The only rather sad part is around 2/3 of the way through, where the author had to use a pre-compiled binary from the Internet Archive, because the original WWW site had rotted away, and the source code did not assemble. This stuff tends to rot if the community does not do the preservation work.

That said, Sergey Bulba's WWW site is still around and the relevant stuff can be found today at https://ay.strangled.net/progr_e.htm . But the continued existences of things like this are not the sort of things to take for granted.

I was in high school when the demoscene took off in the 80s. It forever tainted my view of software development as full of lazy programmers not bothering to optimize code as hardware got better and better. Myself included.

Demoscene is still a thing!

https://syntaxparty.org/ is on in a couple of weeks if you happen to be in Melbourne.

Nice.

Check out this one though: https://demozoo.org/productions/13188/

If you are in the US and near Pittsburgh, Demosplash(one of the largest demo party in the US) will be at CMU on Nov 21. Tons of 8 bit shown there and to actually play with during the conference!

Not me vogueing to that little ditty~

The time-shifty nature of demoscene is really interesting to me. The community seems small but influential, so general awareness of it moves more like word-of-mouth, even in the internet age; people make incidental contact and pick up some small but incomplete aspect of it, often years after the initial release. People in 2026 enjoying work made in 1992; people making new demos in 2026 that look like they're from 1992.

Hits harder than the same dynamic in pop culture because these things are so little-known, but they find their way to your eyes and ears across the gulf of time all the same.

[flagged]