chaos.jetzt is the community platform for young hackers between 18 and 25 – so it was rather exciting to be invited to talk a little about the demoscene!
But… How would one go about presenting the demoscene to a younger audience without being either detached or cringe? It may come as a surprise to some of our Assembler-luminaries: evermore impressive high-end effects for evermore powerful PC-graphics cards tend to receive respectful nods instead of loud cheering these days.
In the shadow of Big Tech and accessible tutorials and communities, the past years have seen a resurgence of playing grounds like Neocities, cyberdecks and low-level programming languages particularly amongst young people.
To start of, a brilliant (and amusing) ressource to start building the talk was the archive of Atlantis Prophecy. This formed a bit of an excursion and illustration into the times when teenagers first made computing technologies their own, leading to a journey through the different platforms and technolgies arising thereafter, cummulating (for now) in the higher focus on creative style and self-restriction through sizecoding on the PC.
We showed demos that should not only present different platforms, but are also some fantastic inspiration for own experimentation, strive for perfection or also simply joy when exploring a platform:
- Area 5150 by CRTC + Hornet (2022) – https://demozoo.org/productions/311767/
- Eon by The Black Lotus (2019) – https://demozoo.org/productions/202831/
- A Statement on The Platform Wars by Moonbase Allstars (2019) – https://demozoo.org/productions/342318/
- Razor1911 by Razor 1911 (2026) – https://demozoo.org/productions/390060/
The presentation slides (in German) are available on Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2026-08_Demoszene-Intro-chaosjetzt.pdf
Afterwards, the Shader Showdowns of Revision Demoparty have served as the perfect background entertainment for further chats and discussions: https://youtu.be/lr6t6wtdfQw?si=uOOyhwXQ3b36e-8U
And …jetzt (now)?
Again and again we’ve been asked by younger folks at events like this how to get into assembler and other low-level programming, or where to get somewhat regular support.
So in parallel to our existing offers like our Graffathons that focus on Javascript-solutions to give easy access to demomaking, we are working on new offers specifically for creative coding on those “old boxes” and custom hardware.
We’ll keep you updated on Mastodon and Bluesky!