Report: Mekka & Sympoum 2k-1

Written by Crest

After a bit more than three and half hours of travelling I arrived at the train station in Fallingbostel where a small bus was already waiting for bringing me and a few other party visitors to the 'Heidmarkhalle' where the Mekka and Symposium parties were held since 1997. It was shortly after noon when we arrived at the party place, but the hall was already very crowded so that it was a bit hard to find a decent place for me and my computer. At least I had success in the end. The big screen was near and the picture quality were really ok. Also the sound system worked very well. Accessing the network was connected with a bit more work than I had expected. Because I lacked a driver that was required for using my network card with Win95, I had to switch to Linux for accessing the network. A good side effect was that I could setup my computer as a party FTP-server using a static IP number while most Windows systems were connected using dhcp. The network itself was a bit unstable and accessing the Internet was sometimes very slow or just impossible (especially IRC and FTP). The voting was done on the network or with the good old paper vote sheet.

The first day ended after the short opening ceremony with quite a good liveset from Sierra/Destiny. On Saturday, the first compos started. More than a thousand people were now at the party, fortunately mostly sceners. During the day hours it was quite nice to stay outside the hall because the weather was amazing with plenty of sunshine and a temperature close to 20øC. In the front of the hall there was a hot-dog stand where you could buy the usual food. Quality and price were quite ok. Inside the hall you could buy sandwiches and other snacks.

The quality of most compos was only average, but with some exceptions. One of these exceptions was the 64k-intro 'gcube' from Matrix, which is really a must-have. Also the 64k-intro 'dusk' from Suburban Creations was very good. In the Amiga 40k-intro compo 'grid' from Nature impressed me most.

In the evening Ronny of Teklords performed his liveset on the stage. Some hours later, in the night, the wild compo began. The most impressive entry was 'Real Reality' from Never In that showed all the effects from the PC demo 'Second Reality' in real life! Have you ever tried to perform a demo in real life? Hard work that was rewarded with roaring applause from all people in the hall. Another very good entry was 'Tribute' from Han Solo of The Coexistence, a quite sentimental tribute to the whole family of demosceners.

On Sunday it was time for the demo compos. The central theme of one entry in the c64 compo was the war in Yugoslavia - respect for this! But in general the quality was not very high. The same goes for the Amiga demo compo. I have seen much better stuff on earlier parties. The PC demo compo was dominated by Smash Designs. Their winning demo 'Event Horizon' was really the best release. Also 'Planet Subotnik' from Suburban and Amable was very nice, unfortunately it doesn't run on my et6000 card. Scoopex presented a 1:1 conversion of their Amiga demo 'Alien' - not very original, but the demo itself is quite ok. In the afternoon I went to the local McDonald's together with IronEagle and Han Solo of The CoExistence in order to talk about the party and the past years. Later, Zippy/BM was quite disappointed at the cancelling of the Ansi compo. The official reason was the lack of entries.

The bad side of Mekka & Symposium was that some people used this gathering for trading child-porn stuff. Furthermore, close to the end of the party one PC got stolen.

For sleeping you could go into a separate sleeping hall. In the first night it was quite cold, but in the following nights it was ok.

On Monday at 10 o'clock it was time to prepare my stuff for the trip back to home, so again I didn't see very much of the price giving ceremony.

At least Mekka & Symposium '99 was quite a good party and the organizers have done a good job. In the train from Fallingbostel I talked with two visitors from Norway, and they said they were also very happy to be here and not at The Gathering that was held at the same time in Hamar, Norway.

- Crest