Young demo coders pile into a hockey arena with computers, tents and beach umbrellas. HELSINKI, Finland -- As 5,000 kids gathering in Finland on Thursday will attest, the European demo scene is alive and kicking.
Things had looked bad for the demo scene a couple of years ago, but now it seems to be making a comeback.
Record crowds are expected at this weekend's Assembly '01 party, the largest gathering of demo programmers in the world.
Packed into an ice-rink in downtown Helsinki, thousands of youthful programmers from all over the world will spend four days watching demos, playing network games and raving till dawn. Some may even find time to sleep.
Demos are small self-contained programs of cutting-edge computer-generated audio and visual effects. They are usually created by small groups of programmers, artists and musicians to demonstrate, or "demo," their skills.
Ranging wildly in style, a demo package is often two-or-three minutes of absolutely amazing special effects set to a thumping techno soundtrack. But unlike music videos, demos are generated in real time on the viewer's computer, and require considerable programming skill.
Distributed for free over the Net via BBSs, FTP servers and sites like OrangeJuice, Scene.org and Pouët, demos are art for art's sake.
The Assembly party is part competition –- programmers compete to see who has coded the best demo –- and part giant LAN party. The programmers are bringing nearly 3,000 computers from home, which will be hooked into a giant network for playing games.
There's no alcohol and few girls. Coders are gathering to show off their demos, make new contacts and play Quake for 72 hours straight.
"If you have something you want to show off, Finland is definitely the place to go, because there are so many talented people there," said William Garrison, a software designer for Prometric of Baltimore, Maryland, and an ardent writer of demo code.
More than $25,000 will be handed out in competition prize money to Assembly '01 participants, some of whom will come from as far away as South Africa, Japan, Australia and Brazil. The top prize is about $5,000, though showing off to fellow programmers is much more motivation than cash.
"It's not about the money," said Pekka Aakko, lead organizer for Assembly '01. "Mainly it's about the fame. If you win at Assembly, it's something. It has always been kind of the mother of all parties."
Nearly all the attendees will bring sleeping bags and camp out in the auditorium. Some even bring tents. They will subsist on pizza, burgers and the Finnish version of Doritos.
Demo coding is largely a European phenomenon, and was as popular among Eurogeeks as hacking and cracking are in the United States.
Although relatively obscure in the States, demos have had a profound influence on music videos, games and movies, and preceded the ubuiquitous synchronized special effects, or "visualizations" in digital audio players like WinAmp and Sonique.
Demos emerged from the cracking culture more than a decade ago. As a way of advertising their conquests, crackers would attach an animated signature to copy-protected software they had decoded. Some of them were so good, they were distributed for their own sake, and the demo scene was born.
They started out as the creations of individuals, but as their complexity grew, so did the number of people required to make them.
"Usually you get someone who is a programmer and someone who is a musician and someone who is an artist, to cover all aspects," explained Garrison. "It's kind of like making a movie, where one person 'storyboards' and one person does the soundtrack and so forth."
Demos were particularly popular with users of aging Commodore 64 and Amiga machines, which are still used to create and play demos.
The demo scene reached its height of popularity in the mid-'90s, when thousands of demo coders would gather at huge parties all across Europe, from Norway and Greece to Poland and Hungary.
The Assembly party started out nine years ago with 700 people. By 1995 it had swelled to 4,000 people, crammed crustacean-like with their computers into the auditorium.
But in the last few years the number of events declined noticeably. The stalwarts of the scene moved on to other interests. Attendance at the parties -- and the quality of the work -- began to drop. Demos weren't hip any more.
"The '99 demo competition was a catastrophe," said Aakko. "It was the worst I ever saw. We thought that if it was going that way, just like shit, then we were not interested in organizing any more."
But then the boom in network gaming generated a fresh wave of interest: Assembly's huge LAN is a major temptation to serious gamers.
This year, 2,800 computers will be hooked into the network and connected using a 1-gigabyte fiber-optic connection to Finland's Internet.
To mollify the stalwarts more interested in demos than Quake, organizers are providing a special area for the "old farts" of the scene, as Aakko put it.
"Oldskoolers" are eligible for a 50 percent discount on the entrance fee of about $30. Organizers expected 250 oldskoolers, but got 500.
"I guess the demo scene is starting to get back on its feet again," said Aakko. "People are starting to make demos more again. Younger people are starting to look at these demos."
