I’m delighted to have the opportunity to get together a demoshow - selection and about text - for Hradby Samoty 2022. It’s always nice to present the demoscene subculture to a new audience. I did my best to select the most iconic and exciting demos to be screened at this alternative audio-visual festival.

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What is the demoscene

A demo is an audiovisual work of art, usually in an executable (*.exe file with code-generated content, such as music and animated graphics) format, prepared to be presented on previously defined hardware (usually with limitations).

The demoscene is a worldwide subculture where coders, musicians, and graphic artists compete in many different disciplines - compos - competitions. It originates from the cracking culture, from a time when there was no Internet, but a lot of creative beings with high level, mostly coding, skills. They organized meetups, where people would physically get together to exchange knowledge and pirated software: demoparties. People meet and find themselves testing their skills today as well. Because they love to do things in the “fun” way, all competitions have limits, such as maximum file size, specific hardware on which it needs to run (old machines such as Commodore 64, and the oldest computers you can imagine) or others.

The demoscene is a live meetup of humans of different races, genders, and age; there is an expectation from you to be highly sensitive and respectful to everybody equally. No matter if you are a beginner or skilled scener, the only thing that matters is your skill and execution of it in your production. It’s expected that if you are coming to a demoparty, you should be participating, either in compos, helping with organization or just being nice and talkative to people around you. 

Demoparties are usually full not just with competitions, but also many lectures, workshops, seminars and of course dance parties or concerts.

In Germany, the demoscene was accepted by UNESCO as a cultural heritage.

PC Competitions

• Demo

• 64K Intro

• 8K Intro

• 4K Intro

Amiga Competitions

• Demo

• Intro

Oldskool Competitions

• Oldskool Demo

• Oldskool 4K Intro

• Oldskool Graphics

• Oldskool Music

Graphics Competitions

• Modern Graphics

• Photo

• Paintover

• Animated GIF

• 4k Executable Graphics

• 3D Graphics

• ASCII / ANSI / PETSCII

• Oldskool Graphics

Music Competitions

• Streaming Music

• Executable Music

• Tracked Music

• Fast Music

• Oldskool Music

Other Competitions

• 256 Byte Intro

• Game

• Animation/Video

• Wild