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It's interesting how in the Nintendo 64 homebrew scene many beginners learn to program in C just to work on 90s video game stuff. And they are welcomed with open arms! My understanding is that some popular YouTubers work on Super Mario 64 mods, which brings in new people. Not all of them are interested in making their own stuff of course but even just editing ROMs makes bits and bytes, hex and hacking more familiar at an early age. So youngsters are definitely still getting into low-level work for fun :)

To summarize, there's low-level programming infotainment (videos, live streams) and the ROM hacks themselves (just games) as popular "exoteric" material for the uninitiated. All this bound together by well-known video games (Mario, Golden Eye), creating a shared context. I think the mods are usually played on emulators Android phones but don't quote me on this.

When you compare the situation for example to Amiga it's clear there's nothing similar going on. Or maybe I've just been living under a rock?

Side note: I would argue the gamedev industry hasn't really positioned itself as a loving, welcoming industry. If I was starting out today with my (debatable) scene skills in my back pocket I'd probably take a look at interesting embedded tech in a startup or a well-established high tech company with decent pay and awesome perks instead of looking forward to crunch time sleeping under my desk at a game studio. Not to mention the whole "ah the game is finished? we'll close your studio then, kthx bye" aspect of it.

Does Amiga have any games that are as iconic as Super Mario 64 or Golden Eye?

exactly that, and my life's experience. Never again at games (did three years early in my career), even if I have to starve.

As someone who's working for one of the massive game conglomerates that's received a lot of bad press over the years, I can say that the industry as a whole has grown up a lot in this area. At least the corner where I'm in. I have zero complaints and from what I can tell from the internal company stuff, they're taking work-life balance and employee wellbeing seriously in other locations as well.

Yeah, I've been in games for over 25 years and it has absolutely improved. Still lots to improve, but my company hasn't had terrible crunch for years if not decades.

It's still demanding and we too are struggling to find low-level tech people.

that's a tough one.. Lemmings perhaps?

AMiga wasn't the game console loads of people grew up on, so no. Gaming was getting way more normalized in 1996 than in 1985 when the amiga was released. It was always a weird home computer that also had some p dope games that kinda looked like snes and megadrive games.

Also, don't underestimate the kids growing up on hand-me-down consoles in the early 00's. That shit was everywhere. Wild how much a decade matters.

Since we're getting sidetracked - I used gamedev as an example because it's the one I know, and it's one that has a large overlap in terms of skillsets and obviously people. As Canopy said, the syndrome is probably visible across the entire tech-industry.

The software industry has scaremongered about things like pointers for decades, and now they're reaping what they've sown. 🫤

The scene is a very particular subculture that grew out of a mix of unique circumstances at a very specific point in time: the advent of affordable but primitive home computers, lack of digital mass communication, limited cultural precedent, etc. It's a generational thing and will probably die out with us. I've given this some thought and realized I'm perfectly fine with it.

The thing that made (and makes) the scene great is that it grew organically, through passionate and creative people hellbent on doing their own thing, without the involvement of clueless adults, corporate incentives or detailed career prospects. If someone comes along and wants in, sure! Show them the ropes. Invite them to parties, help them with their code.

However, it's not the responsibility of the demo scene to supply the software industry with capable developers. If the industry needs low level skills, maybe it should spend a bit of its abundant cash on honing that message and creating reasonable incentives instead of on, for example, copyright lawyers.

Similarly, it's certainly not the responsibility of today's teens to fill the ranks of a peculiar hacker niche based on unspoken yet extremely rigid rules and concepts thought up four decades ago by a bunch of aging kooks who are, to a large extent, still farting around with MS-DOS, 6502 CPU:s and blitter chips.

As Radiant said, there are other venues today where kids can (and do) experiment, learn and build a social context around their activities. Let them find their own thing and enjoy it.

It's worth remembering that similar subcultures did not emerge in America or Asia, so there were cultural conditions as well, and it's unlikely that they are still met today.

I think demos as they are, were a big thing in the 90's since they were so close to the games. If you wanted to have a great looking game, you needed to have a great routine. The process of producing assets was similar as well. Best of what's possible on a home computer.

Nowadays the state-of-the-art real-time computer graphics stuff is in AAA games, but they are not produced by small teams anymore. The process is very different, involving assets produced by dozen artists, outsourcing, asset stores, 3rd party engines. Demogroups often don't have dozen artists and the last 3 are traditionally frowned upon. (Although some routines and assets have been always ripped from other scene productions and games..)

Probably the scene is not _dying_ because of that mindset, but it certainly provides certain kind of landscape for the next seeds. Engineering is based abstractions, and it's pretty hard to rank them and claim that one level is more correct than another.

Personally, I respect people doing stuff on the level that has been common in the scene. (Mostly trying to stay close to hardware- because it encourages a certain technical prowess) But it's really hard to match state-of-the-art computer graphics seen elsewhere while artificially limiting yourself.

That's also what made the scene interesting to me. Here in Austria it rarely happens that young people organize themselves. Most of the time they are guided by clueless adults (e.g. in the math olympiad).

Yup, that's the world we live in. It's all about the end result.
That's why vintage hardware demoscene makes the most sense to me. It's still the bleeding edge on vintage platforms, new coding world records are still being broken. But I guess it will die out with the diminishing of population that grew up with these vintage machines.

One more thing: It seems to me that modern day PC demo aesthetic is artificial and decided upon. While the oldschool platform's demo aesthetic(s) tend to be set by hardware itself. So the hardware limits are truly king.

4gentE: surely that’s very subjective.

Look at pixtur’s design in demos for example.. or Destop. While I agree that hardware constraints are lovely and a pleasure to work with, the more conceptual constraints definitely have something to offer as well.

I'm not sure if I understand the implication correctly, but apparently PC has no hardware limits, which is why everyone is doing raytracing at 60fps?

Whereas it's the hw limits of the c64, and not the historical / cultural preferences, which forces _all demo effects_ to take the form of scroll texts on that platform.

@farfar : Of course! Without any doubt.

I didn't write it as a 'matter of fact' judgement.
What I wrote only serves in the exact context and that was:
In this thread a question came to light: how do you attract new people to the demoscene? There was an argument that the the demoscene cannot compete with "state-of -the-art computer graphics seen elsewhere while artificially limiting itself". And for a newcomer with no specific background in demoscene, no sense of context, that is probably true. Now, conceptual constraints are not exclusive to the demoscene, they can be practiced, and are practiced in other visual content creation (in fact they are a big part of what makes art - art IMHO). The only real, 'original' demoscene constraint today is realtime-ness and file size. But we're talking about ever-evolving machines (just imagine DOS vs Vulkan 4k), so any such constraint at any given time is in fact just artificial and arbitrary. On the other hand, on 'dead' machines (ie those that are not being produced/upgraded anymore) - the constraint seems very natural and finite to me. It's not self-imposed, it's just there. I'm not sure if I'm explaining this in the right way, so sorry for that.

I don't know if the 'deadness' of these vintage machines means the subculture surrounding them is dead too. As much as I like real vintage hardware, I also like the whole 'fantasy console' fad. I think it brings fresh people. And while its constraints are artificial, (1) they are finite and (2) they don't need to compete with "state-of-the-art computer graphics seen elsewhere" for outsiders attention. It is very obvious to anyone they are about the art of code, not about pure visual stimuli or aesthetical mannerism.

Point taken. For the longest time C64 demoscene was exactly that - gazillion versions of a scrolltext. The fact that this has changed over the years proves your point in this case : the 'constraint' was of cultural and not material nature.

Now, one could argue that the amount of scrolltext based effects on C64 could also be due to it having a "hardware scroll" - the video hardware has a dedicated fine scroll register.

In contrast, maybe ZX demos are chock full of plotters because it's much easier to write a bitmap plotter on ZX that C64, plus ZX has a faster CPU.

So I suppose we're looking at both hardware (Marxist historical materialism anyone?) AND cultural reasons...

Not true; TIC-80 literally runs on host-speed. The only constraints it has is that it looks and sounds ugly, but there's no inherent technical challenge.

Also, how is platform choice itself not an arbitrary limitation?

Also, if technical limitations are the stricter the better, how come Atari VCS releases don't outnumber C64?