evilpaul.org

A big hello to anyone visiting here after seeing one of my talks at the Edinburgh Interactive Festival over the past couple of days. I gave two talks at the event. The first, on Sunday 11th, was a one hour screening of demos with a little bit of a talk on the history and background of the demoscene. The second, on Monday 12th, was a half hour screening as part of Channel 4’s Talent Arcade series of talks.

As promised, I’ve collected together the details of all of the demos that were shown in my talks:

List of demos shown on Sunday

List of demos shown on Monday

If you would like to find out more about the demoscene then here are a few sites that you should check out:

demoscene.bitfellas.org – A new demoscene outreach site. We’re currently very much in Beta but keep checking back as we will be starting to add more new content and updating the layout over the next week or so.

demoscene.tv – A bit like YouTube for the demoscene. Here you can check out high quality video captures of some of the best demos, and they can all be watched from within the comfort of your favourite browser.

If you would like to contact me at all about any of this then please just leave a comment on this post. Don’t worry, I’ll moderate out any contact details so they won’t appear on the page ;)

Yesterday I held my demoscene seminar at the University of Abertay. The audience of around 30 people was a good mix of University staff and students as well as members of the local gamedev community. I spent a little over an hour giving a brief introduction to the scene and showing some of the best demos from the past few years. The complete list of demos that I showed is available here

At the end of the seminar I put up a slide with some links to websites that provide further info on the demoscene. These were:

demoscene.tv – A great site with high quality video captures of demos. Check out their “What is demoscene” link on the right-hand side of the main page.

scene.org – An “offical” demoscene site. Scene.org is a non-profit organisation providing free web-hosting and support to demo groups. The site contains news stories and forums. Scene.org is sponsored by such high profile companies as NVIDIA, Pixar and Media Molecule.

pouet.net – A site whose goal is to list every demoscene product ever released. This is the best place to find information on demos. It’s also a good place to find all demos released by your favourite groups. Note that the forums on this site are not for the feint of heart!

Finally, thank you *so much* to everyone who came along. Hopefully you all enjoyed yourselves and were inspired to find out more about the modern demoscene. If you have any comments or questions then please feel free to leave a comment here or email me at demoscene-at-evilpaul-dot-org.

It used to be a fairly regular event: gather a group of friends together, post-pub, at the house with the biggest projector screen we could find and watch demos. I’d always end up as the curator, either choosing the demos myself or interpreting the calls of the audience (“Show us that cool new 64k one!”). It was a little like DJing I suppose, and I’ve always enjoyed doing that too.

Since then I’ve always wanted to take things to a bigger stage and introduce the demoscene to a wider audience. I even had wild ideas of projecting MFX demos (like A Deepness In The Sky) on to the sides of buildings just to mess with people’s heads…

Luckily, I no longer have to think about resorting to such guerilla tactics. The University of Abertay in Dundee have very kindly agreed to lend me one of their cinema rooms, and I’m taking the opportunity to run a little demoscene outreach event there. So, on Friday the 6th June, I’ll be showing some of the best and most accessible demos from the past few years and giving a bit of a background talk in a shameless attempt to get more people interested in the demoscene ;)

Once the event is over, I will post details of the demos shown. Wish me luck!

[edit] Here’s a picture of the back of the flyer with a map to the venue. Click on the thumbnail to enlarge it.