demoscene /dem'oh-seen/
[also `demo scene'] A culture of multimedia hackers located
primarily in Scandinavia and northern Europe. Demoscene folklore
recounts that when old-time warez
d00dz cracked some piece of software they often added an
advertisement of in the beginning, usually containing colorful
display hacks with greetings
to other cracking groups. The demoscene was born among people who
decided building these display hacks is more interesting than
hacking and began to build self-contained display hacks of
considerable elaboration and beauty (within the culture such a
hack is called a demo). The split
seems to have happened at the end of the 1980s. As more of these
demogroups emerged, they started
to have compos at copying parties
(see copyparty), which later
evolved to standalone events (see demoparty). The demoscene has retained some
traits from the warez d00dz,
including their style of handles and group names and some of
their jargon.
Traditionally demos were written in assembly language, with
lots of smart tricks, self-modifying code, undocumented op-codes
and the like. Some time around 1995, people started coding demos
in C, and a couple of years after that, they also started using
Java.
Ten years on (in 1998-1999), the demoscene is changing as its
original platforms (C64, Amiga, Spectrum, Atari ST, IBM PC under
DOS) die out and activity shifts towards Windows, Linux, and the
Internet. While deeply underground in the past, demoscene is
trying to get into the mainstream as accepted art form, and one
symptom of this is the commercialization of bigger demoparties.
Older demosceneers frown at this, but the majority think it's a
good direction. Many demosceneers end up working in the computer
game industry. Demoscene resource pages are available at http://www.oldskool.org/demos/explained/
and http://www.scene.org/.