YouTube Scene by introspec
Generations of demomakers insisted that their demos must be watched authentically, i.e. in the right way, on the right hardware, in the right state of mind (typically, inebriated). To be fair to them, this often made sense. Those who did not know the intricacies of USR 0 were definitely not worthy, and those who insisted on using their cheapskate clones instead of the party-approved Pentagons were clearly lost to the scene anyway. Anyone admitting to watch demos in an emulator had to be ostracized, because emulators were shit (they truly were).
Most principled sceners added special checks to their code, to crash in emulators, just to hammer the message home.
Demos made by the elite did not work anywhere, except on their elite computers.
A lot has changed since then. Demomakers accepted that it would be nice if people could watch their demos, even the misguided souls with emulators. Meanwhile, emulators got so good at emulating that some of them are actually more authentic than the vast majority of the newly built hardware.
Of course, nowadays this is also irrelevant, because who watches demos in emulators? There is a YouTube for that.
It is so much easier to watch demos on the YouTube! For starters, they don't need to be downloaded and decompressed, they (almost) always work, and only crash when intended. The loading times are zero, except for the recordings that kept the loading part (made by the sadists for the masochists among us).
But then you can just skip it. In fact, there are many other things that you can skip: prolonged introductions with walls of text, boring effects, slow effects, effects that are shown for far too long, ugly fuckings, insincere greetings, anything. You can easily skip whole demos within a blink of an eye. Many demos sure deserve skipping.
This irks people, the same kind of people who used to add emulator detection to their demos. They complain that YouTube recordings do not faithfully reproduce the experience (which is partly true), and they also hate the fact that the viewer can defy their "artistic vision". But I think we should embrace it.
You see, I believe that YouTube is the best thing that ever happened to the demoscene.
YouTube forces us to see demos in a wider context, and it is not a pleasing picture.
An infamous Russian scener AAA made his name by creating, arguably, the largest collection of ZX Spectrum demoscene software. Almost every random piece of standalone code was scraped from old floppy collections in support of the claim that AAA's site contains over 10K "demos". Even hidden parts and hacked game intros were extracted from original releases to boost the total number of entries. Back in December 2016, AAA kicked off a new vanity project - a YouTube channel containing captures of every demo from his archive:
https://www.youtube.com/@ZXAAADemoZXSpectrum
The new goal was to get a recording for every item in this collection. It took AAA several years of work and remarkable commitment, so now his YouTube channel contains 10,641 videos.
Have you ever survived watching First Association Megademo from the beginning to the end? he has actually recorded it.
But there is a snag. As of March 2023 his channel attracted 677,201 views. This is about 300 views per day or, more importantly, less than 70 views per demo in 6+ years, about 10 views per demo per year if you want to be kind.
Some think that we are living a mark for the posterity, but that mark turns out to be pretty inconsequential.
We are irrelevant.
We placed our best work next to funny cat videos and cat videos won.
And it is not like we did not have a chance to succeed. The most popular video featuring an actual ZX Spectrum is probably a retro-computing remix of Radiohead's "Nude":
It is actually not a demo, and it is not even authentic, but it has over a million views.
Which coincidentally is 1.5 times the number of views for the entire output of ZX demoscene over its history.
OK, OK, I know, you will say that the quantity cannot beat quality, that the whole premise of AAA's channel is dubious, and also that there are some ZX Spectrum demos that managed to attract tens of thousands of views. So things are not quite as grim. I kinda know that. But I also know that the typical audience of a decent ZX Spectrum release on Pouet is several thousands views at best, and that the vast majority of the scene output barely gets outside of the scene bubble.
I recently saw the release of a new track by a popular Russian rapper Oxymiron - it gained a million views overnight.
I know, this is not a popularity contest, but it hurts just the same.
Why don't people watch what we do?
The answer is, we ARE irrelevant.
We are irrelevant not because people don't get what we do, but because we rarely talk about anything that matters. We are irrelevant because we choose to stay irrelevant by rarely trying to engage with the outside world. We are irrelevant because a big part of the scene is still stuck in juvenile daydreaming with plasmas, twisters and rasterbars.
There's a war going on, but we'd better get that party started.
Thank god we mostly abandoned megademos, it would have been even sadder with them around.
I don't know how this happened. Maybe plasma just isn't as good an entertainment as it was in the 1980s. Maybe it was not all that entertaining even back in the 1980s, but we were too excited to notice.
A bunch of geeks took "The medium is the message" literally to create the medium so devoid of message that no-one cares about the medium anymore.
So, next time someone asks you why don't we get young people joining the scene, tell them - young people don't really see the point. So, next time someone says we should attract more shader coders or chiptune musicians or gif artists to our community, tell them - we do not seem all that interesting to them, because they literally do the same things that we do, but in ways that are radically more open to human interpretation.
Worse still, many of our demos are just plain ugly. We rarely generate an audio-visual experience that is worth experiencing.
Pretty inexcusable for an audio-visual medium if you ask me.
All this can be fixed. A demo can be a work of art, for real. A demo does not have to talk to people using scrollers with ramblings and greets. A demo can share experiences about love or war. A demo can actually look cool and inspire people.
The main thing that is stopping you is the intent, or the lack of thereof.
You must intend to create a work of art. No, it is not elitist, and it is not ridiculously ambitious either. It is simply a matter of positioning: you won't create a work of art if you never intended to.
There ain't such a thing as spontaneous creation of art.
So, next time you work on a project, ask yourself, if this will become the screenshot of your demo and you see it in the YouTube suggestions - would you actually click it to watch? If you are getting annoyed waiting for an effect to end and keep fast-forwarding it to save the development time - what makes you think that people won't skip it on the YouTube, or worse still, switch to another video? Is the demo you are making cool enough to show your mate from the office? How about your girlfriend? Is it beautiful enough to enjoy simply watching it? Is it funny enough to stand next to a cat?
Basically, don't just do something, do something cool instead.
The oldschool was all about technical prowess and posturing. The newschool refused to do either, but it was not radical enough in eradicating the baggage inherited from the past. And we need to, if we want our legacy to survive. The next school should be about leaving the comfort zone of the tradition and going back to the world in all its diversity and richness.
We will either undergo the transformation, or be safely forgotten.
Your choice
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