HN Reader

"The scene is dead" has become a meme by now. For example the "new talent" Meteoriks award is introduced with "For a scene that has been dead since 1999, our walking dead are pretty fresh".

It is well alive. Sure, we still see some of the same people from 1989, and the average age is certainly going up, but it absolutely doesn't mean we aren't seeing new blood. Styles change, technical achievement is usually seen in the sizecoding or "wild" competitions, while PC demos tend to be more cinematic and focused on art. We are seeing new things, like livecoding shaders and fantasy consoles. Of course, the Amigas and other oldschool platforms are still there, with new tricks being discovered year after year.

There are still regular demoparties. Revision, the successor to Breakpoint and Mekka Symposium is doing well year after year. With the addition of some online events like Lovebyte.

Things come and go, but there is no sign of the scene really being dead. Heck, we even seen older demosceners bring their children to the parties, with some of them already doing cool stuff.

In my experience the old computer nerd communities don't do much to help get young people that would be interested into it. A lot of the discussion online mainly just consists of reminiscing about how amazing the '80s were.

Documentation is also in something of a state—the big video game consoles (NES, SNES, Genesis..) all have plenty of free, modern high quality guides teaching you how to program them from nothing, understand all the hardware, etc.. then look at the '80s computers (*especially* the Amiga) and it seems to mainly be scattered around old book scans and wiki articles assuming varying levels of pre-existing knowledge of the hardware. Strangely enough a lot of the best documentation seems to be from YouTube tutorials (I guess because you can see what they're actually doing). It sounds wrong to call it "stuck in the past" but I guess that would be the best way to describe it.

This isn't really about the scene specifically but it's somewhat related at least.

I was just walking down demoscene memory lane yesterday. Some of my favorite demoscene demos were Amiga ones (playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPdB_zdyMbM&list=PLwds84NCmJ...), which lead me to "The Greatest Video Game Tech Demo Ever," Shadow the Beast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovwFjgAFhOs

That video's great because it breaks down how Psygnosis managed to get 12 layers of parallax scrolling at 50fps and 128 colors on-screen. I never really loved the game as much as (say) Blood Money, but it was an awesome accomplishment in the same way demoscene demos were!

Much love for the demo scene, where it all began for me, pulling all nighters as a teenager writing 68k assembler in asmone on the amiga.. phreaking calls to euro BBS, writing trainers and intro for games, scanning 1800 numbers for diverters/PBX systems to exploit, pulling all your best assembler graphics routines together for your crew's newest demo for release at all-weekend demo/LAN parties.. normal teenage activities, right?! :D

The scene is not what it used to be, but it's still alive and will remain for decades. We "old-timers" were lucky to be around the 90s when the demo groups and parties were on full swing.

There are many groups and parties to mention, but for those interested have a look over at: https://www.pouet.net/toplist.php

https://files.scene.org/

https://assembly.org/en/articles/assembly-summer-2025-demosc...

The demo scene inspired me to keep my next‑gen terminal [0] tiny: it is under 5MB (Mac download was once 900 KB) and my aim is to get all downloads down to ~1MB. If demosceners can do it, regular indie devs really have no excuse.

This scene isn’t dead; we should just look beyond 3D glitter. See File Pilot [1] for another compact, clever example.

[0] https://terminal.click

[1] https://filepilot.tech

I was never part of the scene, but I did write code for a couple of demos and had friends in various groups. I just wasn't much interested in making non-games, and no one I knew were interested in making games. Made me sad later when I learned how many people from the demo scene had ended up in the games industry. If I had know that as a teenager I would have happily done more boring demo coding just to have a path into game dev later. Well, kind of ironic considering everyone I met in the scene were loudly proclaiming how lame it was to play games.

In hindsight I would have loved something like the 2010s game jams and indie games culture to have existed in the early 1990s. Guess this just proves how much of a lamer I was.

Seems the modern corollary to the demoscene is TouchDesigner programming. I always thought it would be such a neat thing for demosceners to jump to TD and work with other forms of art like live dance and live music. The fact you can have body tracking, hand gesture recognition and also have it react to sound seems like the next step in demoscene stuff.

To me one of the problems in modern demoscene is that modern PCs (especially GPUs) are so ridiculously powerful that full fat PC demos struggle to fully take advantage of it, at least in a way that is apparent to viewer. To me it feels like the emphasis has shifted more on the content side than purely techical excellence.

Sizecoding is another matter, and arguably the more interesting side of the scene these days. But it is kinda sad that we need artificial restrictions to make things interesting rather than trying to exploit every drop of perf you can squeeze from the computer.

Perhaps its the lack of appeal, in the past, the idea that you could squeeze performance into an old machine was cool, but the gap between current hardware and "demoscene limits" feels like artificially crippling: if you have 64GB of ram, the appeal of 64KB demo is far less than if you have a 64MB 486DX. It would be far more cooler, that instead of ancient hardware and artifically limited PCs, they would run demoscene on embedded stuff like Raspberry PI and modern microcontrollers, that would align with current DIY trends instead of chasing retro clout.

The best period of my life as a programmer. I've never stopped feeling nostalgic for the demoscene of the 80s and 90s. When we used to fight between Amiguys and Atarists. The Amiguys always won, of course. In fact, there was no real point to flamewar about. They had almost everything. And us Atarists? Well... we had a 68000 at 8 MHz, a MIDI port, a budget several hundreds of $ less... and even more ingenuity to get the best out of our machines (hey, let's defend ourselves as best as we can). But when the despicable PC reared its ugly architecture, suddenly we were the best of friends.

I must also confess my sacrilege, Amiguy: a buddy gave me his Amiga 500. Shortly after, the floppy drive on my STe broke down. So I took apart the one from the Amiga and put it in my ST... I wasn't even sure it would work, but it did. Now you can beat me up... but calm down. It's not like the Amiga's drive was its strong point, was it? I couldn't have done that with the Copper and its friends, and sure I wish I could have!

This saddens me. The idea of the demoscene really resonated with me, and I was curious about making stuff and joining.

The only people who still pitch demoscene dead are those with unrealistic expectations or who just returned and are surprised it’s still alive, ran by a number of 40+ people while they remember themselves joining at the age of 15. But the conversation about new generation is missed by solid 20 years and all of us who just stay focused on producing don’t waste time on rants, only to have 5 mins on hacker news that by default won’t get the idea of demoscene anyway. Way too many different scenes here to focus only on one that finally turned into a hobby, not a life changing experience.

/hollowone^oftenhide

I feel like the massive popularity of tiny fantasy consoles like pico-8 is a pretty good sign that at least the ethos of the demoscene is live and well

The first death was definitely the arrival of 3D accelerators and shaders. It's never been the same since.

In all fairness, the conditions that saw the demo scene rising are so remote to be almost incomprehensible to the new generation.

"You see, when a cracking crew beat the protection of a new game, they would upload their hacked version to an elite BBS and repackaged it with a little intro and a trainer. They had to be very creative and skilled, often working directly in assembler, in order to achieve impressive imagery and chip music while still fitting on the same 1.4MB floppy."

blank stare

Perfect timing, this was released yesterday. Minecraft on a 16mhz 68030

https://youtu.be/nHsgdZFk22M?si=HVFlgllY6sPld4v3

Physically, demos and game development have advanced far beyond where they were at the beginning of the demoscene, but now people no longer come together. Game engines and devices have become accessible to everyone, and people are constantly inventing new things. For example, just look at the number of algorithms and new gameplay mechanics now compared to 10 years ago.

In 2012, I created a live coding platform and spent a lot of time thinking about why live coding didn’t become more popular than traditional coding. Live coding came about 10 years before React, which became reactive because you no longer had to press F5 every time you updated the HTML (I worked on the first version of React Webpack, which was doing server-side rendering).

Later, after going through a startup accelerator, the puzzle finally clicked for me. Companies and businesses began making serious money from video games, discovering lots of talent in the wild indie dev and demoscene space. The best talents were like raw gems and this eventually scaled into an industry.

Now, the best innovations are being patented and presented at SIGGRAPH and the game engine market is massive. Of course, amid all the flashiness and white-collar presence, it’s hard to spot the demosceners, but they’re behind every game. They’ve just been hired by corporations and their talent no longer expresses itself in the same way.

Unfortunately, companies provide very little support for the demoscene, which is why we don’t see the same explosive growth here as we do in games, graphics or AI.

I remember one case where a guy was hired to animate King Kong’s face for a movie and he spent two years hand-animating every single emotion. I wonder what kind of demos he might have created during that time if the corporation hadn’t hired him and forced him into repetitive work.

The market.

Shoutout to everyone who were at The Party '92, best experience ever for a young computer nerd.

i've attended a (very small and local) demo presentation and Q&A once and, of course, asked whether the demo scene was dead. the presenter said the demo scene has been declared dead for years already.

that was probably over 15 years ago.

Dunno about state of the scene insights, but earlier this week this submission got some positive attention here.

Interview with Japanese Demoscener 0b5vr

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45137245

While correct for many parts this article gets a few things wrong imho,

- People in the early 90s probably weren't there so much for the demos as for the swapping (ie game copying), it was called copy-parties before it was called lan or demoparties.

--> As such , the numbers of really active sceners was probably about the same all through the 90s up until 2000, the decline in some areas was probably more a function of money being available to talented people as well as the internet overtaking reasons for gatherings (being copying or gaming)

- "The farting around with 6502's (C64) and blitters(Amiga)" is partly a Swedish thing. (related to the mentioned Dreamhack lan/esport-parties)

--> Those who never left and/or are return-ees (people with grown kids) are heavily into those retro-machines because they were a tad older and grew up with that and always held that special place for them. The last large Swedish demo-generations are still tied up in their careers and/or kids and haven't really begun returning (if they ever will thatis).

- The actually somewhat eventful story of Dreamhack (And the early demise of the Swedish demoscene rejuvenation)

--> Swedish sceners started earlier to get adopted into commercial endeavors, but the death-knell was that a deadly discotheque fire in Gothenburg had happened a few weeks before the 1998 Dreamhack event, rowdy sceners were thrown out since a nervous organization didn't dare have any scandalous behavior after pressure from teen parents with sceners subsequently deciding to start boycotting Dreamhack. Once that rift had happened and quality suffered there was never any real push about keeping the demoscene as a part of their lan-focused culture with an eventual total demise happening.

I think cultures have thresholds, we tried and actually managed some rejuvenation while some of us in that last large Swedish generation was still in our 20s (however as the article points out, it was a trickle and we were probably too few with the wrong focus perhaps), now in our 40s we're probably not going to be inspiring any teens directly.

Also the engagement threshold, as many from our generations are now established professionals (like from people that designed the EA-Frostbite engine,etc) the quality put out as "side-projects" are still enormously more adept than what beginners can approach, yet feeble compared to the pure engineering effort managed by the professional game making tools.

Sure you can easily partake, but it's probably demotivating knowing that what you make has such a long way to go (we feel it ourselves).

Will it die out totally? I was actually more worried 5-10 years ago, kids need creative outlets and the entire AI-storm that might make some demotivated will also create more unemployment for capable people, and after all, the golden eras were during times when kids were getting talented but couldn't find jobs for those talents.

I would love more outlets for creative coding, I feel like neocities is a bit like that. That said there isn't really a scene or real sense of community (AFAIK). I mean someone liked something I uploaded once, but I never interacted with them again.

Cohost had fun vibes like that as well, but I guess it's no longer with us. Same with Glitch, but admittedly I didn't use it in the last few years, but it was my go to option for hosting a snippet of unserious HTML. "HTML in the park" does seem like one fun IRL outlet for this kind of thing, I found out my city has one and I want to go to it.

Admittedly none of these were really demo scenes or places where creative coding was exclusively fostered, but creative coding and demo-like-scenes communities probably exist but are more likely some obscure discord server.

Don't know what the author is talking about.

Assembly, Summer 2023: https://assembly.galleria.fi/kuvat/Assembly+Summer+2023/Perj...

Assembly, Summer 2024: https://assembly.galleria.fi/kuvat/ASSEMBLY+SUMMER+2024/PERJ...

Looks like plenty of attendance, lots of elementary through high school age attendees. Lots of families bringing their children. Site's got 1000's of pictures of evidence.

Maybe the scene has change in a way they don't especially want to attend over the years, yet it does not seem to be "dying". This post on LinkedIn claims Summer 2023 had 25,000 attendees. Seems healthy.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lassinummi_assembly-summer-20...

Minor edit: Also, still have all the results and competitions each year. Demo, 1k Intro, 4k Intro, Short Film, Dance Music, Freestyle Graphics, ect...

Results, Summer 2023: https://assembly.org/en/events/summer23/posts/assembly-summe...

Results, Summer 2024: https://assembly.org/en/articles/assembly-summer-2024-compet...

It's dying because the home amateur PC is on its last legs.

And the cracking scene has now to grapple with hellish online activation.

And then many workflows have become sort of professional or moved to the web altogether.

And the younger generation, having received access to gigabytes of RAM and storage, simply couldn't care less about being super lean and fast.

There's really no future for the scene.

I didn’t know what the demo scene was before I read this. I still don’t.

Is it hackathons?

I'm seeing a lot of AI being demoed recently ...

This feels like a discussion about the demoscene amongst people who have not been to a demoparty in 20 years.

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The EFF types and HN reader types are also dying subcultures.

From my perspective these evolved into game jams. I feel like if you only count competitions for old, outdated platforms these won't be getting as many new comers as other platforms that are common place and easy to develop for. Hosting them purely via the internet made them more accessible.