I would love more outlets for creative coding, I feel like neocities is a bit like that. That said there isn't really a scene or real sense of community (AFAIK). I mean someone liked something I uploaded once, but I never interacted with them again.
Cohost had fun vibes like that as well, but I guess it's no longer with us. Same with Glitch, but admittedly I didn't use it in the last few years, but it was my go to option for hosting a snippet of unserious HTML. "HTML in the park" does seem like one fun IRL outlet for this kind of thing, I found out my city has one and I want to go to it.
Admittedly none of these were really demo scenes or places where creative coding was exclusively fostered, but creative coding and demo-like-scenes communities probably exist but are more likely some obscure discord server.
"The scene is dead" has become a meme by now. For example the "new talent" Meteoriks award is introduced with "For a scene that has been dead since 1999, our walking dead are pretty fresh".
It is well alive. Sure, we still see some of the same people from 1989, and the average age is certainly going up, but it absolutely doesn't mean we aren't seeing new blood. Styles change, technical achievement is usually seen in the sizecoding or "wild" competitions, while PC demos tend to be more cinematic and focused on art. We are seeing new things, like livecoding shaders and fantasy consoles. Of course, the Amigas and other oldschool platforms are still there, with new tricks being discovered year after year.
There are still regular demoparties. Revision, the successor to Breakpoint and Mekka Symposium is doing well year after year. With the addition of some online events like Lovebyte.
Things come and go, but there is no sign of the scene really being dead. Heck, we even seen older demosceners bring their children to the parties, with some of them already doing cool stuff.
That video's great because it breaks down how Psygnosis managed to get 12 layers of parallax scrolling at 50fps and 128 colors on-screen. I never really loved the game as much as (say) Blood Money, but it was an awesome accomplishment in the same way demoscene demos were!
Seems the modern corollary to the demoscene is TouchDesigner programming. I always thought it would be such a neat thing for demosceners to jump to TD and work with other forms of art like live dance and live music. The fact you can have body tracking, hand gesture recognition and also have it react to sound seems like the next step in demoscene stuff.
From my perspective these evolved into game jams. I feel like if you only count competitions for old, outdated platforms these won't be getting as many new comers as other platforms that are common place and easy to develop for. Hosting them purely via the internet made them more accessible.
The demo scene inspired me to keep my next‑gen terminal [0] tiny: it is under 5MB (Mac download was once 900 KB) and my aim is to get all downloads down to ~1MB. If demosceners can do it, regular indie devs really have no excuse.
This scene isn’t dead; we should just look beyond 3D glitter. See File Pilot [1] for another compact, clever example.
I wanted to say earlier when first reading this that I got like 15 minutes in without any explanation of what this scene was, and it felt like that might be a reason for a scene to die, if someone like me who got his first Commodore 64 in 1986 and has been alive for nearly half a century with interest in what this sounded like had never heard of it, outreach and publicity to new folks must not be great.
But Wikipedia says this is primarily a European thing, so I guess that's why.
The best period of my life as a programmer. I've never stopped feeling nostalgic for the demoscene of the 80s and 90s. When we used to fight between Amiguys and Atarists. The Amiguys always won, of course. In fact, there was no real point to flamewar about. They had almost everything. And us Atarists? Well... we had a 68000 at 8 MHz, a MIDI port, a budget several hundreds of $ less... and even more ingenuity to get the best out of our machines (hey, let's defend ourselves as best as we can). But when the despicable PC reared its ugly architecture, suddenly we were the best of friends.
I must also confess my sacrilege, Amiguy: a buddy gave me his Amiga 500. Shortly after, the floppy drive on my STe broke down. So I took apart the one from the Amiga and put it in my ST... I wasn't even sure it would work, but it did. Now you can beat me up... but calm down. It's not like the Amiga's drive was its strong point, was it? I couldn't have done that with the Copper and its friends, and sure I wish I could have!
Much love for the demo scene, where it all began for me, pulling all nighters as a teenager writing 68k assembler in asmone on the amiga.. phreaking calls to euro BBS, writing trainers and intro for games, scanning 1800 numbers for diverters/PBX systems to exploit, pulling all your best assembler graphics routines together for your crew's newest demo for release at all-weekend demo/LAN parties.. normal teenage activities, right?! :D
In all fairness, the conditions that saw the demo scene rising are so remote to be almost incomprehensible to the new generation.
"You see, when a cracking crew beat the protection of a new game, they would upload their hacked version to an elite BBS and repackaged it with a little intro and a trainer. They had to be very creative and skilled, often working directly in assembler, in order to achieve impressive imagery and chip music while still fitting on the same 1.4MB floppy."
Perhaps its the lack of appeal, in the past,
the idea that you could squeeze performance into
an old machine was cool, but the gap between
current hardware and "demoscene limits" feels like
artificially crippling: if you have 64GB of ram, the
appeal of 64KB demo is far less than if you have
a 64MB 486DX. It would be far more cooler, that instead
of ancient hardware and artifically limited PCs, they would run demoscene
on embedded stuff like Raspberry PI and modern microcontrollers,
that would align with current DIY trends instead of chasing retro clout.
I feel like the massive popularity of tiny fantasy consoles like pico-8 is a pretty good sign that at least the ethos of the demoscene is live and well
The only people who still pitch demoscene dead are those with unrealistic expectations or who just returned and are surprised it’s still alive, ran by a number of 40+ people while they remember themselves joining at the age of 15. But the conversation about new generation is missed by solid 20 years and all of us who just stay focused on producing don’t waste time on rants, only to have 5 mins on hacker news that by default won’t get the idea of demoscene anyway. Way too many different scenes here to focus only on one that finally turned into a hobby, not a life changing experience.
The scene is not what it used to be, but it's still alive and will remain for decades. We "old-timers" were lucky to be around the 90s when the demo groups and parties were on full swing.
To me one of the problems in modern demoscene is that modern PCs (especially GPUs) are so ridiculously powerful that full fat PC demos struggle to fully take advantage of it, at least in a way that is apparent to viewer. To me it feels like the emphasis has shifted more on the content side than purely techical excellence.
Sizecoding is another matter, and arguably the more interesting side of the scene these days. But it is kinda sad that we need artificial restrictions to make things interesting rather than trying to exploit every drop of perf you can squeeze from the computer.
I was never part of the scene, but I did write code for a couple of demos and had friends in various groups. I just wasn't much interested in making non-games, and no one I knew were interested in making games. Made me sad later when I learned how many people from the demo scene had ended up in the games industry. If I had know that as a teenager I would have happily done more boring demo coding just to have a path into game dev later. Well, kind of ironic considering everyone I met in the scene were loudly proclaiming how lame it was to play games.
In hindsight I would have loved something like the 2010s game jams and indie games culture to have existed in the early 1990s. Guess this just proves how much of a lamer I was.
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[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 50.6 ms ] threadCohost had fun vibes like that as well, but I guess it's no longer with us. Same with Glitch, but admittedly I didn't use it in the last few years, but it was my go to option for hosting a snippet of unserious HTML. "HTML in the park" does seem like one fun IRL outlet for this kind of thing, I found out my city has one and I want to go to it.
Admittedly none of these were really demo scenes or places where creative coding was exclusively fostered, but creative coding and demo-like-scenes communities probably exist but are more likely some obscure discord server.
It is well alive. Sure, we still see some of the same people from 1989, and the average age is certainly going up, but it absolutely doesn't mean we aren't seeing new blood. Styles change, technical achievement is usually seen in the sizecoding or "wild" competitions, while PC demos tend to be more cinematic and focused on art. We are seeing new things, like livecoding shaders and fantasy consoles. Of course, the Amigas and other oldschool platforms are still there, with new tricks being discovered year after year.
There are still regular demoparties. Revision, the successor to Breakpoint and Mekka Symposium is doing well year after year. With the addition of some online events like Lovebyte.
Things come and go, but there is no sign of the scene really being dead. Heck, we even seen older demosceners bring their children to the parties, with some of them already doing cool stuff.
That video's great because it breaks down how Psygnosis managed to get 12 layers of parallax scrolling at 50fps and 128 colors on-screen. I never really loved the game as much as (say) Blood Money, but it was an awesome accomplishment in the same way demoscene demos were!
This scene isn’t dead; we should just look beyond 3D glitter. See File Pilot [1] for another compact, clever example.
[0] https://terminal.click
[1] https://filepilot.tech
Is it hackathons?
One great analogy I heard somewhere -- if videogames are prose, demos are poetry.
But Wikipedia says this is primarily a European thing, so I guess that's why.
I must also confess my sacrilege, Amiguy: a buddy gave me his Amiga 500. Shortly after, the floppy drive on my STe broke down. So I took apart the one from the Amiga and put it in my ST... I wasn't even sure it would work, but it did. Now you can beat me up... but calm down. It's not like the Amiga's drive was its strong point, was it? I couldn't have done that with the Copper and its friends, and sure I wish I could have!
Interview with Japanese Demoscener 0b5vr
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45137245
"You see, when a cracking crew beat the protection of a new game, they would upload their hacked version to an elite BBS and repackaged it with a little intro and a trainer. They had to be very creative and skilled, often working directly in assembler, in order to achieve impressive imagery and chip music while still fitting on the same 1.4MB floppy."
blank stare
/hollowone^oftenhide
There are many groups and parties to mention, but for those interested have a look over at: https://www.pouet.net/toplist.php
https://files.scene.org/
https://assembly.org/en/articles/assembly-summer-2025-demosc...
Sizecoding is another matter, and arguably the more interesting side of the scene these days. But it is kinda sad that we need artificial restrictions to make things interesting rather than trying to exploit every drop of perf you can squeeze from the computer.
In hindsight I would have loved something like the 2010s game jams and indie games culture to have existed in the early 1990s. Guess this just proves how much of a lamer I was.
https://youtu.be/nHsgdZFk22M?si=HVFlgllY6sPld4v3