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
GuB-42 · 4h ago
"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.
bitexploder · 1h ago
Computing in general is /huge/ now. X is dying is funny in tech. By raw number of participants has it ever really changed? Take MUDs for example, I remember my MUD days. There are still hundreds of active MUDs. Is X really dying? Who knows.
Exactly; it’s like model railroads or stamp collecting. Never truly dead!
(I mean this with deep sarcasm.)
GuB-42 · 2h ago
I think one of the difference between stamp collecting and the demoscene is that while stamp collecting was quite big for a time, the demoscene has always been a niche thing.
For a time the demoscene looked bigger than it was, mostly because of all the cracks. But for the people who actually produced stuff or went to demoparties or even just seek out productions that weren't cracks, it has always been a small world, like a few thousands of active people worldwide.
mlyle · 1h ago
I think there's still people hacking around doing cool stuff.
Things like PICO-8, etc.
It's much harder to throw a big party these days in general, and especially so about technical niches. Hack Club is popular with youth, but much more about smaller gatherings.
7thaccount · 1h ago
I went to a coin/stamp shop not too long ago to kill some time downtown and the guy said basically nobody cares about stamps anymore. Still plenty interested in coins.
akst · 4h ago
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.
bradly · 2h ago
I recently starting dabbling in live coding and found it to be really hard and fun and technical and creative. And while I'm not really that comfortable in Discord, I did find the community welcoming and helpful.
shrinks99 · 4h ago
HTML in the Park is one of my favourite events in Toronto! Great crowd, I highly recommend attending yours or setting one up if nobody runs one.
abnercoimbre · 3h ago
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.
> If demosceners can do it, regular indie devs really have no excuse.
Demosceners and indie devs are working under different constraints. For demosceners, the file size (4kb, 40kb, etc.) is the goal. For devs, especially those making a tool that you download and install, extreme size constraints seem unnecessary (although avoiding bloat is always good).
Instead, it seems to me that primary constraints for indie devs should be things like being easy to maintain, well documented, easy to use, easy to fix bugs, easy for other people to work on and extend. Small size should be a secondary target rather than primary.
Of course, one of the advantages of being indie is that you can set whatever constraints and targets you like for yourself.
tecleandor · 2h ago
For me, one of the greatest examples of this style is Reaper[0]. A completely functional professional audio DAW in a 12 to 20MB download (depending on your architecture and OS).
--
0: https://www.reaper.fm/download.php
mananaysiempre · 1h ago
On one hand, seeing multiple megs described as slim makes me want to pinch myself, because that’s very far from my understanding of reality. On the other, today these apps always seem to include a bespoke toolkit of some description (as both File Pilot and Reaper demonstrate), whereas slim golden-age Windows apps leaned very hard on the GDI/USER/COMCTL one, and those libraries are quite hefty.
(Unlike, say, the Visual Basic IDE, which had two custom toolkits—the one the apps used and the one the IDE did—or Office, which AFAIU included three or four divergent versions—for Access, for Word and Excel, for VBA apps, and for the VBA IDE, with the last two being effectively identical to the respective VB ones, though I don’t know if the IDE and the Word/Excel ones were actually different. And that’s not counting IE’s toolkit, which basically displaced USER controls in HTML forms by the time of IE6. None of these count as slim, is my point.)
But what really makes me wonder here is how File Pilot manages to display what looks in the screenshot like a shell item’s (file’s) full context menu using its custom styling.
My impression was that the atrocious and discordant two-level Explorer context menu Microsoft is pushing in Windows 11 was because the traditional (Windows 95-era) way to provide context menu items with was to write a shell extension (an Explorer plugin, which would get loaded not only into the bloody system shell but also into every app that used common file dialogs) that would get called when the menu was being built. And that callback interface was built around the assumption of menu items being traditional HMENUs (and allowed the shell extension to set up arbitrary drawing routines for the items it added). So changing the toolkit that Explorer used for context menus away from USER was essentially impossible, and even styling it differently from Windows 95 was fraught (I do remember seeing the occasional flat-gray menu item on Windows XP with Luna enabled). There was an attempt to transition to more declarative context menus around (IIRC) Windows 7, but evidently adoption wasn’t good. And thus the Windows 11 Explorer was forced to use the embarrassing hack of initially showing the declarative context menu, drawn using its new toolkit, then grafting the real one, drawn using USER, onto it as a submenu.
And yet.
File Pilot draws the full context menu with a look very similar to Explorer’s preferred one.
How?..
jsonc · 58m ago
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
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!
michaeldoron · 4h ago
This saddens me. The idea of the demoscene really resonated with me, and I was curious about making stuff and joining.
detaro · 4h ago
Then go and do it. As the article says, a lot of the scene is very open to newcomers today.
Philpax · 2h ago
Nothing stopping you! Keep the flame alive :)
Martin_Silenus · 2h ago
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!
msuniverse2026 · 4h ago
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.
The EFF types and HN reader types are also dying subcultures.
a_bonobo · 4h ago
I was just thinking the other day, I haven't read a vim vs emacs flame-war in years.
jsheard · 4h ago
The vim and emacs guys had to join forces to flame the greater evil - Electron-based editors.
bigstrat2003 · 2h ago
A noble fight if ever there was one.
gjsman-1000 · 4h ago
And they’ve lost. Everyone and their cousin uses Electron editors while showing up to FOSDEM on their MacBooks to discuss kernel development.
It’s already long over. We’re just starting to notice. The EFF is baffled - why do they yell in a void now, when just a decade ago they stopped SOPA/PIPA with dramatic effect?
The free internet and the communities that support it have lost their voice and their cultural support. Interesting. It couldn’t possibly be because they stepped beyond common sense and became an echo chamber amongst themselves… right?
(There are many things popular on HN, heresy to question, that even I as a participant emphatically do not support, and I’m sure I’m not alone. I’ve learned hinting at these views gets downvotes and bad faith feedback… so it’s hard to cry at the growing irrelevance. It’s deserved.)
yoyohello13 · 4h ago
Vim and emacs have definitely lost the main mindshare, but development on those projects is still very strong. Their main focus has never been on mass adoption, so how can you really compete with projects whose main goal is to eat the world?
shmerl · 4h ago
neovim community is very active.
tehjoker · 1h ago
Big tech no longer cares about appearing to be revolutionaries fighting for good and ppl are disillusioned
Gigachad · 3h ago
Now it’s flamewars over AI agents.
giveita · 2h ago
It's thought leaserships over AI agents.
dismalaf · 47m ago
It's because Neovim just crushed both...
trhway · 4h ago
Across the world the balance between conformism and dissent is getting heavily tipped toward the conformism. Subcultures that are dissent from the mainstream cultures are thus getting toned down.
dfex · 53m ago
This is actually really exciting - it means in somewhere in the next 5-10 years we'll inevitably (well, hopefully if the cycles of history are anything to go by) see a bunch of new dissenters rise up with their associated subcultures - and the mass diffusion of the Internet will help them find their people regardless of which country they live.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF · 4h ago
It's especially bad in the US where the folks in power are talking about invading our own cities and declaring that trans people should not own guns
koakuma-chan · 4h ago
What's EFF?
jdlshore · 4h ago
Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit championing the hacker ethic.
The very broad definition is people who write artistic shaders frequently limited to a binary size, sometime 4kb, sometime 16.
Sharlin · 1h ago
That's a very narrow definition, really. In general demos have neither much to do with shaders (except insofar that you have to write shaders to do 3D on GPUs), nor are they size-limited in general; only certain subtypes are.
charcircuit · 4h ago
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.
"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
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.
https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=59105
(I mean this with deep sarcasm.)
For a time the demoscene looked bigger than it was, mostly because of all the cracks. But for the people who actually produced stuff or went to demoparties or even just seek out productions that weren't cracks, it has always been a small world, like a few thousands of active people worldwide.
Things like PICO-8, etc.
It's much harder to throw a big party these days in general, and especially so about technical niches. Hack Club is popular with youth, but much more about smaller gatherings.
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.
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
Demosceners and indie devs are working under different constraints. For demosceners, the file size (4kb, 40kb, etc.) is the goal. For devs, especially those making a tool that you download and install, extreme size constraints seem unnecessary (although avoiding bloat is always good).
Instead, it seems to me that primary constraints for indie devs should be things like being easy to maintain, well documented, easy to use, easy to fix bugs, easy for other people to work on and extend. Small size should be a secondary target rather than primary.
Of course, one of the advantages of being indie is that you can set whatever constraints and targets you like for yourself.
--
(Unlike, say, the Visual Basic IDE, which had two custom toolkits—the one the apps used and the one the IDE did—or Office, which AFAIU included three or four divergent versions—for Access, for Word and Excel, for VBA apps, and for the VBA IDE, with the last two being effectively identical to the respective VB ones, though I don’t know if the IDE and the Word/Excel ones were actually different. And that’s not counting IE’s toolkit, which basically displaced USER controls in HTML forms by the time of IE6. None of these count as slim, is my point.)
But what really makes me wonder here is how File Pilot manages to display what looks in the screenshot like a shell item’s (file’s) full context menu using its custom styling.
My impression was that the atrocious and discordant two-level Explorer context menu Microsoft is pushing in Windows 11 was because the traditional (Windows 95-era) way to provide context menu items with was to write a shell extension (an Explorer plugin, which would get loaded not only into the bloody system shell but also into every app that used common file dialogs) that would get called when the menu was being built. And that callback interface was built around the assumption of menu items being traditional HMENUs (and allowed the shell extension to set up arbitrary drawing routines for the items it added). So changing the toolkit that Explorer used for context menus away from USER was essentially impossible, and even styling it differently from Windows 95 was fraught (I do remember seeing the occasional flat-gray menu item on Windows XP with Luna enabled). There was an attempt to transition to more declarative context menus around (IIRC) Windows 7, but evidently adoption wasn’t good. And thus the Windows 11 Explorer was forced to use the embarrassing hack of initially showing the declarative context menu, drawn using its new toolkit, then grafting the real one, drawn using USER, onto it as a submenu.
And yet.
File Pilot draws the full context menu with a look very similar to Explorer’s preferred one.
How?..
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!
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!
More https://github.com/psykon/awesome-demoscene
It’s already long over. We’re just starting to notice. The EFF is baffled - why do they yell in a void now, when just a decade ago they stopped SOPA/PIPA with dramatic effect?
The free internet and the communities that support it have lost their voice and their cultural support. Interesting. It couldn’t possibly be because they stepped beyond common sense and became an echo chamber amongst themselves… right?
(There are many things popular on HN, heresy to question, that even I as a participant emphatically do not support, and I’m sure I’m not alone. I’ve learned hinting at these views gets downvotes and bad faith feedback… so it’s hard to cry at the growing irrelevance. It’s deserved.)
Interview with Japanese Demoscener 0b5vr
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45137245
Is it hackathons?