A history of the Amiga, part 8: The demo scene | Ars Technica

Author’s note: The Demo Scene is the latest piece in a long-running Ars series on the history of the Amiga. The last installment in the series ran in 2008, but professional obligations for the author caused a delay. More chapters are on the way—emphasis on chapters. The ultimate aim is to compile all the parts of this series into a book. Stay tuned!

Genesis

As computer games became more and more complex in the late 1980s, the days of the individual developer seemed to be waning. For a young teenager sitting alone in his room, the dream of creating the next great game by himself was getting out of reach. Yet out of this dilemma these same kids invented a unique method of self-expression, something that would end up enduring longer than Commodore itself. In fact, it still exists today. This was the demo scene.

The genesis of the demo scene started with the Apple ][ in the late 1970s and fully formed with the Commodore 64 a few years later. It started with the battle between game developers and pirates. Companies like Sierra would add newer and cleverer copy protection to their wares to prevent copying, and this challenged the pirates (who were mostly teenagers) to crack the protection. If you were the first to crack a game, you wanted to show off your feat to your friends, so crackers would add a byline with their pseudonyms on the game’s loading screen.

Friendly competition between cracking groups led to an artistic arms race. Instead of just modifying the loading screen, groups started to create their own “intros.” These were little animations that would scroll the names of the group’s members, perhaps with a little music in the background. As the intros got larger and more complicated, they started to rival the size of the games themselves. Eventually, some groups stopped doing the cracking altogether and just packed a single floppy disk with as much of their art, animation, and music as they could. These were the first demos.

Creating the demo scene

Demos required the participation of multiple people, including artists, musicians, and coders, much like a small game studio. Unlike games, however, demos did not (at least at first!) earn their creators any money. For the teenage crackers who became demo creators, this wasn’t a huge issue. Creating a great demo wasn’t about getting paid. It was about recognition from your peers, about amazing your friends by showing them something they didn’t think could be done. This was something greater than money. It was empowering and addictive.

The first demo groups cut their teeth on the Commodore 64, an everyman’s machine that ended its long life after selling 22 million units. When the Amiga arrived, powered by the Motorola 68000 chip, it represented a quantum leap in power over its 8-bit cousins the Commodore 64 and Sinclair Spectrum. Demo groups flocked to the new machine with its greater color palette and superior sound. The Amiga’s custom chips were just begging to be explored by clever coders banging directly on the hardware using assembly language for superior speed.

Although the Amiga 1000 was released in 1985, it wasn’t until the more inexpensive Amiga 500 came out in 1987 that kids interested in demos could afford one. Trefor James was one of them.

“I started out with a BBC Model B and then moved onto a Commodore 128,” he explained to me. “When the Amiga 500 first came out, I knew I simply had to have one. It was so hugely ahead of anything else that was around at the time. It changed everything.”

A friend at school gave Trefor some pirated games, most of which had intros from the cracking group on the front of them. He loved the idea of a group of guys (and they always seemed to be guys) who dedicated themselves to the challenge of removing copy protection. He also was intrigued by the idea of scrolltext, where you could communicate with others doing the same thing. A friend, already in the demo scene under the name “Count Zero,” told him that if he liked intros he would love demos. Count Zero then gave him a stack of 3.5-inch floppy disks.

Most of the demos contained phone numbers in the scrolling text in the end credits, and Trefor called some of them up, not knowing what to expect. He found that they were “a bunch of really cool guys” who were just as excited about computers as he was. Before he knew it, he was part of the scene as a mail trader.

In the early days, the primary method of distributing demos was by mail. This proved somewhat impractical as the scene got larger, so trading moved to dial-up modems and bulletin board systems (BBS). This led to a new problem: long-distance phone bills. Traders could have up to 150 contacts with whom they swapped software. Trefor said that monthly phone charges of £400 (more than $1,100 in today’s currency) were not uncommon. For a teenager, it was hard to sustain these bills for very long.

Some people sold their computers to cover the costs, thus exiting the scene forever. Others started trading hacked calling cards. “Virgin” cards were highly sought-after currency as they could be used for up to six to eight weeks. AT&T and MCI were the most common as they provided toll-free 800 numbers in most countries. The top cracking and demo scene BBS would trade in valuable text files describing how to build blue boxes and other “phreaking” tips for hacking the phone exchanges.

Before the Internet, these phreakers were building their own international communications network. Demo group collaboration sometimes extended over oceans. Arctangent, a 19 year-old computer artist living in the US, had contributed some graphical screens for an electronic scene magazine called “Grapevine.” One night at 2am his phone rang. He heard the distant, tinny voice of a British woman asking if “Aaah-tangent” would like to join the demo group LSD. Initially he thought it was a prank call, but they phoned back and insisted that he “Just say yes.”

Running a demo group

Keeping all these far-flung groups of enthusiastic teenagers organized took a very special kind of management. When Count Zero asked Trefor to join the group Anthrox, he jumped at the chance. It wasn't a large group (he was their fifth member) and when Count Zero started winding down his activities, Trefor ended up taking on some of the group's management duties. Much of this activity consisted of finding smaller groups and “consuming” them for their talent. A good way to grab an artist or a coder from a rival group was to bribe them with an offer of a cheap modem. It was a tricky balancing act. Artists and musicians wouldn’t join groups without good coders, and the coders wanted the best artistic talent to make their algorithms shine.

Disputes between groups were inevitable, and while they never got truly nasty, sometimes bad feelings would leak out into the demos themselves. Along with the “greets” to other groups displayed in scrolling, bouncing text, more nasty messages could sneak in. Occasionally a group would release a sub-standard demo “on behalf” of another group they were fighting with. These arguments may seem petty with the benefit of age and hindsight, but they mattered a great deal to the people involved at the time. Sure, in some sense they were typical teenagers, with cliques, in-jokes, and plenty of swearing. But they were also very atypical teenagers, capable of writing highly tuned assembler code that talked directly to the Amiga’s custom chips and made them sing.

Running a demo group was basically a job that you paid to do. So why would anyone do it? Trefor provided the answer: “What else could you do at such a young age that would let you talk to and meet people from all over the world and have a hand in creating things that were so damn cool?”