Bizarre '98 Report
Written by Skin
Some weekend in August, Bizarre 98 was going to happen. No, not another gangbang party for SM freaks but a demo party! Bizarre has a long history in The Netherlands, and again everyone was anxious to get to Biz98. We (Quad) have visitd all the Dutch parties and decided to go early to Etten-Leur (location of Bizarre since ages).
Last year we had to stand in line for a long time to get in, so this year we would be the first in line... bummer! A lot of people had arrived before us, and officialy we should stand and wait outside.
But thanks to Mindex/NO we got in right away (great organisers, they really care about the demo-groups :-)). We installed all our stuff and in a couple of hours all of Quad was there and we were ready to rock! I personally went to Biz to have fun and meet a lot of people, but others of Quad wanted to make at least one intro and a demo.
The ones involved in the project started working immediately. We installed our stuff in the small area of the Bizarre location, as Quad: G-Day, Darkxceed, Sarix, in this part of the building there was not Sarix' girlfried, non-Quad: ir that much noise.
The bigger area is always stuffed with people playing MP3's on their 4KWatt speakers. It's a real shame that some people only come to show off with their big stereos and MP3 collection. I don't have a problem with those MP3's (I collect some too) but it is annoying when they are playing them while you are trying to communicate with another scener or just want to work on your production. But then again, it's always the same on all the parties, some noise makers and some real sceners.
I installed the network for the Quad people and tried an IRC connection to find out if 'famous' sceners were at Biz and who were staying at the home front. I already found MagicBoy/Superstition but tried to find other users on the local IRC server (I even fixed an outside world connection). Biz98 was perfectly organised and Hewlett Packard was always supporting Biz with high quality network stuff. On the local IRC network people were talking about crap (= Quake and stuff), which was a reason to find some real sceners in the relax room at Bizarre. One great reason to visit Bizarre is the relax/food room where a lot of sceners hang out and talk about the scene, beer and girls. :)
On the second day (Saturday) some compos started, while we were stressing to get a production finished and found some free time to watch fellow-sceners' productions. Not much, but good things come in small parts... The music compo and the house one had the usual Dutch competitors, and the gfx compo wasn't very spectacular. Necronomicon/Quad entered the raytrace compo with an excellent entry, applause and cheers from us (make fun!) while his (winning) entry was shown. After some smalltalk with Infant (ex-Acme/ex-Quad) and Amnesia/'just blonde' (the Dutch demo scene couple of the year :-)), I got a hold on JAL/Nostalgia and Sparcus/Nostalgia. These organisers of TakeOver really check out all the competitions (some weeks ago we had met at Wired '98).
In the meantime some deadlines went by... and we hadn't finished any of our productions. :( We suck... well, time to have some more fun then. :) We wanted to make a demo co-production with Trepaan. These really wicked guys won the Biz96, Quad won Biz97, so Biz98 should be Trepaan (they are really sick clowns) and Quad... too bad we didn't do it.
The guys from Trepaan are _really_ wicked, we had some good laugh with some small talk and anti Bill Gates jokes. :) As always Jace was coding bit by bit for another extremely small surprise code production, Asm-God. :) Jace/TBL
The first compo apart from the surprise coding compo was the 4k one. The 4k compos around the world are getting better and better (Mesha was released at Asm). Purple Dreams 2 really surprised me. It was an excellent entry. The others were nice, too, but not as good as PD2.
We wanted to enter the 64K compo with one or even 2 intros. Neither of them got finished, so we were watching some nice competition between Jello and Maroon. The two had really nice 64k's, but in my opinion Maroon was really the better one. Jello should/could have done better, oh well, these guys have already got our respect so why bother. :)
And then I was tired, I wanted to sleep. Sarix was also getting a little bit
Zzzzz... So we fetched our sleeping stuff and went to the sleeping room (near
the cosy relax/food room). As we entered the room we heard someone snoring
_really_ loud, we got out of there and went to a walkthrough 'hall' just in
front of the food/relax hall. We lay down, and hoped to sleep soon... but we
didn't pick a good place for some goodnight rest. People were walking by
constantly and talking to us, known sceners but also the catering was
interested in our crap talk. :) We even explained to a catering girl what
Biz98/demoscene was all about (
The king of the compos, the demo compo, was about to start. I had already seen
the entries of several groups. As usual Superstition had some excellent code
by Magicboy (former Spirit NS member). This friend from our 'neighbourhood'
really gets it going at parties, a really good 24h/day coder!
Our Belgian friends from Green had also produced
an excellent demo, I really liked this one! It had
some funny parts and some original 3D parts. As
always I was kinda sleepy while sitting in those
nice theatre chairs, but it was nice to watch all
the demos from the (Dutch) scene come by, although
it is more fun while competing oneself in that
compo.
One 'not-demo' was also shown during the
demo-compo: kippen-schieten by the famous Witan!
It was a game in which you had to shoot chickens
out of the air, very hilarious!
The winner of the demo compo is Superstition.
After watching 10+ demos it was just to wait for the price ceremony. As usual
it started behind schedule. The true minor part of Biz98 was the _really_ long
wait we had to do, the price ceremony was delayed several times and often they
announced it after waiting for half an hour at the theatre door!
Next time inform the sceners more!
The price ceremony itself was really nicely organised and funny but most of
sceners were irritated and gave Harlequin, the master of the ceremony, a hard
time.
All in all, Biz98 was again a great party with a lot of chitchat with the
Dutch and Belgian sceners. I really enjoyed talking to Neliz/Trepaan, hearing
the bragging of Rogue and Jace :) and of course meeting some sceners I had
never spoken to in real life!
Next year I'll be there again to enjoy the excellent relax room, nice
organisers, cool network and a lot of small talk. The quality of the releases
was quite good, and in the near future it will be even better with a growing
Dutch scene (let's write about that another time :-)).
- Skin/Quad