Breakpoint 2007 report (By Sobec)
Hi there. I just recovered from the demoscene-event of the year. Don't get me wrong here, I am not complaining! But all in one it was pretty exhausting - building Breakpoint, making Breakpoint and leaving Breakpoint with an infected left leg (a bin for electric current fell against my shinbone during buildup leaving a pretty big wound behind) was a bit more straining than usual....
This year, I was shiftorga in the info-team, thus my trip to Breakpoint started monday before the party. Docd picked me up and the plan was that we'd drive to Hamburg in the evening with one car (carrying equipment, bringing me to Cyraxx's place) and one motorbike (carrying Docd and Sushi - not the seafood, but the organizer!). Somehow, Docd's bike wasn't in the right mood to carry anything at all due to a discharged battery, so we had to change the plan: Docd's wife brought me and our equipment to Hamburg while Docd and Sushi went by train to go to Acyrd's place.
On thursday morning, Ace'r'us arrived at Cyraxx's place with one of the rented vans. After breakfast, we packed our gear, collected additional equipment from Innovalan for the party and headed straight towards Bingen. We arrived at 9 pm, unloaded the van, met the other orgas and had something to eat (pizza-wave \o/). After that, it was time to build your home for easter - and so we did. Setting up Breakpoint this year went pretty smooth, all the teams improved their mode of operation, sometimes we even had a pretty good advance in the buildup timetable. A big highlight during installation was the bbq on wednesday evening - Scamp got some real nice herbage and garlic steaks. We had some beer and some good laughs, now as I said, it was a really nice highlight.
Moving on to thursday evening - the first sceners arrived. Nobody but the organizers was allowed in the hall until 11 pm - and we had the strict rule: no drunken people and no alcohol in the hall until friday 10 am. All who arrived followed that rule pretty well except for one Finnish guy who apparently had too much vodka, so we had to put him to sleep in our alleyway (where he destroyed some of our decoration though...).
Friday - time for party! At arround 1 pm it was time to throw out all people - the last organizer meeting took place with Scamp briefing security matters and also distributing the last things to be done. Afterwards, people paid entrance and we started our journey through time and space. We even had some cool fun competitions this year thanks to Netpoet (for example: Vista speech coding compo, it was about dictating some lines of given text to the vista speech engine, it was quite funny, "delete that!" :)) The first concert of the party was the BASS gig on Friday evening. Although I had an info shift at this time, I was able to enjoy it in the infotent (thanks to the additional beamer and p.a.), kiss the drummer! :)) BASS really improved, hope to see them performing again next year. The 2nd big live act was Press play on tape on saturday evening. I saw them at their very first gig back at The Party 1999 in denmark and HELL, they really improved bigtime. They played for about 2 hours and I really loved it, so did the crowd. What a big entertainment!
Now for the compos. Since I was busy most of the time, I wasn't able to watch this many compos, but I actually had the time for 6 compos to watch on the bigscreen. i really liked the 96k game compo, won by Archee with "sumotori dreams" (and the fact that it was replayed LIVE by Jeenio and some other guy at the afterparty), the audience had a real good laugh - grab this one and see for yourself! PC4k was pretty nice too, won by Alcatraz with "sprite-o-mat", Be sure to also watch Metalvotze and Mercury's release "unbekannte spezies bei ihrem paarungsritual" - a really nice and colorful one! Too bad TBL didn't compete in the Amiga demo competiton thus clearing the way for Madwizards' really nice demo "senzala" - Mawi finally won the Amiga demo competition! :) But now for the killer of the party: PC demo competiton, really nice entries here too. For example "noumenon" by Andromeda or "lucy in the sky with deitis" by Synethetics. Be sure to grab those releases (ranked 2nd and 3rd). The last entry to be shown was fr-041: debris. Ok. A demo in less than 180kb, it almost took away my breath while watching this on the bigscreen. When the demo was over, ppl stood up to applaud Farbrausch (almost the same feeling back when fr-08 was released). A real MUST-SEE!
Nice releases in almost every competiton, a large amount of high quality stuff - thanks everyone who took part in the competitons!
Another great thing was the new location for the seminars this year - the newly builded mensa, 150 metres away from the partyplace and creating space for 400 viewers.
On monday morning after the demoshow we had quite a party in the infotent - Ronny and Yoda provided the crowd with real kickass DJ sets and the party lasted until 8am! Some people even got their hair cut :))
Breakpoint 2007 was a real kickass party!
THANKS FOR PARTY - TO ALL VISITORS AND ORGANISERS OF Breakpoint 2007 - DEMOSCENE THROUGH TIME AND SPACE - HOPE TO SEE YOU ALL AGAIN NEXT YEAR!
Personal greetings (in no special order): - scamp, bitbreaker, las, zehbra, carp, schommer, cyraxx fashion, pest, ragnarok, sinep, hypo, tinka, allie, charlie, yoda, zolo, ryg, chaos, wayfinder, fieserwolf, shamada, syntax, abductee, sir garbagetruck, formica, styx, sierra, raven, pro, cosmic, naitandu, dipswitch, eha, netpoet, sirrah, ddeml, lunatic, paralax, coma, nufan, phenomenon, bombe, blockbuster, mbb, dfox, scoup, docd, sushi, shifter, gizmo, acryd, faith, mouldycat, 2b, charlie, groepaz, jk, cobalt, bero, dalezy, manx, t$, paniq, red, scythoior, sungam, aeg, verschdl, yaka, ace'r'us, jenny and to all i forgot!
General greetings: ALL ORGANISERS AND VISITORS OF BP 2007!
Sobec