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I love 4ks, because most of them are designed around one main effect and polish it to the max. The design principle »less is more« comes to mind and I think this sizelimit is the main reason because a lot of them are so great.

Of course I know that »Elevated« or »Oscar's Chair« were game changers of its own, but what are the other 4ks that revolutionized this category through the last decades and why?

Let me start :)
cdak by Quite & orange

I'd like to throw in some Omniscent

Were they though?

Elevated yes, but what's the effect of Oscar's Chair on intros that followed it? Is there more of an effort for representative geometry or cinematic direction / sound design? I don't think so. (And I say this as someone who fucking loves that intro.)

You could argue that Absolute Territory changed more of the game, but only that it was suddenly interesting to pathtrace and we're still in the valley period where noone's really done anything new or interesting with it.

I would say the last big game changer was Kindernoiser / Kindercrasher as one of the very first distance field intros. Most of those things since have been either iterations on that, or something original (like Oscar's Chair) that was so outside the comfort zone that people appreciated it and then moved on.

parsec! blurry as fuck, but it was very wtf at the time

His works.

Omniscent from 1997.

I wrote two articles on the subject:

https://datunnel.blogspot.com/2018/09/history-of-4ks-part.html
https://datunnel.blogspot.com/2007/08/demoreview-2-ships-in-bottle.html

Basically, they cover the period 1997-2017.

Stay tuned for the third one in 2027.

Jointly San Angeles Observation and Micropolis. For me there was a very noticeable step change from Assembly 2003 to 2004 in the amount of content possible (and expected) in a 4K. Yellow Rose of Texas was great, and quite possibly counts as a milestone itself, but it would have been totally overshadowed if it had been up against the 2004 competition.

And on the Spectrum, Goa, obviously.

Cool.

Hmm, I always thought they were just following the Störfall Ost recipe.
(maybe because of the flat shading look they have in common).

Void 3 had voice synthesis in an era most 4Ks didn't even have music.
Atrium was seriously impressive in the amount and quality of content, music, coherent design, camera paths...
Hartverdrahtet set a bar with post-processing effects in 4Ks.

Artefacts

Heroic 4k action for C64 from Krill and co.

It took some time for the music in Windows 4ks to move beyond midi and simplistic synths. ÜberNuss is probably a good example of an early, more elaborate synth. Mollusk took it up a level, and I think that synth was an inspiration for several other 4k synths, in particular Mentor's (used in most TBC and Pittsburgh Stallers 4ks).

+1 for Helium.. i clicked on the thread to mention it, but, t$ already did :D

I recall Sult being particularly groundbreaking actually. There were certainly a few raymarching intros before it, even in realtime in 4k that are arguably more entertaining (eg. receptor) but it was the first in my mind to push the geometry and lighting to a place where it was kindof hard to justify not using the technique for a bit :)

Imo Hypnoise should at least be mentioned.

Yeah, Sult pioneered the particular flavor of distance function raymarching that would become the bread and butter of 4k for years afterwards.

For pixel shader raymarching in general, Fallty is the earliest that I can recall.

To me these are legendary and set a new bar or opened new ground when they were released (yes, there's lots of Loonies in this list):

Atrium, Candystall, Texas, Falty, Micropolis, Void-3, Omiscent

I have a lot of blind spots in demoscene history, but these ones left an impression on me.