Tag Archives: party

C64 Scene Photo Albums

Interpersonal relations in the early cracking– and demoscene were shaped by a contradiction. On the one hand, sceners hid behind nicknames – for conspirative reasons, or just to appear “cool” and mysterious, or a mixture of both. On the other hand, despite the moral panic of “isolation” as a purpoted consequence of home computing, being part of the scene was always a highly social activity. From its dawn in the 1980s, the scene was a long-distance, yet very dense, interpersonal web, woven by floppy disks in the post, modem connections, conference calls, and intro scrolltexts. Of course, one could meet each other on a local level, and from time to time copyparties provided possibilities to meet your long-distance contacts, but more often than not you did not know how your fellow sceners outside your regional boundaries looked like.

Often sceners would sent each other photos through the post; from time to time, they would appear on the pages of papermags. Now, thanks to Hedning‘s collecting and scanning efforts, we can rediscover a long forgotten medium of photographic exchange: photo albums and flyers, compiled by swappers and spread among their contacts. A particularly industrious swapper in this regard was Incubus from Sweden, who produced dozens of such albums in the early 1990s, sharing pictures from the most recent copyparties as well as random portraits sent to him by his contacts from all over the world. These pictures, sometimes barely recognisable due to b/w photocopying, do not just show us “who was who”, but also tell a lot about self-staging and identity management in the pre-Internet years of home computer enthusiasm.

You can download the PDFs through the metadata links, or simply browse through the pages of the albums in the gallery below.

• Appell #3 photo flyer by unknown author, 1990s [metadata]
• Commodore Scene 1996 photo flyer, 1996 [metadata]
• Photo-Flyer #1 by Goat/Acrise, 1996? [metadata]
• Brutal & Hurricane Party 1992 photo album by Incubus/Antic, 1992 [metadata]
• Fifth Party Album by Incubus/Antic (incl. photos from The Party 1993), 1993 [metadata]
• Fourth Photo Album by Incubus/Antic, 1992? [metadata]
• Immortalized #10 photo album by Incubus/Antic, 1990s [metadata]
• Light & Phenomena Party 1992 photo album by Incubus/Antic, 1992 [metadata]
• Photo Album by Incubus/Triad, 1993 [metadata]
• TCC 1993 photo album by Incubus/Triad, 1993 [metadata]
• The Greatest Ever Photo Album by Incubus/Antic, 1992 [metadata]
• Yet Another Photo Album by Incubus/Antic, 1992? [metadata]
• Yet Another Photo Album by Incubus/Triad, 1993 [metadata]

PS: Incubus himself showed up in a Facebook thread discussing this update, and shared his memories on the production process. “I remember sneaking into my mother’s office at her work late in the evenings to use their Xerox machine. All of my 300 contacts got a copy, so it was heavy work for me (and the Xerox machine :) ) each time a photo album was to be released. It was great fun!“

Mixed 1990s Demoparty Stuff

Without further ado, today’s batch consists of demoparty flyers, badges, timetable sheets and the like from the 1990s. The materials were kindly provided by Goat/Laxity, Exocet/JFF, and Ile/Aardbei.

• Dialogos 1999 badge [metadata]
• Place To Be 5 (1997) invitation brochure [metadata]
• Saturne 4 (1996) timetable [metadata]
• The Gathering 1997 flyer [metadata]
• The Party 1997 organiser area sign [metadata]
• The Party 1998 ticket [metadata]
• Volcanic 3 (1997) timetable [metadata]
• Volcanic 4 (1998) timetable [metadata]
• Volcanic 5 (1999) invitation flyer [metadata]
• X’97 Takeover flyer [metadata]

Early 1990s Amiga Materials

Our faithful contributor S11 sent in another batch of highly interesting scans from the early 1990s Amiga scene. The batch consists of group stickers and copyparty / demoparty invitation leaflets. Particularly the latter are very insightful. Back then, when websites were unheard of, the organisers made sure to cram as much information as possible into the invitation leaflets, which were circulated at parties or spread by mail swappers. Through these leaflets, we can learn about what was considered important about a scene gathering back then, which features were praised as spectacular (such as the amount of prize money), and what sort of behaviour was deemed (in)appropriate. While some parties made piracy a crucial part of their advertisement campaign, others stressed their “legal-only” outlook and appealed to visitors not to engage in any illegal software copying – the differentiation between the cracking– and the demoscene was just beginning…

• Action sticker, early 1990s [metadata]
• Amiga Inc. sticker, 1990s [metadata]
• The Beach Party 1992 invitation leaflet [metadata]
• Birdhouse Projects sticker, 1990s [metadata]
• Factor5 sticker, 1990s [metadata]
• Hardline sticker, 1990s [metadata]
• Hurricane & Brutal Summer Party 1992 invitation leaflet [metadata]
• Infect sticker, 1990s [metadata]
• Maximum Pleasure Copyparty 1991 invitation leaflet [metadata]
• Sun’n’Fun Conference 1992 invitation leaflet [metadata]
• Targets sticker, 1990s [metadata]

S11 Collection – Old Amiga Flyers

Our next batch of papers comes from S11/Desire, who was so kind to scan several party invitation, flyers and magazine votesheets from his active period in the Amiga demoscene in the early 1990s. They are highly interesting artefacts of the early days of the demoscene – particularly the very detailed party invitations, which give insight on how demoparties were advertised and conducted “back in the days”.

• Amega Party 1991 invitation sheet [link]
• Defcon One & Sanity Meeting 1991 invitation sheet [link]
• Prime 1992 invitation sheet [link]
• Chit Chat diskmagazine message sheet (1993?) [link]
• Global News diskmagazine votesheet (1995) [link]
• Global News diskmagazine issue 2 promotion sheet (1995) [link]
• Nordic Report diskmagazine votesheet (1992) [link]
• Midnite Mess diskmagazine issue 1 promotion sheet (1992) [link]

As a kind of bonus, S11 also provided us with a flyer for the (in)famous PainStation arcade machine, which was spread at the Evoke 2004 demoparty where the arcade was exhibited and excessively used by the visitors: [link]