The Demoscene

I have recently written a short resume in which I explained that computer games have been an essential part of my life ever since I discovered them and that creating my own games was what I longed for the most in my youth.

Sometimes I question if editing a magazine about the demoscene was the right thing to do. I once read that demosceners are people who in their youth were more fascinated by the crack intros than the actual games. I am definitely an atypical scener as demos never interested me. I was only into diskmags. The actual reason why I focused on the demoscene was that I had a penpal who was of the opinion that the coders of the demoscene were the best programmers in the world.

I could have stopped dealing with the demoscene when I was 14 and won first place in a size-coding competition organized by demoscene magazine Pain. After all this achievement showed that my programming skills were on par with the ones of leading demo coders.

But there was no game development community with a structure similar to the demoscene. Although demos were not what interested me, the demoscene was still the community that came closest to the type of community I longed for being part of.