Story of The Lost Souls

Written by Kezoomer

The Story Is True

(The names of the members in TLS have changed over the time, so for your convenience, all names were changed to what they are NOW.)

In the beginning...

It all really started in the glorious days of 286s and 386s. A few weird characters from a really small town in Norway called Lundamo joined forces in their main interest, namely computers. Games were the main interest, of course, but also Pascal programming and such. Some years passed, and cracker "intros" became more and more regular, and the so-called scene on the PC was beginning to shape up. Around 89/90, three members had formed a group with no name. After some thinking and arguments, the name was decided as The Lost Souls. Our souls were lost to the computer. We were caught in its vicious grip. Also, the name was inspired by such groups as THG and TDT, where we wanted the abbreviation to sound cool as well.

For a long time, TLS was nothing more than a group of fellows who did cool things and stuck together. I have no idea when MTB joined in as a member, but this member thing was quite undefined at the time.

After a while of general computer nerdity, things began to be more scene oriented. Kezoomer got his first Scream Tracker, and started to track some shit, so did Kulde and Rex RawHead. RawHead bought a copy of the excellent ModEdit and tracked some tunes, but all of a sudden he decided to use his computer talents for making cool pictures and 3d scenes.

It's rolling...

The first party was arranged in Melhus, and at the time, it was basically a so-called copy-party. TLS was there, and we discovered an extremely cool 4-player game called TANKKK, which we played most of the time. When we found out there actually was going to be a demo/intro compo, we sat down, making some music, coding some awful shit in Pascal, resulting in a terrible "demo" called "Bad"... Unfortunately we were unable to find a player working with Pascal, so the demo was never finished, thank God.

As time went by, we realized that we all needed better programming skills, and started fondling around with Pascal, only to discover that it was very hard to get anything fast enough to be cool. As a god's response to our prayers, a fellow who called himself "sniper" or something was introduced to the gang, because he was also programming some stuff in Pascal, and had made some stunning shadebobs... :) He joined TLS, and we all decided his name to be "CyberFish". He didn't like it too much, but after a while he got familiar with the TLS way of thinking too.

We started on a project to make our first real intro/demo/whatever, and it was going to be Pascal spaghetti frenzy going on for a long time. When we presented the intro at another lousy melhus-party, it contained a starfield, 3d bopping bars, some logos and a writer... WOW! It won and we got ourselves a nice old 8086 with a monochrome monitor to play with... er... no... we disintegrated it rather than playing with it. But it was great fun! The monitor was used later in the TG96 WILD! competition.

It's real!

TLS was starting to become what most of us wanted. A demo group. The only one to code, however, was Cyberfish, and as he finally learned some good Assembler, we were definitively on a good roll. The next great achievement was the intro "Synthetic" with our first 3d-showoffs. It was not a great work, but we took it to an early Tonstadparty in 1994, winning 500 bucks.

At this point, Kezoomer had found the ST3 to be his favourite tracker, and started to be quite a good musician, RawHead was becoming a very good 3dgfxer, and Cyberfish started to get the hang of good asm programming. We had our own BBS, maintained by MTB called Sorcerer BBS using the BBBS system. We were really beginning to get a grip on this "Scene" thing. The next big goal was The Gathering '96. Remember that at this point, TLS had been around for 5-6 years, and we were no newbies.

The Gathering '96

The work pre-gathering was long and intense... We decided that what we lacked in skill, we would make up for in nice design and smooth transitions... Well, it kinda worked. :) The demo Mind Over Matter was submitted at TG96, and ended up 9th or something, which was not bad at all, for being the first _serious_ demo ever made. We also contributed to the fastintro compo, and received 3rd place, winning 3000 NOK or something. We received two shitty 14.4 modems... (They're for sale by the way... :)) The Gathering was a great experience over all. But the greatest experience was our WILD! contribution.

The WILD! contribution was absolutely crazy. As we left for the partyplace, we stacked our cars full of old monitors and a large, heavy club. Music was played, we ritually entered the stage with the monitors. Club held high... BLAM, again and again... We really mashed those monitors, and came 5th!!!

Flying Higher

The Lost Souls Development Group had been formed the past year. In this team you find one coder (Cyberfish), one musician (Kezoomer), and one graphician (Rex RawHead). These are the illustrious three, living for and on the scene. After The Gathering '96, all the development group members developed their skills, becoming better coders, musicians and gfx'ians.

Once again there was arranged a Tonstad party, in which we decided to make a demo for the democompo. It was not a very great demo, but it earned us some good cash... :) Kezoomer also won the music compo. Read more about the productions on the production pages.

TG'97

Thanks to that goddamn school our one and only coder was not able to finish the grand demo project of ours for TG97 (I'd love to tell you more about it, but it's an industrial secret! :)) So, sadly, the only thing he was able to pull through was a tiny 4k intro called pGp, which only reached 7th place in the compos.

We did, however, have a really great wild contribution this year, including a chainsaw, a grand microsoft logo and some other texts written on polystyrene boards we could bang our heads through, all of that accompanied by some really aggressive Pantera music.

It failed to reach the top...

More things failed for TLS at TG'97, most of all in the music competition. Kezoomer was in a terrible rush against the clock, and all of a sudden, he just had to deliver some shit that was not very good. It reached the finals, oh yes, as one of the 28 songs to be selected from over 200 contributions. But sadly, it failed to reach nothing more that last place in the finals. Also some reviewer in DemoNews slaughtered the song. Anyway, the song is released and is available under the productions pages. Next TG will hopefully be a little bit better... :)

1998 - The Year of The Lost Souls

From may 1997 to march 1998 The Lost Souls were the hardest working group in the country. We had decided to release a demo of which we could be proud, and that required some hard work. Unfortunately Kezoomer had to enter the army for a year from July 1998 and had some hard times keeping up to pace with the rest of the group and the entire scene.

We had decided to make it a demo with a fast pace and awesome design, putting a lot of consideration into camera angles, color ranges and making it fit the music. The final result was awesome, and after showing the demo to a few scene devotees at TG98 the reactions were very good, and some considered this to be the best Norwegian demo ever made. Expectations were high before the demo compo. Sadly, we were victims to one organizers sabotage, and the illustrious demo "II" only ended up in a disappointing 5th place.

Kezoomer also entered in the multichannel compo with the tune "The Thin Line", and aquired a decent 8th place after being once again selected as one of the finalists. The number of entries in the music compos are ridiculously high.

TLS actually won one compo at TG98, the fast music compo. Kezoomer got some help from the infamous Caramel and entered the tune "Fast Fisk" and won!

- Kezoomer / The Lost Souls