Today's demo scene is packed with works of astonishing sophistication. Everyone you ask has a favorite: Human Target, from French coding team Melon Dezign, was one of the first to synchronize all the graphics to the music; the groundbreaking Jesus on E's by UK group LSD combines a rave soundtrack with flickering counterculture imagery. Switchback by Rebels takes you on a rendered high-speed roller coaster ride, while State of the Art by Spaceballs replays vast digitized video sequences as collections of animated polygons. The coding groups responsible for these (and many other) titles average about two or three big releases a year, each representing many teen-hours of programming, art work, and design. Until fairly recently, demos like these have been almost exclusively a European phenomenon, running on the Euro-coders' favorite home computer, the Commodore Amiga. Historically, demo origins can be traced to early 8-bit home micros like the Commodore 64 and Apple II, but demos (and their corresponding culture) really took off when Commodore's 16-bit Amiga hit the market in 1985, with its hi-res graphics, 4,000-color palette, powerful video handling, and four-channel digitized sound. As one coder put it, "We could really start experimenting with all sorts of stuff that made noncomputer people turn their heads." Like games before them, demos swiftly evolved to a point where they were too complex and time-consuming for individuals alone to write. Inevitably, coding groups appeared, featuring a minimum of a programmer, a graphics designer, and a musician. Sometimes these would be groups of school friends with a common interest in computers, although larger groups started to form, working across national boundaries via bulletin boards, e-mail, and the Internet. They exchanged music, pictures, code, and homemade development tools, but never met in person. At first, these groups retained close links with the illegal pirate scene: traders would exchange demos for cracked games if they didn't have any warez of their own. "They were a currency at one point, a great currency to buy pirate games." explains ex-coder Jolyon Ralph, technical director of the Croydon, England-based Almathera Systems Ltd., publisher of several demo compilations, This is still reflected in the demo scene's unique terminology - with its world of BBSes, busts (police raids on BBSes), and lamerz (noncoders, bad coders, or generally clueless individuals). Group members play with nicknames or handles, which means that news sheets (found on the scene's numerous bulletin boards and disk magazines) read like sports transfers or soap opera updates. They keep fans informed of new recruits and summarize the antics of existing members. Groups form swiftly, poaching members from other teams; if your skills are in demand, you can expect to move around. Oedipus, currently with the UK group LSD, gives a detailed account of joining the relatively small group Trance UK as a C coder in April 1992: he was poached by rivals Nerve Axis (NVX), wondered whether to join Destiny (a larger group) or stay with his friends in NVX - his mind was made up for him when NVX split up. Destiny then linked up with the famous Swedish group, Talent, so Oedipus formed a new group, Nebula, which he headed for a year, until arguments with co-manager Antichrist prompted him to take up an invitation from Pazza of LSD. Incidentally, Oedipus is 16. Much of the demo scene's impetus came from the intense rivalry between manufacturers of two of the most popular 16-bit home computers of the time, the Commodore Amiga and the Atari 520ST. (In Europe, the high price of IBM PC-compatibles kept them out of the home market until the early '90s.) In the early days, commercial software support was thin on the ground and technically disappointing, so users wrote their own routines to demonstrate their machine's superiority. "I've got an Amiga and my friend's got an ST," mimics Jolyon Ralph. "How do I prove that my Amiga's better?" Competition between groups also helped advance the demo coder's art - Jolyon fondly recalls the BOB wars, an ongoing contest to animate the greatest number of BOBs (Blitter OBjects, or independently moving graphics) on an Amiga screen at one time. "Somebody released a demo saying, Look at this, we can get 64 BOBs running around on screen. So, of course then somebody said, 64? I can get 68. - 68? I can get 80. - 80? And so on.... It got to around 200. One of our guys was a particular fan of the BOB war and was determined to win it. Eventually," says Jolyon, "it was won by someone who did infinite BOBs, but that was really a big cheat. But they were all cheats, so it didn't really matter."