Performance 2001 demoparty report
(23/02/2001 - 25/02/2001)
After being on vacation for a week doing sports, it was yet again the time of Performance - a demoparty taking place in the city of Lohja, Finland.
The party was held in Lohja's high school whose main assembly hall was just the perfect room for about 102 computer places. The organizers had even thought of using the spare space for a rave corner. The first thing you would notice entering the hall is the cold temperature. In effect, the general temperature within the hall had been brought down to a mere +15C so to save on heating expenses during week-ends. As a result of this the scene area was a little cold at first, but on the other hand a non-sweaty demoparty is not such a bad thing after all. Besides, once everybody was in with their body heat and had booted their computers, temperature became very bearable and thus stopped being an issue.
Even if all the computer places weren't sold out, there were quite a lot of people inside nevertheless. Most of the sceners were from Finland and among these the vast majority were locals from the city of Lohja. The party itself started on Friday afternoon and KYDROX and I arrived in front of school building just as the doors were opening. There, we were greeted by Dosifei, the main organizer, who took us in with all other guests, after the now traditional "checkpoint" of bags checking. Now why would she think we would have any alcohol among our stuff? -)
As so often with demoparties, the schedule was pretty "dynamic". Eventually, all the competitions were moved up to Saturday and hence Friday evening was sacrificed to other things, which let latecomers a chance to set down too. Most people then basically fell back on the pretty speedy LAN network, while WAN bandwith was average, chatting on IRC and leeching stuff, but still others like myself were finishing their compo entries (KORONA and I were finishing shaven raven and we were at the time still missing KORPUT's logo too).
Of course not all the dudes were spending time solely with their computers, some were boozing outdoor, some were fencing with soft swords they had brought along with them, while others were "letting it go" raving, over by the neat discotheque area.
By Saturday afternoon, the deadline for all entries arrived. Some 100 entries in total were submitted and the MP3-compo was the most popular there, with about 30 pieces of music, even though only ten lucky ones were actually played to the crowd. The least popular compo in terms of number of submitted entries was the c64 competition with only three entries, two demos and a piece of music. Chronologically the competition started out with the ansi-compo (way cool), followed by pixels and raytrace competitions. All I can say is that the overall quality of those entries was pretty good, and all graphic artists ought to take a look at them, because they are imho worth at least a peek.
Later we saw some wild demos, five of them had been entered. The most remarkable and memorable wild has to be the real life show by Tero. Tero and some of his few friends presented us a human pyramid. It was so funny to look at the pain grining faces of those fellows at the base of the pyramid when Tero was loading more and more guys on their backs. Many swore afterwards never to do such a thing again: "Trust me - that really hurts!" After the MP3 competition, which again was tremendously fierce, came the most awaited ones, i.e.: the 64k intro and demo competitions. There were 6 intros and 9 demos, and the quality of them wasn't bad either, considering the number of attendees.
Sunday was the final day of Performance 2001. Before people deserted the building around noon, a kind of prize giving ceremony took place hastily. In fact there was nothing closely resembling to a prize ceremony, the results were only made public and the prize money was awarded to them. The only speech we got to hear was a speech made by the wild demo winner Tero. The speech was read from an used pizza plate. So apart from the prize ceremony and one or two incidents it was a nice party indeed.