Review: Takeover '99 Booklet

Written by Adok

Like in 1998, the organizers of the Takeover party decided to distribute a free booklet to all attenders this year. Thanks to The REW of Nostalgia, who sent me the booklet via snailmail, I can write a few lines about it for all of you who haven't been at the event too.

The booklet was created one week before the party. It was designed using Freehand, exported to PDF, and printed at a professional printer shop at the university campus. In total, it consists of 44 stitched DIN A5 pages. The cover uses various colours, while the rest of the little magazine is in greyscale.

The layout is simple but practical: two text-columns, a non-fixed-width font with serifs like Times New Roman and justified text. Several photos, adverts and artworks decorate the magazine. For instance, Simon of Prone, Visualize of Sunflower and Antony of Pulse were assigned to draw something with the theme "digital flower". Their pictures, which with the exception of Visualize's seem to be rendered, are in the booklet and look good even though they are only grayscale.

Apart from information about the party, such as the compo rules and a guide on how to connect to the internal network, there are a few articles of general interest for the scene, namely an interview with the game-musician Bjorn Lynne, in the scene known as Dr. Awesome of Crusaders, recent demo, intro, coder, graphician, musician and group charts provided by the Heroin magazine, some thoughts about the "Internet and the scene" by The REW, a report by JAL about the Auditorium at which Takeover was held, and a link collection by Assa of Acme. Everything is in a good English just like in the Takeover e-zine at http://www.takeover.nl.

A few words about some other adverts and illustrations I found quite funny. On page 22 you can find the photos of eight young men and an empty field saying "THIS could be U". Below it says "Ever dreamed of being a $uperhero?", and on the bottom of the page there is a membership application ready to be filled in. What's that? Obviously a Quad advert, as I recognized Skin and G-Day in the photos. And on page 6, there are the shapes of a boy and a girl, followed by "30:01" and the note: "Surgeon General's Warning: Too much testosteron may result in severe or even fatal brain damage." Obviously this should indicate the proportion between the sexes at the party, which is quite usual for a demoscene event like this. (Though it was probably not exactly 30:01 if there were exactly 600 visitors at Takeover '99 because that would make 19.355 girls. Grin.)

Well, I'm already curious to see the booklet of next year's Takeover party!

- americanadok^hugi