Dreamhack '99 party report
Travelling through time to the party of dreamhack...
So, it was decided. Me (KOWBOY) was going to dreamhack '99. Along with me went three of my friends, llord polpe, moxie and frozen yoghurt. Since llord polpe, moxie and I had been at the last dreamhack which we all thought was a great party, we were all very hyped about going there once again. The preparations for our departure were planned and written down (almost). Our trip to dreamhack depended on llord polpe's success in getting his drivers license, fortunately for us (and llord polpe) he succeded in taking his drivers license. So, the timetravel was set. Our driver was chosen. Our vehicle was stolen... I mean chosen! We were about to travel through space and time in an old Mazda 323 to the city of Borlänge to attend what was to be called 'Sweden's largest demoparty'.
We prepared ourselves by packing the car the night before the dreamhack and since llord polpe insisted on bringing his way too large 21" monitor we had some problems with fitting all of our equipment into the car. Lucky as we were, my sense of geometry helped us out and all went well. So, we went to bed (except frozen yoghurt who spent the night watching DVD movies) to get as much sleep as possible.
I woke up the day after at 4:30 A.M. Tired as hell I waited for llord polpe to pick me up. So he did. Moxie was late (as usual) and frozen yoghurt was tired. Boomschackalack and we were on our way, listening on strange goa-trance on polpe's large audio system.
Some hours later, we arrived...
The arrival...
Ouch! How many people can there be in line in front of the dreamhack entrance! One simple answer: TOO MANY!!!!
I had to use the bathroom, stand in that way too long line, buy a ticket and eat. We should have arrived 2 hours later, because then the line was gone and everyone was inside.
After some annoying minutes (like 60!) we were finally inside the building. If there is a dreamhack organizer reading this, please make the registration progress a lot faster and smoother for the next dreamhack happening please. I phoned my smaller brother who was already there to see if he had taken some places for me and my friend. He had. Good boy! So we rigged up, tuned up and sat down... Nothing happened...
In the future, there are no such things called networks...
Suddenly I heard someone saying that there were no network. Ok, so? I don't give a shit. I had no use for the network except for voting in the compos. To solve my friend's simple problem I took my very elite 8-port hub and rigged it up for a small local network. That had to do for now. After a while the guys in front of me started to yell in their too big soundsystem: "Give us our money back! Give us our money back!" This was annoying of course but why did they want their money back? "So the network doesn't work, it will... This is a party, nothing works the first day," I thought. I think it was moxie who told me that there were no switches or hubs at the party place. Hehe, funny. One of the largest network companies in the world as a sponsor and no switches. Funny. A bit later it was announced on the very big and nice bigscreen that switches and hubs were flown in from Stockholm, Amsterdam, London and some other places. Cool. The guys in front of stopped screaming and the party continued. That was a relief for my ears.
The second day. We had rewritten the future and there were things called networks...
The second day was better. The party feeling was starting to spread... No guys were screaming because of no network... Loud and strange music pumping from loudspeakers... Funny lights blinking in the total darkness... 3000 people were sitting in front of there computers leeching warez... I mean coding wonderful demos, composing awesome music and beautiful pictures. ;)
The big problem with this
party was in my opinion, that it seemed to me like everyone was
leeching warez and stuff. What's the point in going to a party just to
leech warez which you probably never will use anyway!? I mean, we all
leech sometimes. But to go to a party just for the sake of leeching I
can't understand. I think that one shouldn't call it a demoparty if
it is just an copyparty!
I was starting to feel that the compo contribs would be lousy since I did only see one guy coding at the party place. That would of course be good for me, since we (NEXTEMPIRE) were to release our intro called Wonder Woman here. We were also going to release some pictures and some nice tunes. So I uploaded our contribs via the Zepo system, which worked just fine.
My phone ringed. Ring, ring, it said and I answered. It was my friend reaper of #lame.se who said that he had arrived at the party place with some of his friends in #lame.se. Cool! More friends to be with. We had a really great time, me and the dudes in #lame.se.
The other days. The future changed...
Since I was a little bit worried about if our intro would work after it had crashed moxie's puter a couple of times but not mine I asked the compo crew if it worked. They said that it didn't. GAHHH!!!! What!? So, our coder wasn't at the party and the intro didn't work. What to do? After some tweaking and doing strange stuff with the file it suddenly worked. Jihaaaa! I handed it in in a disk since I no more trusted the Zepo system 'cause of what it had done to our intro. Anyway it worked on the compo machine and I was satisfied. I went to McNoname to eat a burger. Tasty! No discount this year (I think) like last year. Not tasty!
So finally it was time to make our hyperspace jump into the beautiful world of demos, intros, pictures and music... It was compo time! YES! Well... ok... after some long delays. But it eventually did start, didn't it?
The music compo gave me an headache since none of our musicians contribs were presented due to some lame excuse the compo crew gave me. Ok, pixel then. One of our gfxians had made a really cool pic called 'did I miss the auction called life?'. It was shown, people applauded and I was happy. How good does life get?
Then there were some other competitors in the pixel compo (obviously) which were good... In fact they were very good. Java's 'änglar finns dom?' (are there angels?) was really awesome. But I still thought that our (KTHULU's) picture would have a good chance of placing high. It didn't place among the three best, which sucks of course. :) As a matter of fact, I still don't know which place it got one week after dreamhack. That is one problem with dreamhack (and other parties). Why can't all of the contribs and the results be released to the public the day after the party. Can that be hard? Please give me a good reason for not doing so, if you have one!
Anyway. Intro compo then. Our intro was shown second and it didn't crash. That's good. Then I saw the other intros. Ouch! They were good, almost all of them were really excellent. Perhaps some of the best intros I have ever seen. I should slap you guys! Why did you do so damn cool intros!?! If you haven't seen these intros you should download them from scene.org once their archive is fully uploaded.
Well. Our intro didn't place amongst the three best, which was expected from me after seeing what we had to compete against. Too bad.
The demo compo wasn't as good as the intro compo according to me. Ok. Nice demos but not too originally. Razor1911 did a comeback after some years of just bringing the leeching guys at dreamhack warez to drewl on. ;) Some other demos were good as well. I recommend that you look at the three best, those are worth downloading.
The accelerated demo compo was good. Not as cool contribs as at the Assembly '99 but cool nevertheless. The moose brothers did a cool and funny demo which won. Congrats to them. Well. WiLD compo was a bit boring sometimes. Strange guys driving strange cars in Borlänge wasn't so fun to watch. My brother and his friends competed with a musicvideo. They called them selves B-Boys and they did a rewrite of a song of a famous (swedish) artist. They didn't place either.
So. We didn't win anything at the dreamhack. Hopefully some guys noticed our talent (hehe) and I can only say watch out, we will get better!
The future ended...
The dreamhack ended. I slept. We didn't win. The network didn't work for the poor leechers. It was too warm. It was too cold. Long waiting times. Delays. Complaints complaints complaints... Well... after all I really did have a great time at this year's dreamhack and I think that it will be even better next year. So I really hope we will see you readers at the next dreamhack, dreamhack2k...
Bye bye future world... I'll see you at the party!