When Razor 1911 became Fairlight

Andromeda & A Prophet of Life

The other day I, the prophet of scene journalism, met Andromeda on #pixel. A nice chat emerged, until I asked him with what group he was making the demo for Assembly. Perhaps Razor 1911? Via query, he whispered: "Nahh, Fairlight. :) Don't want to talk about it in #pixel, people will only stark asking stuff about Razor and FLT... I know, they've done that before when I've mentioned the names."

Poor Andro had to hide from his fans because he didn't want to tell the same story again and again! But that's exactly what we have diskmags for: to publish such information so that people like Andromeda just have to refer to a place where his fans can download the mag. So I offered him to write a little article based on four leading questions. In fact he answered them so comprehensively that this article does not consist of much more than quotes. *grin*

"Just some forewords, it's nice of you that you wanted to do a article about this since so many people have asked me just about these questions, and I won't explain it again, unless you're asking very kindly. ;)"

Just like Fairlight, Razor 1911 is an old group, well-known even among gamers, so I guess you've heard the name. After the split into the legal (demo) and illegal (cracking) scenes, Razor mainly focused on cracking games. Until the early 1990s, it also had a demo division which occasionally released its productions for various computer systems.

Andromeda writes, "The demo div was re-founded on the pc by Hetero, Graffik & Fireblade. I think that the main reason of the re-birth was that the wares guys wanted some neat cracktros, and of course also demos etc. The members were: Graffik, Andromeda, Smash, Pantaloon, Macaw, Case, Fireblade, Hetero, Beduin, Mithris, Krafton, and Cutepixel.

I had the idea to join the Razor 1911 demo division when I talked to Smash, a fellow scene musician whom I hadn't met on IRC for a long time. He told me he had joined Razor 1911, so I thought it would be cool to be in the same group as he. But since I was and still am in Noice I was thinking of concentrating 50% on both groups. But as the time got by, I got more and more involved in Razor and Razor turned out to be the group which I was most active for.

We only released one demo and a 64k intro and a few cracktros before we decided to put the pc demodiv to its death. That was because of internal problems within the group. Not really within the demo div, it was the leading of the warez div which was runned very lame. Loads of the old timers and friends of ours got kicked and as a result of that we decided to leave in February this year.

Obviously Fairlight had seen our stuff (the cracktros). So they asked some of the Razor demo div members to join. Then we asked them if we couldn't get the whole team in. And so it went along. Even Strider has showed his interest in the demo div and might start helping us out with some code, etc.

Fairlight demo div are: Pantaloon, Andromeda, Graffik, Fireblade, Musik, Smash, Illuminator, Oyise, and Case. Recently we released 2 'party prods'... just something we made for pure pleasure (no, we're not proud of those). The 2nd one was a small little intro with 278 groups greeted. And yes, the compo crew did play the whole intro during the compo - ZZzzz. ;)

Just recently we released a serious 64k intro at SE in Denmark, and it placed 1st. We're currently working on 4 productions.

Now we also have a music division in Fairlight. Fairlight Music will concentrate on releasing Music disks, so stay tuned for some nice releases.

Fairlight Music are: Andromeda, Azazel, Loxley, Keith303, Norfair, Smash, and Xerxes."

Andromeda & Adok