About

Hello, I’m Arnaud “norecess464” Storq.

This site is my personal space for showing my creations, articles and experiments — out of an interest in programming and the demoscene at large, and in particular in the 8-bit computers and consoles built by Amstrad, a brand that was hugely popular in the United Kingdom throughout the Eighties.

I started programming in BASIC at the very end of the Eighties, on the machine of my childhood: an Amstrad CPC 6128. That is where I discovered video games, and where a devouring passion took hold — for computing in general and programming in particular — fed in no small part by the magazines of the day, Amstar & CPC and Amstrad Cent Pour Cent, and later by French television as well, Micro Kid’s on FR3 and Télévisator 2 on France 2.

Even though the 6128 had become an obsolete machine as time went on, it is where I was introduced to algorithms, handling data, managing files, compressing it, and a good many other ideas besides — all of which turned out to matter a great deal for my studies and my career afterwards.

My first attempt at taking part in a demoscene production was a diskmag: Ghoul’s Fanz, in 1993, under Scorpion — written by myself, on a disc. Three more issues followed, and by the fourth, in 1996, they were coming out under Condense, the group name I chose and the one most of what came after carries.

I contributed to a few demos in those years too — Ze Meeting 95 among them — and went to my first coding parties. Those were where I took up Z80 assembly, and where I came to understand the machine’s own peculiarities in any depth.

That fourth issue was where I stopped writing for the Amstrad. 1996 is when I turned to the PC instead, and worked my way through x86 assembly, then C, then C++. A few demos came out of those years of intense learning: Eat My Short in 1999, Bame in 2000, Redline in 2003.

Alongside that I began writing for Posse Press, and for its magazine Code(R) in particular between 2003 and 2004: feature articles, programming courses, tests — for people who wanted to know how it was done. It was a rewarding thing to do, and a flattering one, with its own technical constraints and its deadlines — looking back, I loved it. Every page of them is readable here, alongside the interviews I have collected from other people in the scene over the years.

The curiosity kept moving. Game Boy Advance programming in 2001, which produced Kance; then homebrew on the PlayStation 2, eight rounds of The Third Creation across 2002 and 2003; then the PSP in 2007, with Recession Maxidemo and Bunny Tetris — demos with an oldschool bent, which says something about where this was heading.

In 2008 I decided to go back into the Amstrad world, twelve years after leaving it, and I have not stopped since: tools, both native and on the PC; demos; and eventually a major game for these machines.

The tools came because I needed them and could not find them: Phactory, an IDE for CPC development; PhrozenC, a C compiler that also runs on the machine itself; cpcec-gtk, an ergonomic front-end I wrote for developing under Linux on top of Cngsoft’s CPCEC emulator; and small utilities like QuickCMD and CatRun. Writing the tool is often the part I enjoy most.

The demos are the ones that sometimes take a long time to design — months of work, and years on the most ambitious of them: Pheelone in 2009, Phortem in 2013, phX in 2018 after five years of work. And the game is Sonic GX, seven years from 2018 to 2025, which put Sonic the Hedgehog on the Amstrad GX-4000 — a console that deserved better than it got.

All of that is the hobby. In real life I program video games too, as a tools, pipeline and online programmer, on a rather larger scale: Far Cry Instincts at Ubisoft (2006, Xbox), Deus Ex at Eidos (2011, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3), and Gotham Knights at WB Games (2022, Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5). I have also worked at Autodesk and at Unity.

I have lived in the Canadian province of Québec since 2003, and still cross the Atlantic now and then — for a party when a new production calls for it, or simply to see friends and family.

On this site you will find my demos, games and tools in Productions, the making-ofs and interviews I have collected over the years in Articles, and everything as it happens in the news archive.

And last, a friendly word for the people I met along the way, or who had a great impact on me, in chronological order — many of them long out of touch, though the good memories remain: Manu de Carqueiranne, Rainbird, Greg, ATC, Longshot, Tom&Jerry, Offset, Epsilon, Philippe Ulrich, John Carmack, Benoit B. de Hyères, Xbarr, Gozer, Stv, Jibe, Acet1, Kalashnikov, AlexKidd, Alkama, Rez, Jylam, Med, Maf464, u2, Tuo, Fra, Bébé, sg2, Duke, SkizO, Nippy, Soundy, Grim, Gryzor, CeD, TotO, Overflow, Jean-Michel Jarre, Akio Tenshi, Roudoudou, Targhan, Prodatron, Rabs. And everyone else in the community, whom I salute warmly.