GPZ's words: "digging the roots..."

"Commodore64 Scene appearently has 7 lives like a cat, a trainer and highscore-saver"

Insert coin for a new game!

The game started in the early 80s when a company called 'Commodore Buissines Machines' hit the market with a machine that was far superior at its time and which would later become the most selled homecomputer ever in computer history - the good old C64 which is still standing here on our desks.

"mmmh, home-COMPUTER? GIMME! 8)"

Yeah, now there was the funky thing we heard so much about, ready to rock our old b/w tv-set, ready to drive us crazy by its amazingly fast tape-recorder and its realiable head-aligning. 
But when we set it all up and switched it on, we noticed that it didnt come up with any of the cool games we heard about, but just showed a boring blue screen and...

ready.

"what the fuck?"

A thing that wasnt really comfortable at its time was that the way it all worked FORCED the users to learn at least certain basics about computers. No plug and play for stupid fools, no setup-wizard...  
So we spent a while trying to understand the things documented in the excellent manual which came with the thing, managed to print "hallo world" to the screen and even found out how to save that masterpiece to a tape.

(note: looking at it after almost 15 years, it was maybe the most educating thing one could ever experience concerning computers... tell an average PC user of today to write a program that prints "hallo world" to the screen! go figure...) 

mission1: piracy and a first scene

The growth of the game-companies in combination with the limited budget everyone had also 'injected' a certain behaviour into the community of the users: they started 'sharing' games instead of buying them.
First pirated tapes (copyed with a hifi-tape-deck) popped up and teached us about using a screw-driver along with the datasette in order to get it working. Not long after that a certain program called 'turbo-tape' made it even more easy (read 'FASTER! FINALLY! ;=)') for everyone to copy games. (And as well helped to recognize certain programs by the noise it produced when reading its header 8)
This is also when people started to crack games in order to make them run/copyable from any media (well, only few guys owned a disc drive at that time, so runable from tape wouldnt be wrong here either), and the race about becoming the most famous cracker started...

"becoming a criminal...huuu?!"

Now when the 1541 floppy drive was available for a reasonable price, the amount of people swapping games via mail increased every day.
This is also the time when the world-wide race for first releases and shit like we are used to these days began. Almost everyone began to call himself a 'cracker' even if the only thing they were capable of was using one of the various intro-editors... Nevertheless these days most of the 'real' cracking groups were formed as well; by the skilled people in order to build the most successing scene ever.

mission2: new ground to explore-the rise of the demo scene

This was something completely new, people started to write their very own programs which were absolutely different to everything seen before. They were not 'useful' ... there wasnt any 'sence' in them but they were nice to watch and so became very popular for coders to show off with their abilities. These days a lot of amazing effects were developed and a lot of limitations have been blown away WITHOUT the need of hardware upgrade ;=) The veterans of c64 demo scene indeed 'invented' the meaning of 'demo' as well as a LOT of things common until today, there was no such thing in computer history before. (Well, and it still is not ;=)

Wave1: Amiga Attack

When the Amiga was first presented as the high-end machine for everyone, it didnt take long when people considered the c64 scene to die... and indeed, quite some famous dudes moved over to amiga, but instead of going down the drain the commie scene was never more exciting then in the years which should follow now...

Communication Boost1: pioniers of a new technology

With the invention of BBS systems used by people to exchange latest news and gossip aswell as releases, suddenly a lot of things changed for the average scener... Everything became faster, news were spread around the whole world in like hours instead of days, weeks (or never...).
Due to the fact that one needs a phoneline to call out, a new species of scener called 'phreaker' (a combination of "phone" and "freak") popped up in order to find certain ways to CALL but not to PAY for it, so the crews were able to call foreign bbs's and trading releases without taking care of online time.
This is the first time when the community of sceners was divided into those who were able to get online and those who were not and so still had to trade their stuff via snail mail. It didnt take long until the 'callers' considered themselves to be somewhat more 'elite' than the mail dudes, a thing that seems to be common until today.

Wave2: The WinTel Syndicate

At a certain time when IBM-compatible personal computers became more suitable for making games people again started talking about the end of the c64 aera, but what did ya expect-it was not! Although some of the skilled/known people left for the pc, most of the sceners didnt like the 'feel' pc's had these days and so stayed at their roots.

These days it looks like a lot of c64 sceners indeed *own* a pc and also use it ... for storing masses of c64 stuff 8) ... "Why i am deinstalling all these applications? Well i need space on the HD and i won't delete that SID collection" ... sounds familiar? ;=))

Communication Boost2: The Internet

It somewhat looks like if the Internet would do the same to the scene like the BBS's used to do when they popped up: dividing the scene into those who get access and those who dont (well, ofcoz it wasnt that easy to get access to the boards time back ;=) ... The few BBS's still online tend to lack support and their role will (or already is?) most probably be overtaken by IRC and FTP-sites in the future. 
OFCOZ an ftp prompt doesnt have the charm of a c*base login, OFCOZ internet-newsgroups are not what the board-subs used to be-BUT you have to admit that the net serves us so much better than the boards in certain situations (like leeching warez at whatever speed your net connection manages, talking to your mates in realtime, sending news all over the worlds in like seconds etc). You can not ignore that the net is just another TOOL that makes scene life more comfortable, nothing more and nothing less than boards were some years ago. The 64 for sure won't die because of some freakin' network, instead the scene will just take the advantages it has and again prove that it is alive...

Last but not least

Well, this is where we are today, heading for the 20th birthday of our beloved hobby, and no way one could talk about the scene beeing dead at all...yeah, its not like it was in the 80's, but if it WOULD, wouldn't it be BORING? Times are changing, so are we and so is the scene!

Coming home from a KICKASS X98 PARTY i feel like the scene is more alive then ever, hey we even managed to get rid of the PC-Lamers and although they didnt pay for us this time that party was SO FUCKIN' COOL! What else could one expect from a living scene if its not meeting a lot of CRAZY dudes at GREAT parties and having a BEER? 


		Sep98, Groepaz/Hitmen