Who Killed the American Demoscene?
category: general [glöplog]
some interesting misconceptions in this thread, time for some oldfart ranting :)
- "BBS" was incredibly common in the US. much much more common also for regular people - ie non sceners - to use them, and to download stuff from them (cracks mostly, but also PD stuff was huge). when we in europe were mostly swapping via snail mail, almost noone did this in the US. interestingly, while in europe "BBS" were mostly used by "elite" people (and others would not get access) it was even common for "local lamers" to use BBSs set up by major warez groups. this only changed later at the end of the 80s when the US people left the C64 behind (mostly because almost no new games came out, ie warez become non interesting)
- the US scene was about warez. and about warez. did i mention warez? even the cracks from the US reflected this - early US crackers tried to make their copies as close as possible to the original, and often that ment there were no intros either. there was a huge scene around "parameters" in the US too, which are basically patches that you apply to a plain 1:1 copy to bypass the copy protection. this also changed only later, when the major US groups left the C64 behind and european groups took over. this was also the time when "NTSC fixing" became a thing.
- demoscene as we know it from early C64 days did not really exist at all in the US. you can count the groups doing demos on one hand, while for european groups you need an entire DB :) and yes, i'm also pretty convinced one major reason for this was that the US people did not understand whats the point of spending so much time into writing some demo that you can not sell for money afterwards (i still hear this today from time to time).
the bottom line is: there never was much to kill in the first place.
- "BBS" was incredibly common in the US. much much more common also for regular people - ie non sceners - to use them, and to download stuff from them (cracks mostly, but also PD stuff was huge). when we in europe were mostly swapping via snail mail, almost noone did this in the US. interestingly, while in europe "BBS" were mostly used by "elite" people (and others would not get access) it was even common for "local lamers" to use BBSs set up by major warez groups. this only changed later at the end of the 80s when the US people left the C64 behind (mostly because almost no new games came out, ie warez become non interesting)
- the US scene was about warez. and about warez. did i mention warez? even the cracks from the US reflected this - early US crackers tried to make their copies as close as possible to the original, and often that ment there were no intros either. there was a huge scene around "parameters" in the US too, which are basically patches that you apply to a plain 1:1 copy to bypass the copy protection. this also changed only later, when the major US groups left the C64 behind and european groups took over. this was also the time when "NTSC fixing" became a thing.
- demoscene as we know it from early C64 days did not really exist at all in the US. you can count the groups doing demos on one hand, while for european groups you need an entire DB :) and yes, i'm also pretty convinced one major reason for this was that the US people did not understand whats the point of spending so much time into writing some demo that you can not sell for money afterwards (i still hear this today from time to time).
the bottom line is: there never was much to kill in the first place.
Quote:
But it's just the flipside of the "all Americans care about is money" line. Both are exaggerations that have some truth value but conceal the real causes.
people get way too rich->too lazy
People get too rich -> have time to make demos. =)
as we're going into stereotypes now, maybe it's diabetes!
If we really want to go there, one could says that you can write a whole demo between two action sequences in soccer/football :P
