Demos We Care About is a daily feed of demos that someone, somewhere, cares about. The goal is to share the best, most interesting, most loved demos to a wider audience. There are two in fact two main audiences for the feed – demosceners who want reminding of the best that the scene has to offer, and then there’s the wider audience of non-demosceners who might not normally get to see these works.

Format

The format is quite simple – a demo a day. Each Tweet gives you the demo name, the demogroup (or groups) behind it, the year, the format (Demo, Wild, 64k, etc.) and the platform. Then there’s the name of the contributor and a mini review, usually just a few words long. You’ll also see a link to the demo on Pouet (the eponymous demoscene database) and a video, most often YouTube but when that fails I’ll use one of the dedicated demoscene video sites like Capped.tv or DTV. It’s a pretty limited format, imposed by the 140 character limit of a Tweet, but the demoscene has always been about pushing boundaries.

What? Videos!?

Now we all know that the demoscene is all about the realtime. Well, ok, that’s not 100% true (we’ll always have gems that aren’t realtime) but on the whole, yes, demos are meant to be watched in realtime. The trouble is we can’t always do this. New demos need high powered PCs while old demos might need an emulator or maybe they just don’t work on your current set-up. That’s why YouTube was invented (sort of..) and I think it’s the easiest way to get these demos seen by as wide an audience as possible. Just promise me you’ll remember the roots, ok?

Origins

The idea comes from Simon Carless’ excellent Games We Care About Twitter account – an idea so good that I shamelessly admit to borrowing it wholesale. That’s ok though, Simon (an oldschool demoscener himself) has already donated quite a few entries to Demos We Care About.

A note about obsolescence

I think the feed has a limited life – there are only so many demos that people care about, and these are being created at a rate of less than one a day. Eventually the backlog will be covered and I’ll be restricted to adding the best new demos as they appear, and maybe picking up the odd lost gem. And that’s why we’ll always need contributions – new blood with new favourites. If you’d like to contribute, check out the contributions page for more details.