Spring 2025
Jargon Buster
Before we begin, let's explain a few terms that will be used throughout this text.
- Crack
- Cracking a computer games means removing the software copy protection. Thus, a cracker is a person who cracks a game, and the resulting cracked game is often just called a crack.
- Cracktro
- A small demo is usually called an intro. A cracktro, then, is an intro announcing that a specific scene group has cracked and released a game. The cracktro was usually the first thing you saw when booting up a game floppy, and you had to press a key or mouse button to load the game proper.
- Effect
- In demo scene lingo, an effect is a piece of code producing a specific visual of some kind, for example a zooming and rotating logo.
- Ripping
- Ripping is the act of stealing some kind of asset - graphics, music or code - from a pre-existing source. Ripping a piece of game music on the Amiga typically involves searching in RAM for loaded music data and, if found, storing it on disk. The ripped asset can then be used in one's own program.
- Lamer
- A lamer is a person with low street cred on the demo scene.
Scandal, scandal
Being eight years old and not speaking any English whatsoever meant that my early understanding of Amiga games was somewhat patchy. Nevertheless, some things will make an impression no matter what. Take German cracking group Unit A's 1988 cracktro for the flight simulator Interceptor, for example.
Three cloaked and hooded figures are hovering in space, their faces hidden in shadow. Stars glide toward them in the background and a golden logo rotates in front. Beneath is a scrolling text, beginning with the words "SCANDAL, SCANDAL". Striking visuals combined with suggestive synthesizer music - and the mystery of not quite grasping what all this was about - means it has etched itself into my memory forever.
Another early cracktro memory is The Movers' 1987 intro for Fire Power. Less aesthetically accomplished than Unit A's offering, it features a colourful rainbow effect, the ubiquitous scroll text and a short sample loop from Lian Ross' 1986 disco hit "It's Up To You".
Like the ripped music in The Movers intro, Unit A's cracktro borrows and steals heavily from other media. The rotating logo, for example, looks suspiciously like that used by the film production company United Artists at the time. And, of course, the intro was made with the purpose of announcing that Unit A had removed the copy protection from the adjoined computer game, and then intentionally taken part in the ensuing illicit software redistribution.
Which is what makes the scroll text so interesting. The first part reads like this in its entirety:
Scandal, scandal!!!! You know Guenther Kraemer (Bladerunner) the author of the copyprogram Fast'Em? He is a thief, because he uses in his Fast'Em the original Fast Lightning copyroutines, they are exactly the same byte for byte. Give him a kick, if you meet him .............
The irony is apparent, bordering on parody: A bunch of hardened game crackers complaining about software theft. The floppy disk copy program Fast Lightning was a commercial title (which later evolved into the famous X-Copy), and its code, "byte for byte", was defended by a cracker group because one of their members wrote it. Of course, both Fast Lightning and X-Copy were, in turn, cracked and spread by other groups.
This paradoxical duality of writing commercial software and cracking games defines the complex and often incomprehensible attitude towards copyright or intellectual property - for lack of a better word - on the demo scene.
Of Cracks and Demos
The cracking and demo scenes are forever intertwined. With the growth and resulting economic and legal muscle of the games industry, the risks associated with cracking have increased significantly since the 1980s. The divide between demo makers and software pirates have grown along with this, but some groups are still active on both fronts, such as Razor 1911 and Fairlight.
I'm not counting the still active C64 cracking scene here. There's little point in keeping anonymous when cracking some newly rediscovered 8-bit budget game from 1984, and contemporary developers of C64 games seem to begrudingly accept the fact that their game will be cracked almost immediately after release - their target audience of affluent, middle-aged collectors and C64 hobbyists will buy the original anyway. Nevertheless, cracking is still being done on the C64 and several groups compete in topping the charts of first releases and best cracks. Many of those involved are also active in both demo programming and professional, contemporary software development.
Unit A were active in the infancy of the Amiga scene, even before the European release of the Amiga 500. Owning a computer at that time was rare, owning an Amiga 1000 rarer still. Considering this, it's perhaps not as curious that the same people involved in writing commercial Amiga software were also involved in cracking games: if your main ambition is to write code and explore a new platform, both activities are merely means to an end. If you can make a bit of cash as you go along, it'd be silly to turn it down.
As for present-day activities, the strange duality of being active on the scene and writing software for a living is perhaps not that strange when the scene activity takes place on functionally dead platforms, or is exclusively about making demos. It gets more curious when considering that there are still members of big, combined demo and cracking groups - active in cracking modern AAA games - who work for major games studios. I'm sure they're not personally involved in cracking, but mere guilt by association could probably be enough to raise suspicion or at least questions of morality among certain people.
Alea iacta est
In 1992, the pinball simulator Pinball Dreams was released for Amiga computers. The game was a critical and commercial success, propelling its crew of Swedish developers into local nerd stardom and spawning two equally successful sequels. It also laid the foundation for the company Digital Illusions, which was later renamed DICE - perhaps most famous for the Battlefield series of games.
Pinball Dreams was prominently marketed on the demo scene, because the authors were active sceners, members of a demo group called The Silents. Their game was, quite predictably, cracked (by Fairlight), and a debate ensued in the demoscene annals known as disk mags - magazines distributed as executable programs on floppy disks. DICE co-founder Fredrik Liljegren, using the scene handle Animal, wrote an article in R.A.W #4. In it, he mentions the subject and calls cracking destructive. But in the same text he also encourages sceners to join the ranks of Digital Illusions as professional developers.
Another opinion piece in the same R.A.W issue suggested a no-crack policy for games made by sceners, an idea that seemingly gained no traction at all. The amount of sceners involved in game development was already then quite large, but would soon grow even bigger. Apart from Digital Illusions, many other companies had also begun recruiting on the scene, for example the Norwegian game studio Funcom.
Fairlight's simple cracktro for Pinball Dreams suggests a somewhat
guilty conscience, but clearly not guilty enough to not crack the game.
None of the Digital Illusions members were strangers to software piracy - not least because The Silents, like so many other scene groups formed in the 1980s, were involved in cracking games for the C64 and Amiga. Liljegren himself is known to have visited demo parties way back when they were still called copy parties - as in copying pirated software. He's also credited with orignal supply - sourcing the original, uncracked game and supplying it to a cracker - for several Amiga game cracks.
Liljegren's story is far from unique, and isn't about hypocrisy so much as it is about the mix of youthful enthusiasm and naïvete that often define our teenage pursuits. Still, it's a great illustration of how shifting and paradoxical loyalties have contributed to the scene's incoherent and haphazard approach to digital ownership.
Original Merit
It's often said that the demo scene is a meritocracy, with the purpose of showcasing originality and individual proficiency within programming, visual art and music. This is sort of true, although perhaps not always in the way one might expect.
As far as originality goes, the scene does appreciate it - but mostly within fixed bounds. A demo is a demo is a demo, and if something deviates too much from the norm, loud complaints will be voiced about how it is, in fact, not a demo, and doesn't belong on the scene. Some very interesting aspects of for example the C64 hardware have been discovered or tamed to perfection by demo coders. At the same time, even this code results in the same things, over and over again: rotating 3D objects, plasma effects, displaying more sprites or colours on screen than some other demo did last month. When a new effect is invented, other coders will soon copy it.
Storytelling and aesthetic flair have improved with the maturity of sceners, but the core is still about certain types of demo effects. Those that successfully stray from the beaten path are few and far between.
Demo coders of course use (or, at least used) books on algorithms and graphics programming, as well as studying other demos and - perhaps - peeking at what was going on in them with the help of a machine code monitor. Nevertheless, code on the scene is expected to be original in the sense that it's not just downloaded or copied from somewhere, but painstakingly written and hand optimized by those who claim coding credits.
Graphics is an interesting and in some ways depressing chapter in the scene history books. Early pixel art was almost exclusively about technique. Images were laboriously copied by hand (using a mouse or even joystick) from analog sources. Fantasy art and heavy metal album covers featured prominently as source material. Originality was, by all accounts, shunned. Certain artists, such as Peruvian-American fantasy art painter Boris Vallejo, have become synonymous with early pixel art on the scene. Vallejo's original work has been translated to early home computers in such abundance that he'd probably shed a tear if he knew about it.
A pixel art rendition by Cougar (left) of a Motörhead album cover (right).
This translation from painting to pixels is a process that requires skill. The pixel artist must compose a suitable palette consisting of 16 or 32 colours and use dithering and anti-aliasing to extend the limited palette and capture fine details on a low resolution screen. Many scene artists did add their own personal flair - little details, small changes, or perhaps combining two different images into one - but few came up with their own, entirely original compositions. It would take many years for truly original scene art to become the norm. Copying - and lately, using generative AI tools - is still common, even if the artists using these techniques tend to speak very little about it, if at all.
If the scene enjoys anything truly original, it's music - and tonnes of it has been produced. The Movers' ripped disco sample mentioned above was more a novelty showcasing the Amiga hardware, than anything else. There are covers, of course, and remixes - but also plenty of talented demo musicians churning out what could no doubt have been successful radio hits, and releasing them for free.
Rip In Peace
Hence, we can conclude that on the scene, there's a difference between borrowing, copying or stealing non-scene material and material that originated on the scene. Nobody would bat an eye at some stolen game graphics or blatant Vallejo copy flashing by in an early Amiga demo - but if that pixel art Vallejo copy was used without permission in another demo by another group, there would be hell to pay. What kind of person would even think of doing such a thing? That's ripping, and you just don't rip stuff like that, because then you're a lame-ass lamer!
Attitudes vary slightly between different platforms and during different eras of the scene. Amiga musicians were engaged in a constant debate surrounding the theft of samples, as in using a sample made by some other scener in your own tune. On the C64 scene, using a previously released tune in a small intro seems mostly okay. On the Amiga, this is considered bad form unless explicit permission has been given.
But, despite variance in the details, the sentiment remains the same: sceners shouldn't use other sceners' work without permission, and they certainly shouldn't take credit for someone else's hard work. Because demos are released for free, the only thing you trade with on the scene is your name and your skill. Skill is developed through grind, which takes time. And then there's the time put into producing something new - be it code, graphics, music, or something else. Thus, when a scener steals from another scener, what is stolen isn't money but pride and time. Such theft can often hurt more than losing the trivial sums of money teenagers had access to in the 1980s.
Free as in free
Modern open source developers often complain about how little money and appreciation they get for their hard work. It is, indeed, in many ways a strange way of publishing software. Of course, some might hope to trade on their name in the future, and some - though relatively few - are hired by companies where they get paid for maintaining their open source project.
Compared to the scene, however, there is an important distinction. Open source has, from very early on, been used in commercial settings. Everyone getting into open source development will, at some level, be aware of this - especially if releasing under a commercially permissive license. And yet, what many open source developers might experience isn't necessarily the loss of money as such, but the strange feeling of someone else making money off something they gave the world for free.
This perhaps even more true for demos. The scene is in many ways anti-commercial. Games were (and are) cracked because it's an exciting challenge, but also because they were considered too expensive for young teenagers. Demos are made because it's fun, and released for free because you want as many people as possible to watch them. At the same time, the strange scene paradox is ever-present: Plenty of demo coders also nurtured dreams of becoming successful commercial game developers.
There's almost never a license included dictating how scene productions can be used - in fact, most sceners probably weren't aware that something like that existed when they first got involved with demo making. Instead, the unwritten and unclear rules of the scene are thought to apply universally. When it comes to commercial grift, this is of course further muddied by the scene's ample use of copyrighted non-scene material. Nevertheless, it did and does still happen: People outside the scene aren't bothered by accusations of lameness.
The loading screen of Andromeda's 1994 Amiga demo Sequential, featuring a message from main coder HeadX.
In the olden days, such grift was mostly about selling copies of demo disks for profit. Now it's more about having your music pilfered by Timbaland, some T-shirt print shop stealing your pixel art, or a monetized Youtube channel publishing crappy recordings of your carefully crafted demo. Grifters are nothing new, of course, but experiencing it first-hand is always hard. More than one scener have expressed feelings of powerlessness, sadness and anger when their labour of love - their time and passion - is sullied with the cutthroat callousness of late stage capitalism. Because, if nothing else, the scene is at least in total agreement that any demo or other production released on the scene, should be copied, spread and enjoyed without money changing hands.
Nobody likes it when someone else takes credit (or cash) for their work. Commercial grifters may be one thing, but when it comes to the scene itself, this feeling can get intensely amplified: in a comparatively small community, ripping is done by people you might have counted as friends. This is rather uncommon, and swiftly called out when discovered. One recent example is when a C64 cracker was caught ripping code, which resulted in him being put on a sort of probation for quite some time.
While the prevailing consensus on the scene is that ripping is lame, some entrepreneurial demo coders advertised - in their own demos - that their source code was for sale. There are a few examples of when this offer was taken, resulting in curiously similar demos from completely disparate groups. This was also frowned upon by many sceners - even though no ripping, theft or copyright infringement was involved. Large parts of the scene, however, value hard work just as much as - or perhaps even more than - originality.
Copyright does not exist
Are you confused yet? Good, because so is the scene. Apart from game developers being active on the scene in close proximity to people that would happily crack said games, some have even at some point held simultaneous, dual positions as crackers and professional developers.
Many demo musicians are also professional musicians, trying to sell the work they do outside the scene for money. This goes for graphics artists as well. Of course, as professionals, copyright, licenses and money do matter. Not just as incentives to guard your own creations, but also because others will do the same. In the real world, there's no free pass for copying a Boris Vallejo painting.
Even if most of us aren't involved in cracking, we were all brought up on pirated software and count many of those who cracked and spread said software as our friends. I'm sure there's some rationalization going on, and a bit of lightweight compartmentalization: what happens on the scene stays on the scene. Still, being professionally involved in a creative industry no doubt changes the way many sceners think about original work, fair use and ripping.
Add to this the fact that there's no central governing body, no official court of good demo conduct and no scene membership card. The scene is just a group of people, all with their own different morals and views. Unwritten rules have transformed and changed over decades of time. Demos with open source code, the use of demo frameworks written by other groups, cheap scanners and digital cameras and the use of generative AI all raise new questions about originality and authorship.
Though the debate has been going on for as long as the scene has existed, very little actual ideology has crystallized. Unlike open source, software freedom on the scene has never been very political. Individual sceners have thought long and hard about these questions - such as Linus Walleij (also known as King Fisher in the C64 group TRIAD) in his book "Copyright finns inte" (Copyright does not exist). But there is no scene manifesto, no philosophical leader and no call to arms for a demoscene way of digital rights management.
The scene just is. And if someone did something you didn't like, such as stealing your code? Well, make a demo about it. Maybe start the scroll text with something catchy. Like, say, SCANDAL, SCANDAL!