A Tale Of Two Scenes

Written by Hamster

I remember back when the Commodore 64 scene was in full swing. I would hungrily await my 300 baud modem to finish downloading the latest release from Triad, Fairlight, or another group. Upon running the program, I was (usually) treated to some sort of nifty intro put together by the group to package with their release. Soon, the major groups even began to code and release their very own full fledged demos. Most groups, in addition to crackers and suppliers, had people whose sole purpose was to code cracktros or demos.

Today, however, the situation is much different. Slowly the two scenes grew apart, and split off into separate, individual scenes (they even moved to different IRC networks - IRCNet and EFnet). Warez releases (up until most recently) stopped containing any cracktros or demos. And many people in the demoscene today tend to look down upon the warez scene as a 'lesser,' totally unrelated group. They think that the warez scene exists solely to pump out releases, not caring about traditional demoscene values such as friendship or creativity.

While I do not deny that the warez scene does have its faults, I believe that there are some within the warez scene which are interested in resparking the close relationship once shared between the warez and demo scenes. Recent .nfo files have even put out the call for demo coders who might be interested to contact certain groups. One should remember that the two groups are, in fact, very closesly related, having grown out of the Commodore and Atari scenes of the 80s. And those who claim that the warez scene does not share the same kind of values as the demoscene need only talk to someone who has spent any time as a part of a group or a member of the warez scene in general to find out that these sorts of attitudes are most prevalent.

I look forward to the day (perhaps not that far off in the future) when the demo and warez scenes will once again work together to make interesting demo productions. I am also interested in what the demoscene thinks about this topic. I would urge those of you reading this to tell me what you think or maybe even write some sort of article on this topic for the next issue of Hugi.

- [HamsTeR]