A Tribute To The 80's, 90's And The Demoscene (And Geeks!)

Do you remember when cracked pc-games showed a demo of the hackers at startup? When you had to fiddle with MS DOS's autoexec.bat and config.sys for half an hour, adding EMM386.exe or QUEMM386.sys to allocate enough memory for the game, and after that trying for an hour to get that damn Ad Lib sound-card to work?

_{Duke Nukem saving the Babes! source: Escapist Magazine}

If so, you're not only an old fart like myself, but you'll also remember the demoscene, the LAN-parties and the bulletin board system dial-up servers on which demos, shareware- and hacked games were distributed before "the world wide web" was a thing. And I'd like to share with you all some of the magic of those times, the early eighties and nineties, by remembering the games, arcades, demos and the demo groups that amazed us back then with their masterful feats of effective programming.

_{source: Wikipedia}

When I was 12 years old and just started my first year of high-school, I saw in a store a real home computer, the Sinclair ZX81: it was nothing more than a small keyboard. These were standing right next to the magazine stands, switched on and attached to a screen, free to be used by anyone who wanted to try the machine. Curious as I was, and after already having played Pong, Space Invaders and Frogger on an old game console (Atari or Philips, we had both), I immediately picked up one of the computer magazines that had real live examples of BASIC programming, took it to the ZX81 and started typing in one of the example programs. After a half hour of typing with two fingers (still do that), the result was that a 3D sphere was slowly, line by line, being drawn on screen in glorious black-and-white.

_{Centipede. source: mata.juegos}

Right then and there I fell in love with that concept of being able to do wonderful things on screen by just typing in the right characters in the right order. I was amazed, even if it took the program almost 10 minutes to draw the sphere and 10 minutes to erase it again. I missed school the rest of that day, and many days after that, because I discovered that near my school there were three Arcades full of pinball machines and great arcade games like Centipede, Defender, Tempest (boy was I hooked on that one), and later Galaga, Xevious, Wonder Boy, Dragon's Lair... I never did finish high-school, but I don't regret that one bit; I was never into the whole "obediance" thing, which is the first and foremost thing you learn there. Who can reproduce best what others tell them, wins the highest score; not a high-score I was interested in.

No, I held several high-scores that had real meaning; most proud I am of my high-score on the pinball classic Eight Ball Deluxe. It had a real computer voice that told you what to do! Most heard instruction: "Shoot the eight ball, corner pocket", where you had to press the left button on the exact right moment to hit the corner pocket in the upper right of the play-field; that was actually one of the easier shots to make :-)

_{source: Silverball Museum}

Then, in the 90's, things changed. Arcade's were losing popularity because home computers were replaced by PC's that became affordable, and my father bought his first PC, an Olivetti 286 with a whopping Megabyte of RAM! And a 256 color VGA screen! And a 40 MB harddisk! And the fiddling with the MS DOS startup files started... But when the game did start, oh boy was that satisfying! The graphics and animations in the first side-scrolling Prince of Persia were astonishing and when Prince of Persia 2 was released, I had my cracked copy on the day it came out thanks to the underground scene of Bulletin Board Systems.

I saw the birth of Real Time Startegy games, with Dune 2 and later the first Command & Conquer... Remember that sexy female voice that said "Global Defense Initiative Selected" when you clicked on G.D.I. at the start of the game?

Also I remember the first time a game made the hairs in my neck stand up, which was Doom of course. But my favorite 3D shooter from those years was Duke Nukem 3D, a game that would never be made in these PC (as in "Political Correctness") heavy times. Dukes mission was to "save all the babes from Earth" by defeating the aliens that invaded our planet. "I came here to kick ass and chew bubblegum. And I'm all out of bubblegum!" when he started shooting aliens, or "damn, I look good" when passing a mirror, or the unforgettable "I got no time to play with myself" when he sees a Duke Nukem pinball machine in an arcade in the game...

There were so many great games back then. All genres we know today were born back then. Do you think survival horror is new in games? Then you never played Alone in the Dark! ... Okay... This is getting too much; I'm getting older with each word I type, so I'd better wrap it up before this is the last thing I'll ever do. On to the demoscene!

_{source: Wikipedia}

Anyone remember Fairlight or Future Crew? I think Second Reality by Future Crew is the most famous 64K demo ever made, released first in 1993. These demo's were really little art-pieces as they were the result of a competition between programmers, hackers really. The demo is just a computer program with the aim to squeeze as much audiovisual capabilities out of the available hardware in as little code as possible. They even went as far as to use known hardware defects and bugs to gain that little extra video- and audio-performance.

I wrote Assembly once, a single function that was part of a C++ program that did nothing else but clear the screen... Push bits and bytes, setting the proper flags after clearing specifically addressed memory blocks, to instruct the right registers and hardware to place the blinking cursor in the upper right corner of the screen, was a heavy task for me back then; I know how hard it is to talk almost directly to the hardware and I know it's the most effective way of programming in the sense that you use as little instructions or memory as possible.

I'll leave you with that and a video of the Second Reality Demo; if you've never seen it before, you're probably a lot younger than me and won't be very impressed. But I invite you to watch it anyway, if only to see how far we've come in so little time. And if you're from my generation or even earlier: enjoy the memory trip back in time. I know I did!

Thanks for reading, as always, dear visitor. I hope the little trip back in geek-history was to your liking ;-)

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