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The MJJ incident
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or
How Sprites Spoil the Scene
or
a recipe to flood a BBS with demotivation and ignorance
The internet is without a doubt a marvellous invention. It connects everyone
with everyone else, across countries, continents and borders and it gives
people like us a chance to exchange software, hints and opinions throughout the
world. Especially the exchange of opinions is something that several people
have a severe problem with.
Now picture the following. A very old-school french wiz-coder named Leonard is
hooked on producing more non-masked 2-bitplane sprites on screen than anyone
else - that's fine with me. Certainly, i can't beat his records and if it's fun
for him - who am i to argue.
Then the Spiceboys come up saying that they can beat Leonard's record - as
usual with a blinking eye - and while Leonard says that the Spiceboys bent the
rules a little to achieve the amount of sprites, he smiles and says he accepted
the challenge. That doesn't prevent one so for uninvolved german from jumping
at the Spiceboys, saying that they cheated, that they're not according to the
rules and that they certainly didn't beat Leonard's record.
Now, it's kind of hard to argue about whether the Spiceboys did or did not beat
Leonard's record. The so-called rules of this competition have been done by
people that left the scene a long time ago and certainly won't care anymore.
Besides that, both screens depend a lot on code-generation and precalculation
of all possibilities - and the more precalculation is done, the less realtime
there is, and the less realtime there is, the more the resulting screen becomes
like an animation.
But that's not what I wanted to argue about. What I wanted to argue about is
the way the DHS BBS was flooded with angry contributions by someone who was not
involved at all, who neither released a sprite record screen until now nor will
do so in the next coupled of years but who somehow decided to defend all
old-school coders and their work from anything and anyone who might ask for the
sense in their doings.
However, it certainly kept the people busy arguing on the DHS BBS and IRC for
quite a while - if we had as much lines of source-code as we had bulletin board
entries, we'd certainly see a multipart demo by now.
Let's do a little time-warp.
There once was a famous group named MJJ Prod. I still remember the first time I
ever downloaded something from an ftp-server from the directory named
/pub/atari/gfx_demos/ and it was called Anomaly by MJJ Prod. To be discovered
later were great demos such as Mostly Harmless or Canari by MJJ Prod. All these
demos featured excellent technique, design and had a unique feeling of an "easy
approach" to making demos - you saw that the MJJ crew obviously enjoyed what
they were doing.
By the time, MJJ Prod. vanished, too. Their latest production known to me was
"Canari", a rather small but very impressive little demo presented on a
Gigafun party. After that, MJJ Prod. was to be considered silent.
Now, MJJ tries a return with slightly varied members. While Fel'x seemed to
have belonged to MJJ Prod. Right from the start, several others have joined
that weren't very famous until now. And by now they have released for example a
slideshow presenting the work of famous MJJ graphicians, including high-colour
pictures converted to 16 colours by the famous Floyd-Steinberg, and a music
player with several already known modules.
Now that isn't exactly the quality of MJJ Prod. that people are used to. But
obviously, they go wild if you tell them. Moondog has tried in a rather - for
his own standards - mild way and even insisted on not wanting to offend anyone
- No use. The people in MJJ Prod. As today try to both live on the hype that
people still connect to the name MJJ without actually being able to feed that
hype.
Once again, the DHS BBS was being abused for a bloody revenge on moondog with a
rather pointless result. While the people in or next to MJJ Prod. kept slapping
their backs for being such a great crew, more or less the whole rest of the
Atari scene expressed rather critical opinions about the later MJJ releases.
At this point, it might be interesting to see that these two topics have
resulted in far more lines of written text on the DHS BBS than the announcement
of parties (ParaCon 4, EIL #3) or the discussion of releases (UMD, Invitros) -
if people were that active when writing for one of the diskmagazines, there
wouldn't be so large delays between the releases for sure.
But why do people spend so much time defending themselves against a presumable
attack by a diskmagazine editor who is known to have a strong connection to the
past rather than the present and who is not really famous for being very
cheerful in general - and who even did try to find a very balanced view on
everything thigs time ?
Why does someone, who is not involved in current demo releases nor has been
involved in nor will be involved vividly defend the rules of a competition that
has run out about 10 years ago against something that was more meant as a
wind-up and didn't insult anyone badly - At least not the one the joke was
aimed at ?
Whatever the reasons are - they're pointless. The discussions around the topics
above are senseless and instead of spending a lot of time arguing why a certain
product was hot or not, maybe people should invest more time into developing
better products ?
It's not easy to criticise. There's a large difference between just saying
"this sucks" and carefully distinguishing what of a demo or game is good, what
is bad, how it can be improved and what people expected of it.
But in both discussion mentioned above, it's obvious that certain people might
also have to learn how to handle critics. By just feeling insulted, calling the
critic names and ignoring all attempts to make the best out of it, no one will
feel better either.
So, dear Atari scene, here's the resume of this article : You have the critics
you always wanted to have : Trying to be balanced, objective and also give an
idea of how it might be done better next time. Now certain people of the scene
should learn how to handle critics.
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