Replay - The Most Active Group Around?

Adok/Hugi

Over night, a new star has been born. After more than a year of existance, the Swedish-based group Replay has suddenly become one of the most discussed democrews on PC. Perhaps this is because of their creative style, their strange yet interesting attempts at demo design. Or because of the enormous productivity of the group: With the exception of Takeover and Mekka, no party of importance has been held this year without a new Replay release. Only this year, ten demos and intros have been released by the guys around Baloo and Roger, more than any comparable group, making up a third of the total number of Replay's productions so far. Is Replay the most active demo crew around?

It all started in Autumn 1997 when Baloo and Goofy, who is now known as Roger, founded Replay. Baloo had just started coding at that point in time. Before that, he had been a mailswapper. Soon Coin joined as a coder, followed by Balrog (music), Piglet (code) and Whisker (code), who entered the group in October.

The first production of Replay was an intro called "Shaaaake". If you wonder why you have never heard about it, be told that it has never been released. The legend has it that the organizers of the party for which it was done, Compusphere 9, tried to run the intro on an Amiga. Obviously it did not quite work.

The next project was an intro for The Party 1997 called "Magaman0". Baloo and Goofy made it the day before the event. Balrog composed the chiptune.

Two demos followed, "Samba" and "Kosmonauts". Probably because of the bad experiences Replay had made with party organizers, they did not compete at any party. However, the next demos did: "Stereo", made for Pool Position '98, and "Mono", presented to the audience at Icing '98. The latter got the 6th place - quite okay for the beginning.

A demo and a dentro were released at Remedy '98, both placed 4th. A slight improvement. Also a demo for Yodel Conference 10 was made. Its name was Automobile. Whisker, however, forgot to release it.

So far nothing spectacular had happened. But at Evoke '98 Replay had its first success with the stylish demo "Baker Selection". It got the 3rd place, and the group won a prize. It has not been sent over to Sweden yet, though. At the time of writing Climax of Amable is still keeping it for the Replay guys.

After that, Leatherboy (code) and Optic (music, gfx, from Norway) joined in, completing the team that is Replay today. With these new forces an invitation intro for Composhere 10 was created. At the party itself, Replay released a demo (Park Jinsung), an intro (E K G), a dentro (Sputnik) and their one and only Amiga demo "Sub". Two 1st places and and two 2nd places went to the team.

The next creation was the demo "M-Plus", 4th at Jumper '98. Interestingly enough, the group Halcyon decided to name their now famous intro that was released some weeks afterwards "H-plus".

The last production of 1998 was the demo "Manual materia". It got only 11th at The Party 8. This year's Replay releases include the 64k intro "Flim" (3rd at Contest '99) and the "Viagra Flim Remix" (1st at Midwinter '99), the demos "Tislaaja" (9th at Elevator '99) and "IZ-US" (5th at Hype '99), the 64k intro "Catch 22" and the demo "In the Mix" from The Gathering (4th and 6th place respectively), the Icing '99 releases "Mono" (demo, 6th), "Roger Superstar" (demo, 4th), and Clinique (intro, 2nd), and finally the invitation intro for the upcoming Norwegian party Distance '99.

Replay's productions may not be optimal regarding the technical side. What makes them interesting is the willing and courage to experiment with the design. As you can notice in their late productions, Replay try to develop a style of their own, just like TPOLM and Orange did in the past. Typical for Replay productions is minimalistic effects and short, hard to read texts.

For instance, in the Distance '99 invitation you are first in the "main menu", a corner of a small room. There are flat objects which start rotating when you move the mouse cursor over them and stop when you move it somewhere else. Clicking at one of these items, you make the whole room rotate, and after that, just the most basic information on the event is displayed. The right mouse button makes the room rotate again to the menu. During this a tune by Sulphur of Orange is played.

To learn more about the personalities behind these creations, we asked the Replay members to write a few words about themselves. Four of them accepted.

Baloo

I'm one of the two persons who founded Replay. I got involved in the demoscene in 1994-1995. In my sparetime I'm a cowboy, and I pixel, code and design in Replay. In fact I have not been a coder for a long time. I started coding C about one and a half year ago. Before that, I had only coded Basic at school.

My scene career started in another group founded by myself and Goofy, Taste. In those days of 1995-1996, I only mailswapped, but later on, when I and Goofy joined Nail, I started doing some pixel gfx. After some months in Nail, we all merged with another group and founded Loop. I left this crew in spring '97 and joined Blocc.

In autumn 1997, I founded Replay together with Goofy. I'll now graduate from school in June and am going to be a Swedish-rodeo champion.

Roger

Formerly known as Goofy/Replay, and well, one of the founders of Replay. Baloo was the other one.

My scene career started around 1994-1995 on my Amiga 500. I got hands on a couple of demos from The Party 1993. Hmm, if I remember exactly, it was Nine Fingers by Spaceballs and Arte by NoooN. I thought that these pieces of art were awesome and started copying demos like hell. Soon my diskboxes were overfilled with demos, intros and diskmags, and then I started swapping some disks with some people around the globe. Well, time went by, and I still swapped demos. I was, together with Baloo, in some more or less lame groups started by ourselves. We changed our handles every week, and well, we did nothing.

I got my first PC around February 1995 and started swapping on PC as well. I got in touch with this contax.nfo file that was spread during that time, and things went on... swapping, faking stamps, getting crashed disks, etc., etc.

I used this PC until May 1998, when I finally bought myself a new PC, a P233 MMX with some fancy stuff, and well, now I was able to run Windows 98. I started trying to do some strange things with that Photoshop proggy, and well, I'm still developing my skills. Oh, and in between, I tried to do some pixel stuff, but hell, I'm too lazy.

I stopped swapping in early 1997, and well, I was in group called, uh, Loop... Before that I was in the group Taste, which had never released anything. Well, nothing more about scene stuff now.

I was born in the year 1980 by my mom, and well, I was a fast kid. Three weeks before planned I popped out.

At the age of 5 I wanted to be a policeman.

At the age of 10 I wanted to be an astronaut.

At the age of 15 I wanted to be a rockstar.

At the age of 19 I want a job.

I have just finished my 12th year in school, and I'm goddamn tired of that fucking institute. I need a job so I can buy some more fashionable clothes and more CD records and a stereo amplifier and some stuff. Also I want to travel a bit around the world.

Future plans for me are like, well, uhm, well, I will try not to get engaged until I'm 30-ish, then I might plan to plant my seeds in a decent lifeform, so there will be Roger juniors for you guys when I'm old enough.

What about the present time? Well, I'm looking for a job, and I'm in the two groups Replay and Amable.

Whisker

This is Whisker, Whisker is this.

My first encounter with a computer was at the age of six. It was a C64, and no serious use came to life, except playing the coolest games ever made on any platform. Actually I tried to code a bit at the age of eight or nine on the same machine, but all I knew was: '10 print "hello"; 20 goto 10'. However, I think that we all had fun with that first program.

When I was nine years old, I found out that there was another computer in the world... the Amiga. As far as I remember I got one for myself at the age of eleven and started coding AMOS together with Piglet.

One day we stopped being creative. Instead of this we watched some demos and got stunned by the things people did. We thought, "We will never be able to do anything like that, that fast, nice, and good-looking." And I think we've never achieved that.

Then, perhaps at the age of thirteen, don't know really... I started coding Asm, and all I did with it was demo-alike thingies, since all Asm reference I had was my brother and a demo school by Septic. The latter I received from a nice fellow called Ant when I requested an Assembler and demo tutorial on a BBS.

So I tried to code some nice stuff on the beautiful Amiga 500, but frankly, I have never made any as nice effects as I would have liked to make.

I was fourteen or fifteen when Piglet decided to buy a PC. I really disliked the idea since the Amiga was the ultimate computer, but he still did it with no respect for me... so he started coding on that too, first some Asm, then some Pascal, some more Asm, and finally some C... And all along I tried to do the same at his place, but back home I coded on my Amiga.

Now our first demoparty visit occurs. It was Hype '97 in the black early days of 1997 (month: February), and for fun we had made a very low class demo called PW-BANAN where PW stands for Piglet-Whisker inc. and BANAN is the Swedish word for banana. The only things it contained was some VGA pics, a blur effect and two animations, all coded in Assembler... So now we got taste of what it was like at a demoparty, and the scene had never felt so real for us before as now.

Back home we decided to code C for a while. So we did and produced some nice effects. We came in contact with two fellows with which we formed a group called Flushed Design. At a party we visited (I think it was my fourth) called Pool-Position 1997 we released a nice little demo called Phase with some 2d effects and some flat-shaded and single-coloured 3d objects.

Soon we also got to know Baloo, Goofy and Balrog. Some months after this nice party we (me and Piglet) joined Replay, which Baloo and Goofy had started just some time before. This was when the creative Replay was born, and you all can watch us grow up to make nice demos ever since...

At the moment I'm a 16-year-old kid from Gothenburg, Sweden. I mainly code C++ and asm on PC, but from time to time I also try to code something on Amiga.

In my spare time I try to mix different animals to bread some really crazy species.

L-Boy

Hi. My name is Daniel Laneby. I'm 19 years old and live near the west coast of Sweden. Studying nature-science. Should have been the last year now, but due to very bad results I have to go another year. I blame the scene, alcohol and females.

I have been interested in computers for about ten years now. When I had my old A500 I just played games. I did have a few demos, and I especially remember 'State of the art' and some musicdisks by Kaktus & Mahoghny. Don't know where that stuff came from. I did not have a modem or friends being involved in the scene. Mail me if you miss your 'State of the art'-copy.

I feel like I missed the old C64-time. And why? I was like seven years old when me and my father went to the store to buy a C64, but when the VERY incompetent little lady in the store couldn't get 'Paperboy' to work properly, I bought a NES8 instead!! She is now on the top of my black-list...

I have been interested in the scene for about four years. Watching a lot of demos on my A1200, without being active. Got all my stuff from local BBSes. I attended some local demoparties in 1996 and watched demos by local groups such as Orca, Keso, and Blocc. I was a big fan of them and decided to start trying to code a bit on my PC. Nowadays I know like about all members of those groups in real life. (Hi Flex, Poison, Baloo, Jus, Alex, Tanic, Icarus, DJ Cat, Patrik,...)

Before that I spent my time coding BBS-doors and made some attempts to write games on my A500 using AMOS and C.

I owned an A500, an A600, three A1200, a P75 and am now using my father's P2/400.

I started to release a lot of crappy demos and 64k-intros in 1997. The quality was very bad, and we used some fake handles and a lot of ripped code (hi to the author of newvox.cpp, I owe you something like $200). But we managed to earn a lot of money, so we continued...

In 1997 (I think) me and Marauder formed a group called Oblivion. Together with Glazer, Bionic and Greco we released a crappy demo (Mindsiege), ended up at the 2nd place at Compusphere 8, and made the winning intro at Compusphere 9 (Embraced). Due to some trouble inside the group I started looking for new boys.

Then in the summer of 1998 I became a very good friend to all Replay-members, so I left Oblivion and joined forces with (R)eplay. Much more fun!

Since then I have been involved in a few Replay-releases, and will be for at least another year or so. I don't live in the same city as the other active Replay-kids, so that's the reason why I'm not involved in all releases. And I am really not that interested in the scene anymore as I used to be. I rather spend time with my girlfriend, "normal" friends, sleeping, or boozing. And maybe smoking something funny...

That's the story of L-Boy.

I say hello to Baloo, Whisker, gfy, Flex, Poison, Alex, Icarus, Yitzhaq, Kravitz, TMK, Namnam, Loonie, Erek, Tanic, J-boy, TMX, Joppz, Axl, Wiz, Kutepixel, Bionic, Airhead, Piglet, Coin, Glazer, Greco, Marauder, INF, Jus...

And to all those people who are reading HUGI for sure: Pernilla (love you!), Henriette, Lise-Lott, Paulina, Regina, Hilda, Karin, Caroline, Anders, Martin,...

And...?

Replay also have their own diskmag, "Shine". The peak of its popularity was in 1997 when the PC demo scene lacked decent magazines. Nowadays Shine is, like all Replay productions, mainly known for its design. Since the staff does not get enough support, they decided to try to experiment with Shine instead of trying to create a serious magazine. A review of the latest issue is included in Hugi #15.

What about the future? Will Replay stay as active in the scene as they are? Or will university, their jobs and the manifold pleasures of the real life also occupy them? At least at the time of writing several more demos, dentros and 64k intros for various local and international parties were planned. Let's hope the best.

To conclude this article, let's let Roger speak again:

More info can be found at Replay's homepage: http://shine.scene.org/replay/

(After this article, several more releases followed. The last release of Replay was the 64k intro "Richard come home", 5th at Underscore 2001. Get all releases at pouet.net.)

- aimabledok^hugi