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Any good places 2 learn about demoscene, like history or slang or w/e?

Watch PC-Lamerit series on YouTube

https://github.com/psenough/teach_yourself_demoscene_in_14_days

Moleman 2 - Demoscene - The Art of the Algorithms (2012)

Also check out this educational demo.

I also have that question....

Anyway, they aren't perfect, some of them are outright frustrating with how much information and context they leave out for seemingly no reason, but:
Simon Carless's PC Format Articles on the Scene (1995-6) [it's behind a 20 dollar paywall:( ]
Mindcandy 1 Demodvd (2002)
Demoscene Doc (2010)
Trackers: The Sound of 16-bit (2021)
We Didn't Start the Färjan (2024)

There's also Diskmags, you don't want to read Diskmags. There's also footage taken live at parties, but like, that's a PRIMARY source in the most literal way possible, so that's annoying. There's also emailing people, but you asked about good places and I feel like I'm stretching the definition of "good" already.

Please elaborate. =)

I of course don't know much about a lot of stuff in the demoscene (that's why I want a video about the entire history). But from what I know by going through UseNet posts from 1995, there is just SO much context behind the Dope demo that is incredibly interesting. Mindcandy 1 didn't cover all it, it still had some with those Hornet dudes being at NaiD. But that Demoscene Doc is rough, Jugi provides some interesting info about like the infamous unemployed orga who ran off with the money to buy his wife a car, we love that. But the rest kind of feels like they're just saying what happened in the demo, like yeah the 7800 PHONG Polys is a lie, but they don't say it's 1024 instead, or that when Jugi showed it to Sandman of Valhalla before it got shown he almost fell to the floor laughing at that info box, or that the info boxes were made by Reward, or that Reward was kinda a part of a trio with Jmagic and Jugi and those three made Cyboman 2, Bill G. Force, xTal and more all together.



This is everything he had to say about OpenMPT, which itself is weirdly lacking documentation of it's history that isn't way too short or way too long.

For the Färjan video, that one is just a bunch of names of things that happened, which isn't too helpful if you aren't a 48 year old who's been in the scene for a third of a century. I say someone turns it into one of them Iceberg charts and then makes a video going down the "Demoscene Iceberg" and get a bajillion views!! That'd be almost enough money to buy your own Färjan :).

I am afraid you'll very very disappointed if you get into the demoscene for "views" and virtual "hearts"

I feel as videos on the demoscene can get views, Trackers: The Sound of 16-bit got over a million, and it's done good for the tracking scene by getting lots of people interested. Plus, videos where people explain how they got bad apple to run on interesting setups get views too! I don't think the problem is that people don't want to watch videos on the demoscene, it's that the sceners who know enough about the demoscene don't then turn around and start making videos on it. ps does, but they don't go into the history of the scene, mainly talking about what happened in the current year, which is still invaluable and a massive good, but doesn't get people in unfortunately.

being in the scene for attention sounds odd to me; there's much better strategies available on the internet if you're after attention.

For me, writing code gives my pointless life a purpose, and intro code works best - technical enough to give a challenge, requires creativity because of the art part, the scope is small enough that I don't lose interest on the way because of my super short attention span. Not to mention the competitive element that gives the right amount of motivation to continue improving.

we have a local attention trade mechanism here, with the thumbs, but those translate badly into youtube clicks or insta followers.

I "got" into the scene by reading a lot of scrolltexts, notes, diskmags, articles, STIL comments etc. Scene was much bigger in late 1990s, or atleast it seemed to be EVERYWHERE.

At the time finnish MikroBitti magazine also had some articles about Assembly and demos, their BBS MBnet also had demos on it's file archive. They were state of the art what could be done with home computers.

Also helped a bit that I had a C64 as my first computer (in 1994!), so I was seeing cracktros and I don't remember seeing demos, but nostalgia from that was probably important later on, because it lead me to tinker with C64 emulators in late 1990s and discover that people were still making demos for it.

So I just watched demos. Somehow found my way to irc-channels mentioned in the .nfo files and web pages. There were people involved in the scene, or atleast who had heard about demos. Went to some local party with friends, talked to some people there, but they felt really arrogant somehow. =) So I was an outlier for a long time. I had my own circles and friends, and we were making all kinds of things, sometimes inspired by what we had seen on demos. Scene people were also writing lots of programming tutorial .txt files. LAMERTUT.txt 3DICA etc. Some demo effect explanations on HORNET were also important.

Maybe the "breakthrough" for me was in 2008 when some bit-older-than-me, hairy REAL C64 scener dudes, on one small IRC-channel were going to have a weekend meeting on a cabin. They were/are actually really nice dudes and agreed to pick me up from the military garrison where I was a conscripted at.

And also there was one other group of people on IRC, which I befriended with in 2009-ish.

Some really talented and nice people in those groups, and we are making prods, visiting and organizing parties and meetings to this day.

..So maybe go visit some local parties. Even if it requires some forcing. Watch demos. Meet people. Maybe IRC is dead, try to find interesting Discords? Some demoscene documentaries are nice, but they are always a bit shallow. It's culture and It's people.

Of course nowdays demoscene is just one of the artscenes on the internet. So many different clicks of arts, music, programming exist nowdays so maybe it's become even more esoteric now than it used to be. lol idk.

It's less so I'm in the scene for attention and more so I want the scene to get attention because...



I live in America, the closest proper party to me is farther away than Inercia is to Assembly, so the word "local" is stretching it. Of course that obvious strategy is to start my own demoparty, but I'd need to get people interested in it, and how am I supposed to get people interested in it if there's no good documentaries to watch?

I got interested in the demoscene in the 90s partly thanks to a french magazine called "PCteam".

I don't think the demoscene was "everywhere" instead I believe it attracted and continues to attract very particular people. You feel it was everywhere because you had particular interests and a particular mindset that lead you to stuff that talks about the demoscene. But from a mainstream perspective, especially back then, it was still a rather niche community.

Also before 2000 internet was scarce. It was still "difficult" to access internet (especially if you were a tween living in a village like me) and it was also expensive. That's probably why you could find paper medias talking about the scene at your local supermarket.

I think the "demoscene was everywhere" feeling was coming from BBSes/internet.
Lots of finnish game development seemed to be somewhat "scene adjacent" due to usage of tracker music, and sometimes games even had straight up demo effects in them. Many of the free finnish programming tutorials mentioned demo effects and of course demos could be distributed more easily than music videos on slower links.

I agree that part of that feeling was due to information/internet being more scarce then, but I'd still argue that at that point in time demos often represented the state-of-the-art what you can do on home computers.

@minebrandon, I got interested in demos by just watching them. I guess because I've always been interested about visual programming, it was just very appealing to imitate what the big boys were doing :)

The way I see it, the demoscene was indeed "everywhere" for a considerable time, but it depends on how do you define "everywhere". The general mindset of computer owners was very different in the 1980s and early 1990s, as computers weren't a form of passive entertainment like nowadays. It was an exciting adventure which only attracted a certain type of creative people. One meaning of the word "lamer" was someone who just used their computers, for gaming or whatever, without understanding it, without coding or doing "power user" stuff. Which, at the time, was simply "using your computer".

It was a natural consequence that likeminded people, particularly if they owned the same type of computer, congregated and built communities. Local clubs became networks, friends formed groups, patterns emerged and turned into traditions. The Amiga became synonimous with "the scene" - back then, often without "demo" added, as it was considered a subscene in the general computer scene.

So yes, if you were a hobbist up to, say 1992-93-ish, you could not escape from the demoscene. It was the only dedicated visual arts community until the advent of the internet.