There are new productions for various platforms ranging from modern to retro and from full restricted intros (256 byte DOS intros, 4k Windows intros) to full blown demos all the time.
Actually, it died when people started making demos in C and horror C++.
No wait, the demoscene died when 3D cards made art/modeling the only valuable thing.
No wait, let me get this right. The demoscene died when mp3 music produced in DAWs replaced mods, and photoshop and wacoms replaced deluxe paint pixelart.
Hm... maybe it died when the internet made everthing available so nothing felt special anymore.
Or when the web and Flash became the place to get a quick fix of visual design.
Maybe it died when kids became more interested in esports and LoL than in coding.
I'm sure it died when Youtube meant you didn't even need the hardware or the download to watch a demo.
Maybe it was when the iPhone appstore meant the most popular device on earth couldn't run demos.
I don't know, I can't decide.
Constrained generative networks would be interesting too.
https://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?type%5B%5D=64k&page=1
There's even a 32 byte demo category. What can someone do that's interesting in 32 bytes? Not a lot, but they still do it. 64K, 8k, and 4k compos are still alive and well on modern platforms and they are just as amazing as they used to be.
When we saw Commodore 64 demos for example, they often impressed even relatively non-technical people.
But today a demo that pushes the limits technically will often only look impressive to those who understand the technical limitations.
That has significantly changed the potential audience to a diminishing subset even if relatively technical people.
It was actually what put me off a bit -- I enjoyed the demoscene to learn new things and to experiment with computers in total freedom. I had no need for artificial limitations set out by competitions, and never really cared much for the gatherings of socially less developed boys who smelled pretty bad (even though I exactly matched that profile myself :).
I really liked the contrarian groups who faked a lot. In Nooon's "Stars" (1995) a 3D bee is rendered with a complete wing missing, to fake a high poly count. "Transgression 2" by MFX may also be a good example of what I am trying to convey here. Obviously it was not real-time ray tracing, but what was it? It puzzled me for weeks!
Not sure that was a factor. You could already earlier prerender things, just maybe not minutes of it, but for loops it always was a thing. Back then in the late 80ies/early 90ies, at least in the C64 scene, it was a huge topic sometimes and people stressed when especially spectacular effects where "realtime", so there will be no doubts, cause prerendering carried a huge stigma with it for a long time.
In fact, this was what held back the demoscene for a while, cause a lot of very stylish things just were not possible at least on C64 hardware without prerendering or at least doing the 3d calculations up front. The scene actually had to overcome their fixation on "realtime" effects before a lot of very artsy, stylish demos became possible, once people started focussing on what you see, not how you achieve it.
The latter part might not apply to stronger machines, though, admittedly. On the C64 any kind of long running animation is a feat in itself, even if you trade limited CPU for limited memory.
Every method of producing a work (done under finite time, I guess :P) will give sometimes vastly different results. Hand drawing an animation will give something completely different under similar time constraints as video editing and completely different from procedural animations.
To give some examples: you can easily render thousands of points, e.g. stars, make them twinkle, draw thousands of trees, and give them all detailed movement. That's very hard to do by hand. By hand you'll have better control of style, and details like paint texture, etc.. Animating characters (with genuine character) is trivial by hand but quite difficult procedurally (you have to resort to essentially manual animation in the end). There's the question of offline vs online rendering... if you're offline rendering you can go bonkers with millions of objects. I personally like being able to run it real time, it gives it a more intimate feeling, and is easier to reproduce.
Also very exciting to me is baking randomness, either with a fixed seed or changing seeds every time. You get a different piece every time you watch it! The possibilities are really vast, and mostly unexplored.
An interesting artist in this respect is Karl Sims [1]. As far as I know, he was not involved in the demoscene, but he sure did make some interesting things!
Say what you will about the current demoscene stylistically, it is to this day an underground, non-commercial movement (maybe countercultural? labels don't really matter, I'm just trying to gesture at something). People make stuff for the hell of it, with themselves as the target audience. It's hard to beat the sheer joy of that.
100% this. Add Generative AI to your list. I think AutoGPT is in the spirit of the demo scene.
> I have another pet theory on why the demoscene died.
It didn't die. Revision hosts hundreds of sceners every year. This year over 400 entries were submitted to the competition, including 40 full PC demos and over 40 tracked/oldschool/executable music entries. Even for small, local C64/Amiga parties here you have to race for tickets to these events.
We released a C64 intro outside a competition a couple of months ago, and within a couple of days it was buried in the inflow of new C64 releases on CSDB. The C64 scene is bigger now than when I got into it 18 years ago.
> The same story goes for tracked music or chiptunes, compared to MP3s.
That didn't die either. Things don't die just because you stop pay attention to them. The notion of competing with Pixar is absurd; the terms of competition and markets are entirely different. Pixar makes movies for the mainstream to make money. Sceners make productions for sceners that may be more interesting to them than a Pixar production in an esoteric sense that the mainstream will not understand.
"The demoscene died" is a trope that means that the original demoscene feeling is gone for many. If you got into the demoscene in 2005, I doubt you experienced it first-hand, but I am sure you have read about it.
Edit: To go into the Pixar argument a bit more: In 1993 a demo such as Second Reality could impress "normies" as much as an MTV video clip could. Remember that back then video clips were often total utter crap, and some demos were buttery smooth 50fps animations with a distinctive feel that you could not find anywhere in popular culture.
In my personal opinion, after the end of the 90s the demoscene devolved into a "L'art pour l'art" incrowd which is great fun for some of its members, but less so for the general public.
The rest of the scene is very much appreciation for doing things within various technical constraints, and any appreciation of that requires more technical understanding. Even these days, many younger software engineers have trouble understanding what it takes to make and compete one of these constrained demos because the constraints themselves are virtually impossible to fathom for people who grew up smoking GB of RAM with poorly written Python code.
The idea of writing a 4kb demo for an ancient 8-bit computer that was dead in the market more than a decade before they were even born doesn't compute until you really start walking them through the fundamental CS concepts implied.
It didn't, though. It just took the scene a while to adapt to the reality that you can't learn how to push a GPU over the edge in a weekend any longer. As a result, making demos also became more accessible, and more directly related to game development (and related careers.)
The result is a scene that is so broad now, it's almost impossible to keep track of it all. It's no longer just Amiga, C64 and PC.
I interpreted you saying that it has died as a claim that it has died, not that it still thrives but—gasp—has evolved since the 90s.
> "The demoscene died" is a trope that means that the original demoscene feeling is gone for many. If you got into the demoscene in 2005, I doubt you experienced it first-hand, but I am sure you have read about it.
Presumably, that's about the extent of your involvement with the current demoscene as well. I am unable to comment on your feeling or how it disappeared. I think to some extent it simply boils down to teenagers growing up and losing interest, or not enjoying the direction of the scene. People have lamented the presumed imminent death of the demoscene for literal decades. It evolves and favored skill sets become obsolete: of course some people who were doing boot block demos for the Amiga 500 may feel alienated by the time the state of the art was 3D acceleration and shaders, just as someone doing C64 trackmos might have felt alienated once the Amiga 500 was the state of the art.
Fact remains that I can sit sweaty and drunk in a room crammed with 100 other drunk people in the middle of the summer and try to fix a fatal bug in the loader 20 minutes before deadline with two group mates standing around throwing out ideas, have an eureka moment just in time and then watch the competition results until three in the morning. I can ride on that feeling for weeks regardless of what your feeling is. If that's the demoscene being dead, I guess people weren't notified enough times despite it being a hot topic for such a long time.
The demoscene virus stuck, and I can really enjoy people doing unimaginable stuff with old and new hardware.
The way you describe the competition feeling also makes me remember similar fun at ICPC contests :)
The demoscene feeling that I have is probably a mix of nostalgia, and a sense of privilege of being part of a really weird subculture. But I also remember feeling out of touch even back then.
I was in the Demoscene (US) and wrote many demos and intros in the 80's and 90's. I don't write demos anymore, because the pressure to support my lifestyle means I write code for money now, but I do get the same feeling when I watch any of the many demos put out month after month by groups that were around back when I was coding demos, and new groups that have sprung up in the decades since. It still gives me the same wonderment when a C64 learns a new trick. It hasn't lost the excitement for me at all to view an impressive new thing. If anything it's gotten better with time and there are what seems like just as many demos coming out now as there were back in the 90s. I may even fly over to Europe someday to visit a demo party.
>In my personal opinion, after the end of the 90s the demoscene devolved into a "L'art pour l'art" incrowd which is great fun for some of its members, but less so for the general public.
I'm not sure what you define as art, but there are still plenty of demos coming out that push the C64 and Amiga past any limit people thought possible. PCs have evolved and basically have no real limits now with the latest Nvidia cards, but the 64k and lower compos are where it's at on the PC, it's still very impressive what can be done in a few KB. New tricks are still being discovered. New ways to do cool new things are still emerging. It's not necessarily "art" as much as it is clever programming, but maybe some people consider clever programming to be an art?
Take Through the Cracks by Still - it is not compressable, and everyone I show it to on the big projection wall agrees that it is unlike any video they've ever experienced.
It didn’t!
3DMark the benchmark by Futuremark is as the name suggests, made by ex Future Crew. The list goes on.
If you go around looking at where most demosceners from the past decade or two work today, you'll find the vast majority of them work at places like Unity, Unreal (Epic), etc.
A real time demo where every pixel can be deformed, giving rise to an ultra interactive world in less than 4GB memory.
Up until the late 1990s it was not possible to playback full screen video on regular PC hardware, because of both CPU and storage limitations.
This meant that if you wanted smooth high resolution animations, you'd have to resort to programming and a lot of tricks.
As soon as full screen video became an option, the only limitation was the actual content of the pixels, and everything could be prerendered. Competing as an individual with, say, Pixar in that context would never make your stuff look nice.
The same story goes for tracked music or chiptunes, compared to MP3s.
This reduced the audience to those who could understand the effort that you went through. In many ways, that just never compares to the original demoscene feel.
It was an amazing time to be alive, but it will never come back, because technology has moved on. I wonder what underground scene kids these days will cherish as much later in life.