Hoax

By Adok/Hugi

Hoax was one of the first diskmags that were released on PC. It issued in 1992-1995. It was made by the Finnish group Epical and its main editor was Kapsu. Most of the issues were downloaded from scene.org about 500 times. Hoax works fine on modern PCs even without DOSBox.

Hoax #1

In August 1992 Hoax #1 could be read the first time. It started with an intro featuring rotating vectorgraphics. Inside the magazine, the menu was displayed on the left and the text of the currently selected article on the right (36 characters per line). The contents were news, articles about various groups, charts (demos, groups, Finnish groups, BBS's, films; 20 voters), Assembly party report, a list of Finnish groups, demo reviews, jokes, an article about how to deal with lamers, a fictional letter of a lamer and some regular columns. The code was done by FCS, the graphics by Kapsu and the music by Blizzard.

Hoax #2

Hoax #2 (November 1992) looked like #1, except that it had worse fonts, which made it hard to read. It had the same columns, and the same people were responsible for code, music and graphics. There was only one rather long article. It was called "Comparing the PC demo scene with the Amiga demo scene" and it was written by Gore of Future Crew. The PC scene was still very young back then, and Gore wrote that it was obvious that it still had to learn a lot from the six-year-old Amiga scene. For example, the PC scene had not had its own demoparties yet. But demoparties played a big role on the Amiga scene. Amiga demos were also much better than PC demos, and Gore wrote it was a pity that many PC demo makers hadn't even seen any Amiga demos.

The charts had the same categories as in the previous issue, except a new one, utils. The number of voters was also about the same. The group articles this time dealt with Digitech and Sonic PC.

Hoax #3

Three months after Hoax #2, in February 1993, Hoax #3 saw the light of the day. It started with an intro coded by Phantom featuring a sine scroller and a 3D starfield. The interface was new, menu and text viewer were now separated. Thus the width of a text-line could be vastly increased (64 characters per line). 54 voters had contributed to the charts, which featured the same categories as in #2. The group articles dealt with Electromotive Force (EMF), Extreme, Quip and The Square. There was a long message from Blizzard to Mr. H of Triton, which was basically a critical review of Fast Tracker II. There was no party report of The Party 1992 in Hoax #3, only a list of demos released there. There were two reviews, with Devastator of EMF and Purple Motion of Future Crew, and a rather long article about the political situation in South Africa (transition from apartheid to democracy). The two tunes featured in this issue were made by Groo of Virtual Dreams and by Blizzard. All in all it was a small but nice issue.

Hoax #4

Hoax #4 (from May 1993) started with an intro that culminated in a nice title picture by Hega. The music was made by Blizzard. Inside the mag the engine and graphics of Hoax #3 were re-used. The group articles dealt with Eterno, Onyx and Surprise!Productions. There was an interview with Firefly of S!P. Darkness contributed an article about what he disliked about the PC scene. There was a C64 scene report by Rune of Hoaxers. Haze wrote an article in which he stated that there were already too many diskmags in the PC scene. There were also articles about the history and the future of computers and about piracy in South Africa.

Hoax #5

Hoax #5 again was released more or less punctually in August 1993 although it was delayed a couple of days due to a harddisk crash. It featured a new interface coded by Feenix with better graphics done by Hega in a higher resolution (640x480 instead of 320x200). The songs were composed by Mikki and Blizzard. The charts featured more categories than before, the new categories were: coders, musicians and graphicians. Group articles were about Coders in Action and X-Pose. In one of the articles, Style of NMS, an Amiga scener, presented his opinion on the PC scene. He said that the PC scene was lagging two years behind the Amiga scene; except Future Crew, PC sceners had not realized yet that design was the most important thing in demos, and there were too many diskmags. But in two years from then the PC scene would take over the lead. That's basically the only interesting article in this issue of Hoax...

Hoax #6

Two years passed without a Hoax issue being released, then in August 1995 the mag that had been considered dead made a re-appearance. It featured an all-new interface with a two-column layout, coded by Mikki with (not so good) graphics by Kapsu and music by Mikki. The "Scene stuff" section is quite uninteresting, apart from the regular corners (adverts, messages and news) there were the stories of Epical and this issue of Hoax. The charts categories (35 voters) were groups, demos, intros, diskmags, musicdisks, coders, graphicians, musicians, BBS's, utilities and scene-related WWW pages. The more interesting articles in this issue were in the Interviews section. The interviews were conducted with Darkness of Imphobia and with Der Piipo of Orange. All in all, this final issue of Hoax was rather poor, just like the previous issue, and so it was probably a good idea to stop.

Adok/Hugi