The Scene - Is It Fading Away?
by zYX/a51
[alan@a51.org.uk - http://www.a51.org.uk]

If you ever get into an indepth conversation with the average 
scener the subject always seems to come around to the "good old days" 
before very long, meaning the demoscene in the early nineties. 
But does that suggest the scene now is somehow dying or has grown 
smaller? 

I don't think the scene is dying as so much as it's evolving in a 
new direction. The demoscene has always been based on the hardware 
and in ten years computers have changed dramatically. The, so called, 
golden days of the scene were at a stage in time when the 8-bit 
machines such as the Spectrum and Commodore 64 were being superseded 
by the impressive 16-bitters like the Atari ST and in particular the Amiga. 

The main attraction with the Amiga was the custom hardware as at the 
time the audio visual capabilities were revolutionary. Bare in mind 
the PC was nothing except a number crunching business tool and most 
potential sceners coming to the Amiga had been used to seeing a 
monochromatic ZX Spectrum display or a blocky C64 screen. The Amiga 
was new territory and especially provided an important proving ground 
for the, then fledgling, demoscene. The point is that there were new 
demo effects being invented regularly, new type of demos coming to form 
(eg. megademos, dentros, trackmos) and new breeds of media such as the 
diskmag being born. It was an exciting time! 

Back to the present day and most people have moved on from the Amiga. 
Not because it's a bad machine but we don't have room for two computers 
in most of our houses so the PC won out. Mainly due to the fact it's the 
"standardised" computer and it's cheap! In turn many of the old skool 
sceners are now using the PC as their main computer. 

The problem with old skool sceners is that they grow up. Ten years ago 
when they were seventeen they didn't have a care in the world except 
getting the latest demo spread as faster as possible or finishing that 
new piece of code that would shake up the whole scene. At twenty eight 
they probably have more responsibility in life such as a career, a 
wife and maybe a kid or two. All of a sudden playing on computers 
becomes a much lower priority in life. 

A slightly worrying observation I've made is that most of the sceners 
hanging around the net still are old skool. Does this mean that the 
demoscene is now made up of guys in their late twenties or early thirties? 
Surely there should have been a much larger injection of new blood and new 
generations of sceners to continue the tradition. Perhaps we need an official 
survey of active people in the scene to see if this is the case, but if it 
is true I have a couple of theories that may account for it: 

GROWING UP WITH THE TECHNOLOGY 

Your average old skooler grew up using machines such as the 
Commodore Vic-20 or the ZX81. Simple machines on which the 
average person, given free time and dedication, could easily 
make their own games and tools with no more help than a couple 
of reference books to hand. By the time they got used to these
 machines the ZX Spectrum and the Commodore 64 were just about
 to hit the world. Hense, they could take what they had originally 
learnt and move it on up to the next level. After that, the Atari 
ST and Amiga. You can see how the pattern goes on. 

Basically, your average first generation scener who is still around 
today has about fourteen to fifteen years of computer hardware and
 programming experience to call up on. Technologies such as the web,
 new languages such as Java and applications like Flash are all 
relatively new additions to the computing work. So as these technologies 
were released to the world old skool guys knew enough about how 
hardware and software operated to jump straight in and start using them. 

But imagine someone discovering the scene in the year 2000. Their 
most likely starting point would be a Windows based PC with a 3D 
graphics card of some sort. Before they could even think about 
producing they would have to work out how all the components fit
 together in these computers (such as a sound card, network card,
 modem, graphics card) and how to install an operating system. 

Follow that by the installation of development software before they 
can even start to program, such as C++. Then they are back to square 
one in a sense because they have to discover how to code for different 
hardware and processor speeds. 

Some people may find it funny that a scener would not know about 
graphics cards and sound hardware but remember when you were a complete
 beginner. All we did was plug the Spectrum in and turn on the power.
 No hard drive, no operating system installation, we could start to 
code in BASIC as soon as the machine flickered into life and, in most
 cases, the manual we got with it actually taught us how to do it. 
We got it on a plate compared to computers today where, to be legal, 
you will probably have to shell out an additional 100-200 on a 
professional C++ compiler before you can seriously consider producing a demo. 

In a nutshell if you are a new guy, a lamer if you will, entering 
the scene now you've got a hell of a lot to learn to catch up to 
the same level. 

HARDWARE GOT TOO SOFT! 

One of the biggest driving forces at the beginning of the scene 
was making the computer hardware at the time do amazing things. 
If it could only scroll one message across the screen at once 
then someone would get a screenful of scrollers moving smoothly.
 If someone else got a kewl looking starfield effect with five
 hundred stars on it then someone else would make it just as fast 
but with a thousand stars... And add a wireframe vector for good effect! 

The only way these "records" could be set and broken was to hit 
the hardware directly. If you'd tried to make a demo using Speccy 
BASIC or (shudder!) AMOS then small children in the street would
have pointed and laughed at you. The only way to get the truly 
amazing effects was to literally forget the reference book 
guidelines and hack at the hardware itself. 

Of course that is no longer possible as no two PC's are the same 
these days. Even Amiga's have been expanded to the point that if 
you wrote a hardware hacking demo today, chances are that it'll
miserably fail to run on most machines. 

This has led to some people leaving the demoscene as they don't 
see the point of coding a demo through software wrappers and APIs. 
To the guys left, the point of demomaking has been to turn it into a 
form of art. Thought provoking lyrics, extensive realtime rendered 
landscapes and hidden meanings litter recent demos. 

Possibly the biggest single factor contributing to major changes in 
the scene is the widespread use of the internet. 

As far as the scene is concerned the internet is a new phenomenon, 
as back at the roots of the scene if you wanted to send a file to
someone it meant copying it onto a disk, putting it into a jiffy 
bag and posting it. Or, if you were truly elite you would have a 
modem and upload it to a BBS. Also, if you wanted a presence in the 
scene you needed to have contacts. This was probably paramount to 
everything else. 

This meant people had to actually communicate to stay in the scene. 
If you didn't reply to that fast contact then he wouldn't send you 
back that new intro. Also the fact that you may only be trading five 
or six disks at a time meant you actually *LOOKED* at everything you 
were sent. Most of the time the contents of the disks were actually 
created by the contact that sent it to you. So you'd write back to him 
and let him know what you thought of it. Remember writing five page 
letters? Jiffy junk too! That's a forgotten tradition now. 

Since the movement of the scene to the internet this has all changed. 
The arrival of email, IRC, FTP and the web should have meant sceners 
would stay in better contact around the world but I think it's had the 
opposite effect. 

Actually getting scene releases is an anonymous exercise now. You'll 
download them from scene.org or from the groups website. This is the 
biggest flaw in today's scene as you never speak to another scener 
during this process. Also because it's quicker you'll tend to grab 
more files than you normally would and everything turns into a big 
leech session, meaning you accumulate ten times more files than you 
would ever have the time to look at. So you wouldn't then be able to 
give anyone any feedback on what you've seen. But, then again, you 
never spoke to them in the first place so you probably wouldn't be 
that likely to send them an email out of the blue anyway. See the 
problem here? 

To sum up, I think a scene will continue to exist for many years to 
come but not in the same form we are used to. Cracking will always 
continue as long as there is software to break but demos are probably 
going to move more towards works of art or 3D benchmarking utilities (!!). 

A grim and depressing thought but the scene as we know it will probably 
turn out be to a one generation sub culture unless we start learning 
how to talk to each other again.