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GameSpotting

Tyler Winegarner
Associate Producer, GameSpot Live

Now Playing: Ikaruga, Dead to Rights, Final Fantasy X.
Game My Roommates Won't Stop Playing: Hitman 2: Silent Assassin

I Am Not an Atomic Playboy

Finland is a cold place, known for its harsh climate and bitter winters. As such, it is not generally regarded as having a strong agricultural industry. On the other hand, Finland has made a name for itself as a place that produces some of the most masterful programmers in the world. The Linux operating system has all but become a household name nowadays, and the author of the first kernel, Linus Torvalds, is a resident of the nation of Finland.

It could even be said that there's a software development culture among the youth of Finland. One of the most pervasive elements of this culture is what is known as the "demo scene," which essentially involves developers, artists, and musicians creating noninteractive visual extravaganzas that resemble, if nothing else, techno-centric music videos. These demos are developed by recognized groups such as Future Crew, ElectroMotiveForce, Triton, and Complex, and these groups share both a sense of camaraderie and a sense of competition. They all get together several times a year and submit their demos in a competition to make the best, slickest, or most entertaining of all. The scene has been around since the mid-'80s, and it has been going strong now for nearly 20 years.

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It may not look like much right now, but seeing this on a PC in 1992 was absolutely mind-blowing.
What's really made these demos special is what their developers have been able to accomplish, especially when they were working with particularly primitive computers in the early '90s. These developers managed to convince Intel 386s with 32MB of RAM or less to crank out real-time 3D models at a steady 30fps, complete with texture maps, alpha blending, and a synthesized, multichannel soundtrack. The demos were all software-based, requiring no special graphics hardware more sophisticated than a basic VGA card and a baseline sound card. This was all possible because the de facto standard language of the demo scene was Assembler--a low-level programming language that is incredibly efficient, but has an intensely steep learning curve. The good news for gamers is that not only have these developers created these outstanding visual displays, but they've also honed a number of skills that carry over well to the game industry. In fact, a few members have made this leap--three members of the Future Crew team worked on Max Payne over at Remedy Entertainment, and two others developed a 3D graphics chip whose technology was later folded into the Voodoo 2 graphics card.

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I'll be honest with you--I've studied programming for years, and I have no idea what's going on here.
If you are interested in something of a history lesson about a bunch of enthusiasts who were way ahead of their time, I'd advise you to check out scene.org, which is a comprehensive chronicle of the Finnish demo scene, past and present. Unfortunately, a number of the most famous demos were written for DOS in the early '90s and will not run properly in modern Windows. But if you have an old machine in your closet that you might like to see crank out some outstanding action, you'd be well advised to give some of these demos a look.

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