[richardjdare]

yes, I was a keen follower of the demo scene in the 16 bit days. not so much the C64, but the Amiga, and then the mid-late 90s PC scene.

Back then, it wasn't so much about limitation, though size-coding was always a thing. It was about seeing something new and cool that hadn't been done before. Pushing things further artistically and technically at the same time.

The Amiga was one of the most powerful machines available to the home market so programming it didn't feel like working under constraint, it felt like pushing the envelope of what was possible. Nobody had anything to compare it to, except maybe SGI workstations, which you'd only see on TV shows about movie special effects.

At that time demo programmers had parity with game developers and were sometimes the same people. You generally saw higher quality and more innovative effects in a demo than you did in even the biggest video games. And there was no video playback on computers, so all graphical effects you saw had some element of demo-scene adjacency, which made the whole thing feel unified, progressive and relevant.

As time went on and technology changed, it became less feasible for lone bedroom coders and small groups of Scandinavian teens to reach that "edge", and keep pushing the boundaries with the same mindset as before, so the emphasis of the artform seems to have changed towards constraint, and towards working with retro machines as historical artefacts.

The scene has had to reinvent itself a few times. I remember reading articles in HUGI diskmag 20-odd years ago discussing how demos had changed from being about hardware hacking, and getting graphics chips to do unusual things, to becoming more of an "algorithmic trip" thanks to the new pc graphics cards that were coming out.