Where does the demoscene come from?
Short answer: It basically started with cracking games on home computers in the early 1980s (at least this is widely regarded to be the main root of the scene as we know it today). Crackers started to remove the copy protection of games for fun and competition with other crackers. Instead of just spreading the cracked games, they soon thought about ‘labeling’ their releases. Modified versions of title screens (saying “cracked by xyz”) were soon followed by a more advanced version of showing the cracking/programming skill of a cracker: The crack-intro. Visual effects, music and long text scrollers filled with greetings and scene babbling. Later, cheat modes (“trainers”) followed. Of course those kind of activities were (and still are) barely legal, so the crackers used pseudonyms instead of their real names. In case you have no idea how crack-intros looked like, visit http://www.flashtro.com for some accurate flash remakes of older amiga cracktros. In the late 1980s the legal part of th
