Whatever happened to..... The Speccy Demo?
PAndroid remembers some of his childhood readings of Your Sinclair. First in a series. Maybe.
Oh, those were the days. When a man was a man, women had breasts, hedgehogs were good and I was innocent. Well, everyone though I was. But really I was the devil in disguise. I planned to take the world over, yes I did. Hahahahaha. Ahem.
My first 'puter was a Speccy +2A. I got it in Christmas 1990, all happy and things, from off my mumsie & dad. They divorced later but that's very irrelevant. We bought the pack that had a light gun included, with various games such like BullsEye and things. Since this was my first system, and I didn't know what an Amiga, or a Sega was, I thought this was state of the art. How wrong I was.....
Being the curious old fool I still am, I went though the manual for the beast, and taught myself how to copy out Basic games from the book. My Parents instantly thought this was amazing, although to this day I have never put together anything resembling a computer program that went beyond the old "10 PRINT 'ARSE'" type-routine. It gave me experience of reading manuals, however.
A year later, I popped into a newsagents and discovered some games mags that I didn't even know had existed (back in those days, kids just didn't bring in games magazines to school. It weren't cool. Also I was in infants, we simply weren't interested.). There were two. Crash, and Your Sinclair. I bought Your Sinclair. I will never regret that day for as long as my hamster churns.
From that moment on, I had discovered something that gave me, well, happiness. I loved this magazine. It was witty, funny, said crap a lot and had some free games on the front of it. I can't actually remember an incredible amount - It was a long time ago - but the main things stuck in my head. Psst, The Odd Cartoons, The fake pages, stuff like that. I do remember pestering my mother about Future Publishing. I was astounded someone could produce this great thing and only be down the road, (Kids think like that) I thought they were gods. The magazine's greatness gave me the unfortunate ambition of becoming a games jurno. You can blame this whole website on that mag. Damn them.
I sold them all in 1994, when I had bought my evil machine A600, and sold my speccy to break even, and get a couple of boxed games. I read Miggy mags afterwards, though I never discovered Amiga Power. Amiga Format was good, yes, but it tended to have it's head in it's arse many a time. Especially in the Miggy's "dying days." I got fed up eventually and started getting Amiga User International, simply for the cover disks, which were excellent.
So what does this have any relevancy to demos, I hear you bludgeon to death? YS had a section called Public House which was odd to the extreme. It got me, and a many other people, interested in the previously obscure demo scene, in a dying commercial speccy software industry. Groups like E3 wouldn't of existed otherwise.
The monthly feature covered mainly activity from the coding groups in the eastern block, ESI, TMG Corp etc. It also spoke about games and things but that was irrelevant, it was the demos I was really after. The odd demo on the cover tape was a bonus, and a great one too. Shock changed many a peoples lives (even though it was the last demo to come from Polish peoples ESI).
Where are they now then, to coin an horribly annoying and sad phrase that I should be shameful of using? [cough] Surprisingly, the eastern block speccy demo scene is still going. Speccys ("Were" - CNBC) cheap in Russia, Pentagons are a plenty, and the FTN networks such as ZX-net are still very strong. And the odd disk or tape tends to filter out from there. Last year a major Russian demo festival (Enlight '97, I think) took place somewhere in Siberia, creating some of the best speccy demos even seen in public. Some of them run on Pentagon's only, other on old 128k's Amstrads. But all are oddly impressive in a sort of "this was never done on MY speccy" way. Here's three examples for you to "take out and give to the dog."
These and some other lovely demos are available at the World Of Spectrum, in the demo section. Just search for this/last year and/or those titles and you'll find something interesting. The X128 emulator is heavily recommended to running them, it's run pretty much anything,except +D disks, which is a bit of a shame.
(It's almost ironic now that the last Amiga magazine in existence just happens to be a Format mag, as with Your Sinclair. But Your Sinclair was good, even in it's underground days. AF has turned into a head-up-arse pile of shat. CU, dare I say it, was a much better mag. Didn't quite get it's cover disk right though...)
Binary Love - Coded by the excellent Russian group Digital Reality, this starts off with a nice little menu screen (with a text file, substituting the old scrolly) where from which you can launch up the demo. This genius of Z80 assembler contains FMV, Devils being pulled apart in high detail, scailing pictures, rotating plasma, nudity, killer music and Microsoft Insults in Russian. It's all just explosive, and very well crafted. It, rather unofficially, won the Enlight '97 best speccy demo prize. And it deserved every bit of it.
Excess - Coded by Zero International Association, it's a very flashy very "we can't spreaken English welled" demo that could easily enduce a epileptic fit if your at all susceptible. If you're not, then it's fun all the same. This demo has a much slower pace than BL, and in this respect is less of a experience to watch, but it keeps up a beat with the interrupt music and makes much use of the "2-bitplane" trick, where 2 images or sets of images are flickered very quickly to give the illusion that there's a different colour background or there's a different colour there completely. Something never taken advantage of back in the machines hey-day. Other than that, this tomb has other some interesting parts, including a 3D vector piece at the end, and a picture stretch thing or whatever there're called. Go look see.
Bizarre Construction - By Beermans of Extreme. Again, more plasma, still and scaled pictures, some impressive illusions and other things to keep you happy. This is an example of most of the demos of 1997, and though good, is pretty typical. Nice picture of a horse, however.