Romanian Demoscene Memories

When I was in highscool I was part of the Romanian demoscene subculture under the “PuthreGuy” nickname and I was part of the “General Failure” demogroup. I was also the SysOp of InfoVox BBS (FidoNet 2:531/10). “General Failure” was later renamed to “Float Entertainment” then to “Float|FX” when it merged with “Brain Damage” group. As of 1997, “General Failure” had 4 members:

PuthreGuy – code
Little Kopsha – code
PhM – music
Foaming Creature – code

Our first demo was named “X-Act” , was written in Borland Pascal and we participated with it at the Reunion Demoparty in Costinesti (aka Generatia Pro Computer ’97). Here we met again Ser and Mega from Brain Damage group (which we knew from a programming contest held in Galaciuc). We took the second prize which consisted in 500.000 lei (~=60$ at that time). We also submitted the demo on Hornet for evaluation and we received two stars out of five (we were very proud of this result given the fact that this was our first demo). It can still be downloaded from the Hornet mirrors.

Our second demo was called “Visions” and it took the second place at Reunion ’99 Demoparty in Bucharest. It featured 3D software rendering with trilinear filtering, perspective correction, transparency, gouraud shading. (Written in C under DOS using DJGPP)

Out third demo was “Spreadsh*t” and we made it in cooperation with Ser from Brain Damage demogroup and we won the second prize at Dracula 2000 Demo Party in Brasov. I remember that we did it in a few days, basically reusing my “Rottweiller 3d” engine (previously used in “Visions”) and adding object morphing capabilities and lightmaps to it.

Together with Andrei(gfx), Mistia(music), Mafler(music) ,Ser(code and gfx) and Benny (code) we created the Reunion 2k ad-hoc team to code the only demo at the Reunion 2k demoparty – “2dnow!” .

We created the demo from scratch at the party place and we took the first place (of course 🙂 ).”Suntem cei mai buni” (“We are the best!”) said Ser when we took the prize 🙂

The “General Failure” demogroup merged with “Brain Damage” to create the “Float | FX” group. The idea was to continue coding in the Game Development area. Some efforts have been done to create a Racing Multiplayer game and we succeded to code 90% of the game engine, but the idea was abandoned due to the lack of time, motivation and maybe other reasons I cannot recall. Our dream at that time was to create a Game Development company and publish our first game. As of today, some of us still believe that this would be the way to go.

It’s very sad that most of the information about the Romanian Demoscene got lost. I was not able to find the name of the winning entries on neither Reunion or Dracula Demoparties. If anybody still has them, please write me.
Demoscene links:

http://tomaes.32x.de/text/faq.php

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene

Romanian Demoscene links:

r2k pictures

r2k impressions (web archive)

Some of the guys that participated to the Romanian Demoscene can still be found on undernet IRC network, #rdemoparty channel.

You can find valueable information about the Romanian Demoscene on Minier Zsolt site at http://cs.ubbcluj.ro/~minier/other/demoscene.html

Here is the scan of the bbs list in 1995.bbs-uri pcreport 1995