Comment by gavanwoolery
12 years ago
This was the first demo I ever saw:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2suZ1KkZ9HI
Which one of my brothers downloaded via BBS (amazingly, my small hometown had a BBS when few people even had PCs). I had no idea what it was at the time, but in retrospect it is pretty impressive - there were really no popular 3D games at that time that I can recall.
A lot of the Spore (EA/Maxis) team was composed of demosceners - I was later invited to work on it but never took up the offer (after reading some horror stories about EA hours).
Arjan Brussee, the main coder of VectorDemo, went on to develop Jazz Jackrabbit, made a few more obscure games, then founded Guerrilla Games of Killzone fame. He recently rejoined Cliffyb and they are probably building something awesome again. :)
Back then it was interesting to see many democoders try to make games on their own, and fail due to the large amount of (comparatively) boring work required, but Arjan was a pretty strong-willed individual.
While a lot of big democoders went on the start famous computer games companies, it's interesting to specular what happened to all the crackers of that same era? Sadly my guess is that they all joined the NSA.
Didn't you build a racing game around that time, too?
Yeah the ill-named Speed Haste, which unfortunately does not seem to work in the recent Internet Archive DOSBox thing:
https://archive.org/stream/msdos_Speed_Haste_1995/Speed_Hast...
For the record, the source code for the game is available on GitHub:
https://github.com/TheJare/SpeedHasteSrc
We were bit oddballs in the demoscene because we had been making games and professional software for years, and we were 5-10 years older than most sceners.
The demoscene had a lot of influence e.g. Max Payne = Future Crew!