Intro's were great. In a nutshell it was pretty much just digital graffiti displayed at the start of a game, in a crack, somewhere on the iso etc. Each release group would try to one up each other by pushing the systems to the limit for rep. You got to realize back then the amount of free space you had available to you was so small that skilled coders had nothing more than a few kilobytes to work with. Since the hardware was pretty much the same for anyone with an Amiga / Commodore 64 / Atari / etc. the coders would have to exploit every single feature and flaw of the system to pump out the best effects and flaunt their skill. The groups each had a coder, graphics artist and a musician who would make music from scratch to match the visuals.
The demoscene isn't dead, its just more of a seperate entity from the release scene now a days. Hell you'll even find groups such as The Black Lotus putting out new demos for the Amiga.
Here's my favorite from The Black Lotus called Starstruck
It's simply incredible. It pushes the Amiga 1200 hardware beyond its limits and reaches 3D visuals that even rival most psp games in my opinion. To put that into perspective the demo runs on nearly 17 year old hardware (2 years older than the ps1), with a 50 mhz processor, no 3d acceleration, no 16bit sound hardware, slow simm ram, 900 kilobytes in size, 50 frames per second (to match vsync and avoid tearing), realtime shadows, nearly 7 minutes long, all with a very sweet tune. The demo scene is still one of the most impressive things in the world.
Also the demo group
.theprodukkt made an amazing playable 96 kilobyte game called .kkrieger in 2004 that's worth checking out. It has parallax mapping, soft shadows, hdr and visuals that rivaled doom 3 and pretty much alot of things even today. Don't bother trying it without a powerful pc though.
And suprise, TBL also makes PSP demo's. I'm certain I can't link it since the only one I can find is NSFW thanks to partial nudity. But you can find it yourself if you search for
Suicide Barbie on youtube.
Also, here's a list of some more psp demos, none of them as good as Suicide Barbie though. You can find a ton of other demos for any platform on that site too.
Fun fact, I'm sure you remember Fairlight. The group founder and leader Strider is now a San Diego Republican party chairman.
Cracktros / Intros ? Where are they?
