Sunflower rocking da house

A Scene Journalism Prophet of Hugi


Gravity 1997 demo competition:
2nd place: Sunflower by Pulse

Gravity 1999 demo competition:
1st place: Wonder by Sunflower
2nd place: Zilog by Sunflower

Amazing that there are groups who make both the first and the section place in demo competitions. And especially demo competitions of parties which are not quite what one could call lamer assemblies. But who are Sunflower? And what do they have to do with Pulse's demo Sunflower?

Simple: Sunflower is Unreal's new group, founded a couple of months after he and the other Poles had suddenly left Pulse. He named it after the demo Sunflower because it had been his greatest success and he had really had a lot of work with it.

Contrary to what some sceners believe, Sunflower is not simply Pulse II. Only three Pulse members belong to Sunflower. Apart from Unreal, this is Camel and Statix. Visualize also used to be a member of Sunflower, a very important one in fact as he designed the graphics for Sunflower's two demos, but meanwhile, he has left. So who is the rest of the group? In one word, a very impressive crowd. In alphabetical order: Echo of Fudge, Frank of Orange, Made of Bomb, Mrock of Hellcore, Nero of Matrix, Saffron of The Black Lotus, Silver Eagle of Pygmy Projects, Slyde of Blasphemy, and Yoghurt of Poison.

Perhaps you have noticed that there are no musicians in Sunflower. That's because the philosophy of Sunflower is to make demos for, with or using musicians, be they real life or scene musicians. If you need somebody to produce a clip for your new song, simply contact Unreal. Two projects of this kind are already under development.

It may seem funny that Sunflower's debut demos were released at Gravity. In Shine #2, one could already read a long article in which Unreal said that he would never release anything at this Polish party again. As we know, he broke his promise, released 73 million seconds a year later at Gravity 1998 and was very disappointed that he just took the 4th place. But, as the master told the Hugi Staff, "later I realized it's not the PARTY that sucks, but people - and in this case it doesn't really matter where I show a demo. Besides, Gravity is a nice party in itself, especially that nowadays the partyplace is by a lake and it's really great to go there."

About the demos. Wonder is a 3d-accelerated demo based on OpenGL. Windows 98/NT and a Riva TNT2 or a 3dfx Voodoo card are absolutely mandatory to watch this piece of Unreal's code. If your PC doesn't fit these specs, you can try Mrock's Zilog. This one runs fine in plain DOS, without any 3d hardware. All you require is a vesa compatible video card, a fast cpu and 16mb of ram. And for both demos you need either a fast internet connection or a lot of sparetime, as you have to download 6mb or 2.5mb respectively.

Future projects? Unreal says: "We're planning things for tp9 maybe.. it'd be one demo and two intros if God lets us.."

Soon we will see. In the meantime goto one of Sunflower's two websites, either Antony's lovely site at opengl.org.pl or the elitist-styled one at tpolm.com. And be happy.

Adok/Hugi