homepage hasn't been updated for about 3 years now
I think they are plain dead and nothing more. It is still hard to believe
that such motivated one member crew just vanished away :( Investigation is
needed here !
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PHOTOTRO (Hemoroids) This ST demo is said to have won some democompo years
ago (can't remember the party's name tho) but was never released ! I have
no clue about the demo content or quality but Hemoroids was known for high
qualities releases, so that makes of it another ILLUSION :(
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Verdict : I remember mailing former members of HMD and one of them even
said he had the demo somewhere but he never mailed me back nor did he
answer my other mails :( Here our hopes are almost close to zero.
UPDATE : I'm back from a weekend at a couple of friends and BANG ! as I
browse thru DHS, I'm happily amazed at reading that that intro has just
been released ! Check our review !!!
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POSH ? (Checkpoint) : Who can forget how Defjam kicked all standards at the
first Error In Line party with SURETRIP ? Then we heard about another ST
brainblasting project and we all waited for Defjam to amaze us. The demo
was first planned to be seen at STNICCC but nothing appeared. Then we
longed for EIL2 but Defjam was curiously absent... I have only seen one
screen and it purely rocks ! From what I know gfx are done and many fx were
added after STNICCC but... we're still hoping for release :(
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Verdict : just when you think they're dead, CP brings us new stuff (refer
to the summer compo held last year). You never know when and where they're
going to release stuff and this rule applies once more here. Maybe EIL3
will save this demo from oblivion... Fingers crossed !
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RESURRECTION (ST Knights and tSCc) : maybe you remember JACE, formely a
member of HMD saying that this demo would kick ass ! I saw some screens
done by Llama which were pretty cool and were seen in latest tSCc intros.
As for Jace he only showed me an STe gouraud mapped glenz vector, which tho
looking nice was definitely too SMALL while the file was too BIG (500Kb for
a single effect !).
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Verdict : We knew quite quickly that there was nothing more to expect from
Jace who had a big mouth but did -NOT- do as much :( We have NO evidence he
actually coded more than this "suspicious" glenz vector thing... Too bad
because tSCc had done great screens. I'd be damn surprised if Jace released
his screens !
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THEN WHAT ?
If you counted them, it gives us 14 unreleased or partly released demos
and there are so many more left in some corners of the scene memory ! Most of
these demos are long lost and I don't think we can expect to see anything of
them in a near future. Among the rest, 3 demos were partly released, namely
AWAKEN, MOTION and JAPEMO and I am grateful to their authors as it gave us more
things to enjoy !
What's left ? If I'm convinced that we'll see Mind Design and Cream demos
someday, I'm not sure about the DUNE demo as there's a lot of debugging to do.
As for CHECKPOINT's demo, the only answer I can think of is '?'
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