Commodore Amiga platform

Disclaimer: This article series doesn’t define the history of the intro/demo/megademo, for neither the Amiga nor any other platform. This is the point of view, I have chosen to write the article series, and in a way I lived it. Your experience may vary.

The Demo

An intro weren’t always enough to show all the skills of a group. The demo was the answer.

The demo was way more “advanced” than the intro. The demo was in multiple stages, but still in an overall theme. One tune throughout the entire demo, repeated to infinity.

The multiple stages of the demo where the playground a to show off the true skills of the demogroup, in programming-, graphics- and music-skills, and here are some boring written examples:

• Logo twist, magnifying, rolling, wrapping and other image effects
• Scroll text with all kinds of cool effects
• Star field
• Star Wars scroll
• Vector scroll text
• Vector images
• Plasma
• Fractals
• A ridiculous amount of bobs on the screen at once

Unique sound

The demo was, beside to show of the skills of the coder, also the stage for the graphic artist and the musician to show off their skills as well. Most demos used some kind of SoundTracker music format, and to begin with the standard SoundTracker sample sounds, but as time went on, musicians added new samples, to create their own sound.

As mentioned before, David Whittaker had a trademark drum-kit, and a few other musicians was also able to create their unique sound as well.

Random noise

A difference in demo– and game music is that game music often has a recognizable tune – a theme of some sort – that will identify the music with the game. A demo did not always use this advantage. Most times, the demo would be a compilation of “random” sounds – or so it would seem – without a recognizable tune, just patterns and pieces of sound.

This would sometime result in pure noise, to the untrained ear, but fortunate, in most cases, it gave a certain feel to the demo and it would also show the skill of the sound design, to the listener.

Group List

There were a lot of great demogroups back in the 90’s, and here are some of those, I still remember:

• Alpha Flight
• Crionics
• Doctor Mabuse Orgasm Cracking
• Dominators
• Fairlight
• Kefrens
• Northstar
• Pure Metal Coders
• Rebels
• Sanity
• Scoopex
• The Silents

… just to name a few …

Further reading

• Prelude to the Intro
• From Intro to Mega, part 1 (Intro)
• From Intro to Mega, part 2 (this page)
• From Intro to Mega, part 3 (Megademo)
• From Intro to Mega, part 4 (Groups)

Source of inspiration and material: Kestra BitWorld on ExoticA