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is this still a thing?
azith28
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
*sits in his rocking chair*
Gather round kiddies, Let me spin ya a yarn of something that happen back in the 1990's.
Home PC's for gaming were pretty new back then. Sure the Apple and Commodor64 goes back to the 80's for the occasional game, but graphically they were usually in the nature of ascii text graphics or really bad (comparitively) animation. This was a time of 4800 baud modems, and the IBM 386 was the most powerful thing you could buy without a huge wallet. (Like those bastards next door who had the newest 9600 baud modem).
Anyway, Sometimes we would use our modems to connect to the local BBS. These were brave souls who dedicated a computer to sharing files to anyone that had a login and a modem. While I grant you its entirely possible that illegal material (Like All 23 floppy disks of Windows 3.1) were available on these sites, we mostly were interested in freeware games. Occasionally we would stumble on nuggets of gold which were classified as 'demos'. These werent game demos, but programming demos that produced graphics and sound effects that delighted and amazed. What was most impressive was how small the file was yet it was doing all kinds of fancy drawings, graphical effects, and sounds for its size. barely larger then a floppy. They werent playable, just essentially a viewing experience, showing just what your computer could do with a few lines of code. (and some knowledge of chaos theory).
Sure they were laughable compared to todays low-budget gaming graphics, and they probably were intended to be used as resume material for people trying to get work at atari or something back in the day. What i wonder is if these are still a thing and obtainable online somewhere. We use to just call them demo's, (but try searching for that on google). I would love to see some of the old ones again, for nostalgia sake, or if people are still making available to the public work like this, it would probably be pretty cool to see what they can do on todays hardware.
Stercus, Stercus, Stercus, Morituri Sum
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http://www.pouet.net/groups.php is a good listing of most of the groups and demos around.
http://awards.scene.org/ is the best of the year awards for them
or just search around on youtube and you can find a lot of them if you don't want to run the files yourself.
Every year a bunch of cool peeps get together for this:demosplash.org/
You should come if you're in the area.
I still visit this site for Scorched Earth ( they made a few remakes of scorched, and the worms series was born out of it, but damn if the original wasn't the best!)
Classic Dos Games.com
As for the demos I think they actually grew out of the cracking scene back then. It started with pirated games having their title screens altered to bring fame to whom ever made the copy available especially in those case where said game has some sort of copy protection. Later on those title screens got animations and what not and this grew into a sort of contest between the different cracking groups and then it grew into a whole separate art form which I guess is what still lives on today.
Dang Tankwars, looks exactly like an upgraded version of the first version of Scorched I played, though that shareware stuff was shared by more than just players, every so often it'd hit a dev, they'd make a tweak, and bam now another game is making the shareware rounds.
If anything I'm sad those types of games never really took off besides Worms, we got the odd one every so often, like Gunbound, but then they'd become too popular for their own good and get freemiumed into unplayable ( like Gunbound)