In March 1986 I heard about this really cool, powerful and affordable new computer, the Atari ST. At the time I was an enthusiastic Commodore 64 owner, and around me many people intended to make the switch to the Amiga. This machine was still in the (albeit relatively near) future, and its price tag was predicted to be substantial.

Then my best ’64 friend, Frank “Antiware” Lemmen found out about an Amsterdam company, Kafka Computers, that “grey” imported UK Atari ST systems, making a switch to the ST much more affordable and, to my pubescent mind, desirably instant. So I got the 512 Kb system with TOS on disk (no!) and a separate single-sided disk drive (double no!) with monochrome monitor (hell no!) and my first box of ten 3.5” single-sided (!) floppy disks (which at the time set me back about the equivalent of € 45). I had flogged my ’64 and this was basically all I could afford. It is a testament to the low price tag of an ST system, though, that I could buy it for what was, essentially, the value of a secondhand ’64 with monitor and disk drive. That day was 29 March 1986, exactly 40 years ago on the day I am posting this.

The first few months were cognitive dissonance galore. In hindsight those months were full of disappointments: Except for “Brattacas”, no games worked on monochrome (“But look how incredibly sharp that mono screen is!”). “ST Basic” was a steaming pile of poo (“But it allows you do really cool things with, like…GEM and stuff!”). Once TOS was loaded you didn’t have a lot of those 512 Kb of memory left (“But you have at least 10 Kb more basic bytes free than on that old ’64!”). And, most of all, after the SID-suffused sound bliss of the ’64, I missed Rob Hubbard, Martin Galway, Ben Daglish, David Whittaker… remember, this was an interminably long time before Mad Max hit the scene and possibly a quarter of a century before gwEm.

I made do with what I had. Obviously I saved up all my birthday-and pocket money to get a double-sided drive. And a colour monitor. And TOS in ROM. And 512 Kb of extra RAM. And we gradually built up a network of friends with whom to swap games and information. From July 1986, “ST NEWS” kickstarted the size and efficiency of that network. I remember there was a lot of childish hate towards Amiga users. I went around saying stuff like “we have 8 Mhz and you only have 7.09 Mhz”. Of course, they had superior sound, a 4096-colour palette, and “Defender of the Crown”. Bitter times.

After a little over a year of “making do” and constantly (deep, deep down) wondering if perhaps I should have gone for the much reviled A-word instead, the door to satisfaction was put ajar. It was April 1987 when Microdeal sent me one of their latest games to review for “ST NEWS”, “Goldrunner”. In it sat one of the tunes I knew back from the ’64 times, converted to the ST by its original composer – none other than SID legend Rob Hubbard. Rob. Effing. Hubbard! And the game itself was nothing to be sniffed at, either – a Steve Bak masterpiece with great Pete Lyon graphics to boot. Certainly, only the sky could be the limit now?

Barely a few months later one of my swapping contacts, Markus “Bitstopper” Herfort, sent me “Little Sound Demo” by a group of Germans who called themselves “The Exceptions”, or “TEX” for short. This was a really neat little demo which, apart from being visually quite pleasing, offered a quality of music that had not been heard on the ST before. Their sound programmer, one Mad Max, had managed to write a superior sound player routine. It played conversions of some fan-favourite Rob Hubbard tunes, including that of “International Karate”. I cried like, well, like a little girl. I am not ashamed to admit it. If there were people around who sought to push the envelope with regard to the ST’s arguably limited hardware specs like that, the switch to the ST had maybe been the right choice to make after all.

It would perhaps be prudent to remind you of the fact that the only way to get more out of a machine like the ST was to become a better, more efficient, perhaps more sneaky programmer. There was no replacement graphics card to wait for, no CPU to overclock, no custom chip replacement’s availability to hope for. And, boy, were there people prepared to get better and a whole lot sneakier to push the hardware to its huffing and puffing limits!

Demo crews like the aforementioned TEX popped up all over Europe and started a friendly competition of trying to outperform each other’s demos. In fact, creating demos became an objective in and of itself. Dozens or hundreds of colours were used simultaneously, ever bigger fonts were smoothly scrolled, ever huger numbers of shapes were moved in ever more intricate patterns.

The world of demos was being – quite literally – blown open with the release of “Super Neo Slideshow” (by Alyssa and TEX). This was a slideshow of “NeoChrome” format pictures with a scrolling message underneath them. A scrolling message underneath them? Yes. Graphics in the actual lower border, which allowed for extra usable screen space below the regular 320×200 pixel normally visible area.

Demo crews went from strength to strength. TEX released the “B.I.G. Demo” in January 1988, which featured all kinds of cool eye candy atop 113 excellent sounding conversions of just about every Rob Hubbard tune ever done on the ‘64. Mad Max’ sound player routine only got better and better. In March TEX released the “Amiga Demo” which boasted an overscan screen that even managed to remove part of the right border. The TNT Crew did the very impressive “FNIL (Fantastic New Interactive Largest) Demo”, which was possibly the first megademo, including a total of 7 different screens that were impressive to the very last of ‘em. Most hardware-groaningly impressive was the whole-screen scroller it featured.

The then climax of demo-ism, by dint of the multiple impressive screens as well as its overal smooth design, was the “Union Demo”. This demo was created by a joining of forces of The Exceptions, The CareBears, Level 16 and the TNT Crew. The groundbreaker was Level 16’s first overscan (i.e. full screen, no borders) screen, but it also featured a smooth solid 3D vector screen (by the TNT Crew), and what some people cite as the best scroller screen ever, TCB’s 3D-sinus-and-a-whollottamore scroller.

Things could have, but didn’t, end there. Milestone upon milestone was released: “Swedish New Year Demo” (in which Swedish crews Sync, Omega and The CareBears bundled their talents) was next in January 1989, followed on its heels by the first UK megademo, “DEF Demo” (by a bunch of 15-year-olds and an 18-year-old who called themselves The Lost Boys). Up next was the “Whattaheck Demo” (May 1989) which was the first to feature full-screen (overscan) scrolling (which later became known as sync scrolling, which later was used in Thalion’s game “Enchanted Land”). The Netherlands saw the release of their first megademo in August of 1989 with the “Genesys” demo by Aenigmatica. The year ended with TCB releasing their “Cuddly Demos”, a gargantuan effort which became the reference point of sync scrolling madness, all made by their four members (Nic, Tanis, An Cool and Jas).

After “Swedish New Years Demo 1990” kicked off the new year, attention shifted to the other side of the North Sea when The Lost Boys released their “Mindbomb” demo, made entirely by the Lost Boys themselves (Spaz, Manikin and Digital Insanity) with one screen by the Bad Brew Crew. This demo lifted friendly competition to the next (and a smidge more bloody) level with a “CareBear Bashing” intro screen. All in good-natured fun, of course – no matter how you look at it, the ST demo scene was full of friendly camaraderie. Awesome.

During the swelteringly stuffy summer of 1990, The Lost Boys were finishing up the “A Prehistoric Tale” game for Thalion in Gütersloh while The CareBears’ Nic was finishing up “Enchanted Land” back in Sweden. One intoxicated weekend was spent sending reams and reams of faxes to and fro Gütersloh and Stockholm that featured GremlBears, CareBear Slaughtering, Lost Boy impalements and various other sadistic feats of torture, drawn out in great detail by their talented graphics artists Dave “Spaz” Moss and Niclas “Tanis” Malmqvist respectively. Wish I’d have kept those fax rolls. That summer saw members of TEX, Delta Force (DF) and Unlimited Matricks (ULM) contributing on some games, rounding it off with the September Düsseldorf Atari Messe release of the “Life’s a Bitch” demo that included the infamous “Bittner Rap” (quite unlike the version on the “Give it a Try” CD and a lot funnier).

A huge climax of Atari ST scene friendship happened in December 1990 when the STNICCC (“ST NEWS International Christmas Coding Convention”) took place. Just about every European demo coder, including everyone mentioned above as well as most Thalion employees, attended. It turned out to be four awesome days of competitions in various categories (pixel graphics, 3½ Kb “VIC 20 Times Revisited” demo, etc.). Several megademos were also released in that pre-Christmas weekend – “Syntax Terror” by Delta Force, the two-disk “European Demos” by Overlanders and friends, and the full-screen-with-digital-music smørgåsbörd “Dark Side of the Spoon” by ULM.

Summer 1991 saw the release of The Lost Boys’ swansong effort, “Ooh Crikey Wot a Scorcher”. Among cool hardware-pushing things, it boasted a screen where a Lost Boy bloodily sawed a CareBear in half. Sadly, this challenge was never answered, let alone topped, by its intended audience. The last megademo of 1991 was the two-disk “Punish Your Machine” by Delta Force of November 1991.

As 1992 dawned, most of the spiders in the web of the “first generation” of demo creation had wandered off to pastures new (and likely green), many of them actually in the games industry. As for me, I directed my “ST NEWS” efforts ever more towards the multimedia side of things. In September 1993, Overlanders/ST Connexion /Legacy/Poltergeist released “Froggies over the Fence”, perhaps The Last Of The Big Megademos. After that, I myself drifted out of the ST demo scene. The Falcon happened, but I was not really in touch with the “second generation” demo crews. Although not sufficiently in the spotlight here, I knew crews like The Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, Avena, Reservoir Gods, Checkpoint, Electra and Cream were all legendary in their own right.

One would be in error, however, to assume the ST demo scene is dead. This fact is attested by various partly or entirely ST-centric coding parties/conventions such as Silly Venture, OutLine, GEMTOS and reunions of the STNICCC (in 2000, 2015 and, the gods willing, 2032) still taking place. Rather than these events just being nostalgia happenings, with old farts reminiscing over the good old times and cracking dad jokes, they actually witness competition on genuine Atari hardware, with boundaries and borders still being pushed (and, more often than not, removed), even on monochrome screens.

The Atari scene is made by the people that are in it. And that’s why it is AMAZING.

Atari Aviary – a site to browse and view (!) Atari ST demos on, being emulated right in the browser (no HTTPS site, but it’s safe)
Atari ST Demo Scene – group on Facebook, quite active!
DemoBase ST – Windows-based database of virtually all Atari ST demos, viewable, filterable, super-de-luxe, entirely offline
DemoZoo – the ultimate online multi-platform demo database reference
Microzeit (publisher of Atari/Amiga/C64 books)
STNICCC – Official ST NEWS International Christmas Coding Convention site, covering the 1990, 2000, 2015 and (potentially) 2032 events
Thalion Discord – where former Thalion employees also regularly post