Cheese

Cheese was a diskmag by the Dutch group The KIP Brigade, which dissolved after issue 1 and then was known as The Cheese Team. Most of the 13 issues were edited by Multiplex. All the issues except issue 4, which has somehow got lost, are available at scene.org. Most of the issues work fine with the latest DOSBox emulator, except issues 10 and 11, in which I'm unable to move the mouse cursor below the middle of the screen. The greater part of the issues has been downloaded 800 - 1000 times.

Cheese #1

Cheese #1 was released in February 1996. Like the other issues, it was a magazine with a lot of humour. It focused on news and rumours about the demoscene. The interface was cute, it had the buttons for music selection in the left part of the screen and the menu or the current article was displayed on the right. There was a live report of The Party 1995 in this issue, recorded on a palmtop. We learn that the idea behind the Cheese diskmag was born on the journey back from Denmark to Holland. Apart from this report and the already mentioned news and rumours, this first issue contained some messages.

The other issues (#2 - #13)

The other issues of Cheese continued the concept of the first issue, but now they also contained some real articles. Most of the articles were funny and about miscellaneous topics, like bungee jumping or Korean immigrants. But there were also some scene-related articles in some of the issues. The Cheese editors explicitely asked the readers not to write about the usual topics like "The scene is dead", which may be the reason why the contents differed so much from the average diskmag's contents.

The Cheese team tried to make the engine "user-unfriendly" and bad looking, but they didn't really succeed - Cheese got good feedback and good rating at the Hornet archive. In some of the issues the texts were deliberately a bit hard to read due to the background picture. In Cheese #6 the user-unfriendliness reached its climax: The bar with the buttons was moved from the left part of the screen to the center, and the text was displayed to the left and to the right of it (not two columns, contiguous!). This looked very funny.

All in all it was a nice, entertaining diskmag. The editors more or less managed to keep their promise to release the diskmag monthly, only some issues were delayed. Cheese #13 came out in July 1997 and was the last issue.

Adok/Hugi