EliteGroup's Blitzkrieg
A War Watching Prophet of Hugi
Holland was the first to be attacked. In April 1999. R12. In the same
month came Northern Germany. R0. Other areas of Germany and Denmark were
the next targets where they placed their clear message: "World
domination. 29. 12. 1999. EliteGroup. We are very good."
On December 29th, 1999, in a small town called Aars in Denmark, world domination became a matter of fact. Everyone was trembling with anxiety when the EliteGroup logo appeared and industrial music began to play. It continued like this for several minutes. The audience was taken aback, hooked, unable to turn their eyes away from what was happening in front of them. When the results appeared, Kasparov by EliteGroup was listed as #1. With more than 4000 points of difference to the second place.
The rest of the scene was flabbergasted when they heard how good this year's winning demo was, everybody who had a 3d accelerator downloaded the multimedial masterpiece that had succeeded at the world's largest demo party. A high percentage of the sceners was equally disappointed later on when they saw that the demo would not work on their PC because they just had lame Voodoo adaptors. The happy ones were mostly satisfied with the demo: "The 'EliteGroup' has proven that the demoscene is capable of doing demos ala the gameindustry", said Otis. On the other hand, there were also voices that reproached EliteGroup for lack of "artistic expression" (Byter of Blasphemy).
But even those people who were not able to watch the demo had an opinion on EliteGroup - even if they had never heard of it before, be it because they had not watched the scene attentively enough, or be it because, despite EliteGroup released two of their 'announcemos' in Holland and Denmark, they hadn't been recognized much outside Germany before their glorious success at TP9. The reason: EliteGroup's website.
"These guys are NAZI!" shouted Odin, French coder of gOds. Why such a grave accusition? Because apart from some craptalk about "discipline, authority and superiority", the curricula vitae of the individual EliteGroup members contained anti-French phrases. For example, EliteGroup's co-founder 'gott' writes: "I donated all the money to poor and homeless children and went to the Fremdenlegion to fight in the second world war. But all these fucking french people were ugly stupid frog eaters... One day the sea talked to me and I knew what I had to do: FIGHT AGAINST THE FROG EATERS whenever you can...." Another EliteGroup member, 'the united states of america', "founded the DAF-project [an abbreviation for 'Demo Against France'] to support the best country in the world and protect the scene from the escalating francenization." And 'der commander' says that he joined EliteGroup's world domination project in order to "punish the french" because they tested nuclear weapons near the island he was living on.
These curricula vitae are evidently fictional, and according to der Commander, the anti-"frog eater" ramblings are not to be taken seriously. All of this is part of EliteGroup's humour. Actually one could say that EliteGroup is in some way a pure joke group, except of its demos, which are serious.
Other people grasped this at once, and one of them, a Spanish scener who calls himself 'das übermaul', immediately founded an EliteGroup fanclub just because he was fond of their sense of humour.
Yet I personally think that this kind of humour is a bit ticklish because it can really be easily misunderstood and provoke reactions like Odin's.
Maybe Odin would not have acted that rashly had he known the real
identities of the EliteGroup members. They are all respected sceners, namely:
Azure, the once no.1 Amiga coder Chaos/Sanity (using the handle PoWa),
Crash/Polka Brothers (gott), doj/Cubic Team (Dr.
Detroit), Fiver (the united states of america), Frenetic/Cubic Team
(Code Hard), Ronny/Teklords (Herr Weltschaft), KB/Purge/TOM/Smash
Designs (The Artist formerly known as Doctor Roole), sir yoda (der
Commander), Submissive/Cubic Team (Domin8r), and The Spy.
Most of them are also a member of the Free Electric Band, for short FEB. FEB started out as a demogroup, but they released only one demo, Alto Knallo, which placed first at The Party 1996. Now they are a game development team working for VCC Entertainment. It is them who produced the late car racing game Killerloop for the Sony Playstation.
EliteGroup was founded short before the Scala 98b Party (see report in Hugi 12) because of disappointment at the "overall loss of quality in the scene". Their plan was to announce to win all major compos at The Party 9 and behave very arrogantly. This should make other sceners hate EliteGroup and struggle to do better demos in order to keep them from winning The Party. In other words, EliteGroup wanted to inspire more competition in the scene.
Did it work out? Not really, because EliteGroup finished only two productions in time: Kasparov and the wild demo Pawlov, which placed 2nd. "Because of partial lameness one of our coders did not complete the PC intro, and we decided not to take part in the amiga demo & intro compo, after the organizers changed the hardwarespecs of the compoamiga to a sucking PPC, which sucks. All these productions were already in a state which was very promising, read, they would have won, if they had been finished", says der Commander. The Java competition was deliberately ignored because the members of EliteGroup think that Java is not a decent demo platform.
Although they did not complete their mission, Herr Weltschaft hopes that other sceners have been encouraged to work hard on demos in order to make them as good as possible.
Lately some Elitegroup members were the subject of a lot of fury once again. At Ambience 2000 they took part in several competitions using the group name "farbrausch" - and won all of these. How? By filling in 24 unused votesheets they found at the party. This was even enough to win the demo competition although their entry was not shown on the bigscreen - in fact not even a working version of it exists.
EliteGroup/Farbrausch is, however, by far not the only group which does votefaking. Just read Curt Cool's article on The Party 9 for some other examples. That their votefaking at Ambience 2000 had this impact probably comes from the little number of people who took part in the voting. Nevertheless, of course, this is does not justify this practice. It is a very questionable way of winning a prize at a party.