Anyone who has known me for longer than a few weeks has inevitably heard me sing the praises of the demoscene. I have a strong belief that this idiosyncratic programmer subculture holds the key to the future of game development, yet it is often criminally overlooked.

What is the demoscene? Wikipedia calls it “a computer art subculture that specializes in producing demos, which are non-interactive audio-visual presentations that run in real-time on a computer.” The demoscene is an offshoot from the early days of software cracking. Hackers who successfully managed to crack a piece of software often created these little self-executing bits of eye candy called “intros” proclaiming their success to anyone who ran their program.

However, since an intro often had to fit into the 4-kilobyte boot sector of a floppy disk, they required superhuman programming skills to implement. At some point, hackers began creating these intros as standalone programs purely to flaunt their abilities, and thus the demoscene was born. Modern intros are typically restricted to 64 kilobytes - derived from the maximum size of an DOS executable - but the mentality remains the same.

Intros often use techniques like procedural generation and audio synthesis to cut down on filesizes, and represent some of the most rigidly efficient code in the world. Current intros like Conspiracy’s Chaos Theory manage to squeeze entire music videos into 64k (for comparison, the one-page PDF file containing my resume clocks in at 182k), and the first-person shooter .kkrieger made waves in 2004 by fitting a playable demo level into 96k without sacrificing image quality. Most recently, independent coder Peter “Archee” Soltesz released Sumotori Dreams, a freeware game incorporating physics technology comparable to expensive middleware solutions like Euphoria and Digital Molecular Matter. Even Will Wright’s team at EA turned to the demoscene for inspiration when creating the procedural technology behind Spore.

So why is the demoscene still so far underground?

In all fairness, I think a lot of it has to do with poor definition. It’s difficult to explain succinctly what makes these programs so astounding, since the concept of filesize is quite abstract and has little meaning to most non-programmers. Additionally, like many computer subcultures, the demoscene is notoriously insular. Few hackers bother to spread awareness of their group, and still others actively resist such attention.

A notable exception is the demogroup known as Triton, whose members went on to form Starbreeze Studios, creators of The Darkness and The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay. Transitions like this are rare, however. One urban legend claims that a major middleware developer contacted Peter Soltesz to purchase the code he used to make Sumotori Dreams, and he responded by releasing a new version of the game that was only 29k, smugly ignoring the offer. While most likely a gross exaggeration, this kind of attitude is not uncommon in the demoscene.

Fortunately, there are some individuals on the fringes of the scene, or entirely removed from it, who have taken up the cause. Will Wright often mentions the demoscene in interviews, citing the inspiration his team found in the scene’s 64k and 4k demo competitions. Sites dedicated to independent games went ballistic over Sumotori Dreams, making it one of the few games to reach an audience outside the scene itself.

Widespread recognition is still some distance away, but I’m glad that progress is being made. Hopefully, Spore will demonstrate what this kind of technology is capable of doing for games. Until then, you can expect me to continue evangelizing the demoscene at every opportunity.

~ by George on August 15, 2008.