La Demoscene : vingt ans d'exploits !

Published in Pleins Feux, Code(R) no. 2, May/June 2003.

Where the demoscene came from, told from the middle of the eighties onwards: the Oric, the Amstrad, the Commodore and the Atari, software passed around on floppies in a schoolyard, and the crack screens that slowly became more ambitious than the games behind them. Then the technical one-upmanship — overscan, filling the border the machine was never meant to fill, a routine pushing more sprites than anyone thought the hardware could — and the groups that formed around it once everyone agreed that a graphician was worth as much as a coder.