15 issues ago...
...Hugi contained the following news and rumours:
"AMABLE - Rumours claim that someone who isn't member of this group suggested to rename Amable to 'Aimable', which means 'lovely' in French, because of a love affair a member of Amable is involved in."
"EXCEED - The leading Hungarian demogroup of 1998 was already declared almost dead by its organizer d-lee two months ago. They wanted to create a final demo called 'Berlin' and then part. Now it seems as if d-lee has changed his mind! He has recently accepted Picard, who also works for Rhyme and is one of the best 3D engine coders in this country, as a new member. Future will tell us what this new strength will result in." Among other things, it resulted in Spot, an Assembly-winning demo bearing resemblance to Pixar-style animated movies.
"FLEUR (Diskmag) - Issue 3 will be released only a few days after this Hugi issue. The new main editor is d-lee of Exceed and Haujobb. Szum is no longer part of the staff." This was the last issue of Fleur. Szum was also the main editor of Dragon, a mag in Polish language. He planned to create an English edition called Dragon International, but the project never materialized. By the way: One of the staff members of Dragon International went by the nickname "Mohammed Napolčon"...
"IMAGE (Germany) - opened their new web-site (...) Moses joined as a PC coder. He is also a member of Pyorrhoea. The fourth issue of the German-language diskmag 'Image', featuring a new interface and 735 kbyte of articles, was released on April 25th." Image was a mag with a pretty steep career: While the two first issues were considered quite lame, it ended up as a respected German-language diskmag (above average). This is partly due to the fact that after the Cream diskmag stopped issuing, its main editor Coctail forwarded most of the articles he had received for the next Cream issue to the main editor of Image for use in the Image magazine. (The others were sent to me for Hugi, but they did not make much difference as Hugi was already a high-quality magazine anyway.)
"INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS - Love at the first glance. Is another scenish wedding going to take place? This time it is a German scener and a Hungarian sceneress who seem to have found out that they perfectly fit together." Maybe you've already guessed it: The German scener was a member of Amable. His handle was Velvet. The Hungarian sceness was called Manka.
"KOLOR - Franky joined. The first result of this new member is 'void 3', the winner 4k-intro of Mekka & Symposium 2k-1, for which he did the sound code. However, he did not stay in Kolor for long. Storm of Fridge claims Franky got kicked out. In fact Franky left Kolor on his own because Storm had joined it. The two of them have a very bad relationship. After Franky's resign, the remaining members are Black Axe, Fontex, Kritix, Lord Chaos, Noize, Raytrayza, Shiva, Siriuz, Storm, and Trojan." Even though Franky has been running a web-development company for some years and keeps saying he has no time for demoscene affairs, the Austrian coder keeps releasing 4k intros occasionally. He is a member of Farbrausch these days, and one of his latest works is "fr-040", which has been released at Breakpoint 2004.
"MELCOM (Musician) - is working on his music disk 'Dark Troopers', which is 85% finished at the moment." Dark Troopers eventually became a great hit. It was spread via CD.
"MERGE - Three Polish-language diskmags (Miracle, Crush, and Acid) joined forces. The new zine will be called 'Merge' and will probably be released in July. By the way, the editor Gardner is currently member of the groups Anakata, Storm Riders, Merge, Utopia Staff, and A.D.E.T. Quite a busy man, huh?"
"NEXTEMPIRE - will be present at Asm'99 and release a 64k-intro. Still more asm coders, graphicians, musicians, spreaders, and a webhost are looked for. If you are interested in joining, leave a mail (...) The groups claims that it will pay all travel costs to demoparties for their members and create a free email address (...) for them." Nextempire and its leader Kozmik were quite controversial; some people even claimed that Nextempire was "the first cult of the demoscene" due to some strict rules (see the article in Hugi 21 written by Harry Sonford aka Morph of Elenziah). Not long ago Kozmik has officially declared that he has left the demoscene. I'd like to thank Kozmik for his support for the Hugi Magazine - he has encouraged quite a lot of talented people to contribute to our mag.
"NOICE - FloOd opened his art gallery which contains both analog and digital art of his." Johan Lund aka FloOd, who has also contributed graphics and a flash intro to Hugi, was featured in a book about digital art released about two years ago; Seven published a review of it in some issue of the Pain diskmag.
"PROMETHEUS TRUECOLOR (Graphics Library) - OpenPTC 1.0 was released. Also, Dan Brown released version 1.1 of his image handling library for PTC, Titan." This was the beginning of a new era of Gaffer's PTC, which nowadays is probably one of the most popular graphic libraries used for demos. Another revolutionary step that happened later was the release of TinyPTC.
"REPLAY - released Shine #4 and plan to finish Shine #5 in June. This time it will include serious charts and articles again. Also new: demos and intros made for TG99." Nine issues of Shine saw the light of the day. The quality was variable.
"RIOT - http://www.scene.at was opened. It is to host pages that are related to any computer-scene in Austria. At the moment we can find Riot's web-site, some stuff about hacking and a link to the Austrian Quake community homepage there. Franky left for Kolor." The scene.at website still exists. It's primarily a collection of links. But recently new signs of life have appeared on this site. Now there is also a forum, and there are announcements of Austrian scene meetings, which now take place far more often than in the past.