pouët.net

Independently, you europeans surely have my full respect. Skills and creativity are top notch over there.

Even knowing that this would be really hard to beat the big groups, I still believe that being allowed to submit remotely to the more traditional/hardcore parties would be a great reason to spend half or maybe an entire year building a more polished prod.

Even then, as already said, this sub-culture is deep at my heart. You are awesome!

deep in*... lol

imerso: i suppose you are not aware of the often employed method to circumvent no-remote submission rules which is to somehow involve a person who will attend the event and let them handle the submission of the prod on-site. just putting "support: <nameofscenerthatsupportsyou>" in the nfo is usually enough to pass the checksums, to be absolutely sure you could ask the local to perform an actual production related task (usually smth small like writing the nfo but actual coops are cool too of course).

(...which is why that rule is absolutely pointless but I've repeated that enough times)

also, working an entire year on a well-polished prod and then releasing it remote isn't exactly exciting either

That's not entirely true, as being able to travel to germany might not be an option and the streaming services of revision are topnotch, so it still would kinda be like you're there.

"Who Killed the American Demoscene?"
the same who killed grindcore.
just think about it...

god i wish i could submit remotely to somewhere that I could gauge the audience's reactions remotely... hard to get to the EU on a hard budget of $30.

Well 8088Mph was a mostly American prod and it won revision and some awards later on. But simply because it rulez - I think it's irrelevant where people come from, I don't think there is much local vote (at least not on revision)

gargaj that doesnt makes the rule pointless... only the execution of the rules.

regarding the "no remotes at big parties" rule:
well its not absolutely pointless as in "you need to know someone who is actually going".
this will effectively stop outsiders of the scene while it is close to nonexistent for established and networked sceners. not sure if that is or should be the intention of the rule, in any case im sure its mostly there for practical reasons.

Probably should branch that discussion out to a different thread though.

Eh, a third, maybe.. Trixter and the musicians, the others are around the globe.

whooo killed mr moonlight?

What utter nonsense.

Thanks, Obama!!

<google poisoning>
obama idiot
</google poisoning>

The US demoscene (of sorts) actually happened in the 1970s, in the form of the Homebrew Computer Club with - I quote, "creating something previously thought impossible" with hw/sw combos (this was a very local club with few members), and with Apple II picture+scroller type crack screens, though not demos as we know them because there were no standalone crack screen competitions.

After that, a US friend explains what you ask by the fact that depression hit and USA skipped from 1970s 8-bits to consoles without experiencing the home computer phenomenon that the rest of the world experienced.

The Demoscene as we know it started on 8- and 16-bit home computers circa 1986, and the above would explain why it didn't get a foothold in the US early. Now, the PC was released in 1981. But households couldn't even afford PCs until a bit into the 1990s, and even by then, few PCs could show releases consistently on the neighbor's PC. This is why youngsters with lots of lost sleep couldn't get their hands on them. :)

So, for anyone but a select few, I think it had to wait until standardized 2D and 3D drivers before the PC could deliver effects that impressed a multitude of exe downloaders.

1/4th IMO. USA, UK, Netherlands, Israel were the major contributions.

I was interviewed for that article too and spoke on the phone with the author for 90 minutes. I also read Gargaj's excellent responses that he forwarded me personally (I'm sure Gloom's were excellent too). And I participated in the USA's demoscene during the height of its heyday in many forms both in front of and behind the scenes/screens. And, despite all that, I still couldn't tell you why the American scene fizzled out.

Killed? Trixter and Phoenix are alive and kicking right? =)

It has a lot of signs of life for a dead thing.
Ok, I mean a party as large as NAID isn't happening, but there are events in California, @party is still happening, Synchrony is still happening . . .
And as for remote entries, @party in the Boston area takes them (:
-says a totally unbiased person-

The North American demoscene isn't dead, it's just different.

Also, I find it fascinating no one writes this about the South American demoscene (where there are still parties!), or the Australian demoscene (also parties!), or the scene in European countries (entire continent of Europe) that aren't Germany and the Nordics, especially places where money and politics have interfered.

I think the American scene was unique in that it got very large very fast (NAID was the size of Revision, two years in a row), and then fizzled. In the other countries you mentioned, there wasn't that order-of-magnitude growth and drop.

The parties were large or the scene was large? Not the same thing.

rally the horde!

The parties were large. As for the NA scene at its absolute peak, a very rough estimate that includes the disproportionately large tracking scene would be about 3000 (for every scener that went to the parties, I'm guessing there were 2 that couldn't go based on my recollection of size/numbers in IRC and BBS contacts, etc.). This is not an exact science.

That said, we were not blind to the fact that the numbers were easily 10,000 or more at the same time in all of Europe. (No idea what the current numbers are now.)

Not sure if that answers your question. I guess I'd say it was large "for us". But a smaller slice of the pie by continent in total numbers of course.

Pretty sure Phoenix is going to knock the microphone out of my hand any second now.