=[ k.a.o.t.y.k °° b.r.e.i.n ]=
bringing kaos to ordered minds

 
At the time, the PC Demo scene was living a golden age all over Europe, slowly attracting more members. For those that have absolutely no idea of what I am talking about, we will have to go through a little voyage to the land of imagination.
 
Imagine a world where the Internet was an obscure network used only by the military, research institutes and other lucky few. A world where "dot.com" and "new economy" where terms totally unheard of. A world with slow computers with no fancy 3D graphics, and where the only thing a PC was used for was work, flight simulating, and adventure gaming...
 
On the other side of the spectrum lied amazing machines that where used for... less serious purposes. Examples of this are the Commodore Amiga, the Atari ST, and all the 16-bit generation consoles that marked a generation (the Super Nes, for instance) with their 256-color graphics and synthetic sound.
 
In this world where "Quake" was only short for a natural catastrophe, the 3D graphics where only reserved to some powerful workstations of digital imagers, and some arcade games. People drooled all over Daytona USA, wondering when, if possible, they could ever have this at home.
 
Looks pretty far in the past, eh? Indeed.
 
In this little world suddenly came a revolution. A Finnish demo group called "Future Crew" released what is considered the father of all PC demos: Second Reality.
If you look at Second Reality today you may just think it's basic, although the length of the production, fitting in such a limited space (2 Megabytes for a 10-minute show!) should be enough to impose respect.
 
A 'demo' is a useless program, a kind of computer video clip generated in real time. Its purpose is to show off the skills of their creators, or, in a more modest and noble point of view, to create something entertaining to watch. As you may expect, there have been endless discussions about how a Demo should be considered as "art" or not, and whether Demos should concentrate more on technique rather than design - or the opposite (these discussions are not over even today).
 
Today, if you want to do a computer video clip, you would just bring up a recordable CD and record the video you made with a DV camera on it, encoding the thing in MPEG4 to obtain a near-DVD quality. But in those days, recordable CDs and CDR drives where something so expensive that people sticked to an extremely cheaper computer media: 3"1/4 disks of an overwhelming capacity of 1.4 Megabytes! Whee!
 
And that was the whole deal: to produce some kind of multimedia entertainment that would fit in one or two disks. Impossible? Sure not! Skilled people started to push back the limits of their computers. It got to some point where PCs where displaying graphics and sounds with a technology surpassing even that of commercial games! As you can expect, a lot of the demo people now are related in some way to the gaming industry.
 
These demo makers teamed with a bunch of friends forming a demo group, and groups competed skills against each other in massive 3-day gatherings all over Europe: the fascinating demo competitions ("compos"). The most famous compos usually held once a year, in the same place. Others appeared out of nothing and then disappeared. Imagine going with your friends and your computers to a huge room (the bigger the better), completely filled of computer-invaded tables (the closest thing to this is now a huge LAN party, for those who know what I'm talking about - but the LAN events does not have the 'creation' factor in them, as least as far as I know). You would stay there for three days, meeting fellow creators, watching other people's productions, and overall having a huge blast. Sometimes there were so many things to do that you could not even sleep out of excitement!
 
As you can imagine, discovering such a fascinating world at the end of high school was very exciting to our minds. Although we were all friends from school, we took the lone wolf approach: we started to create our own "one-man" groups, with names that would make the zany-named dot.coms envious. An example of these early names is "Punks Gone Cyber" (populated by yours truly) and "Cybernetic Artware" (composed by Fahruz and... himself).

One fine (dreadful) day (night), Fahruz and Mad Process decided to join forces. The former mainly specialized in graphics and music, whilst the latter concentrated fully to music. The group, it was then decided, would bear the good name of Kaotyk Brein (KB). Although it had been discussed that this was a natural state of the members (judging from some of their wacky ideas), we have to admit that it is generally what you get when you put more than two college students in a room with some bottles of good beer...

Time passed... over a couple of years KB contacted many members of the Demo scene, exchanging creative ideas, reviewing creations, or just having fun hanging out and discussing about almost everything. At some point, the two KB members looked for a new member, and turned to their closest friends, who where also interested in the demo scene although with a more passive role. I was offered many times to join them, although I always refused out of honesty: I was so busy with my college work that I doubted I could have the time to do anything useful for the group. However, I really liked the atmosphere of the scene and so often accompanied my KB friends to scene-related events (like the famous Pizza Hut gatherings in the middle of Paris!).
 
This changed during the summer of 1997, when I was in an internship in a small town. I wanted to learn assembly coding since junior high, however I had no idea on how I could approach the subject. My internship was in a bank as a clerk but in a small agency in a town almost abandoned for the summer (everybody was on vacation). It was interesting in a way, since it allowed me to view the internal gears of a retail bank, but some afternoons where really long.
 
What is the relationship, you may rightfully ask. Well, it turned out that having so much free time while waiting for costumers, I brought with me a small assembly book that I digested slowly. I still had a long way to go at the time (I just discovered advanced algorithmic), but I was already fascinated by the possibilities of mastering computer programming. But let’s go on with the story.
 
During the same summer, I was once again offered to join KB. This time I accepted. Having passed the first year of college gave me a different vision of things, and I realized that my mistake was to think that I should work alone to create something for the group. Instead, I now saw that working all together, in different tasks but towards same goal, we would be motivated by each other and go beyond our limits.
 
Just after the internship, a very big demo competition was to be held in Wasmes, Belgium. Perfect timing ! Its name was the Wired'97, which was simply the most impressive and fun gatherings I have ever been into. We stacked all our computing machines in Mad Process' car, and took the three-hour trip to the place (we almost got lost twice, but we managed to get there anyways by our combined lucks).
 
This was a great demo party because everybody in the group (even our guest-member, Cold, who ultimately never joined but we where looking forward to it) participated in different ways. We did not prepare anything in particular for the big competitions, but we gave our shot to the "surprise" competitions.
These compos are different in the way that the time is very limited (often less than 24 hours) and the subject is revealed during the gathering. The subject is simple enough, but only the most amazing productions would win (actually, there usually were good prizes for all these gatherings. Often the first-place winners went home with a brand new computer!).
 
It was the perfect place to put my recently learned programming knowledge to test. Mad Process tried the music surprise competition, mumbling in inspiration since he long mastered his craft and had not to worry about how to do things. Fahruz considered doing some graphics but we where short of computers (we brought only two for four people), so he just hanged around having fun and occasionally commenting on what we were working on, motivating us to continue (a huge help when you spent one hour to figure out something and can't find it).
 
Cold was our CD-man (the only person in the group to have a CD writer), and he was mostly playing games over the place's Local network (that was sometimes so bad (the network, not Cold) that it crashed a full row of computers...). Although we teased him for only thinking of playing, but he made sure that we could obtain copies of other groups' new productions (or what they released at the party, at least).
 
Neither Mad Process nor I won the competition. I was short of ten bytes of being the winner. This looks close, but it is not: the purpose was to program something to do a certain task is as much small space as possible. My compiled program was 63 bytes long, but it was not enough. Mad Process did an excellent job in my opinion, and deserved a place in the podium. But the jury was mostly subjective and his music was not to their taste. But we were still very happy!  The important thing was not winning, but how much fun we had participating.

The vacation ended and everybody resumed going to his respective colleges. We had a lot of ideas and our first demo was slowly on its way. It was however severely delayed since everybody was busy doing something.
 
Some of us gave a hand to other groups. Mad Process did the music for some other people (e.g. Lithium), and I helped out some e-zine demo groups with articles and short stories (eg. Reality Failure, Extravaganja). Fahruz on his side was the busiest of all us in college, and so he solely concentrated in our upcoming demo.

And then, this era ended slowly when life took each other's in their own paths.
 

 
Fahruz was busier and busier in college, preparing a huge exam. He had to stop for a full year to concentrate on his books. At some point he decided to move to Germany to continue his studies, and is still there, making good money working part-time in JAVA programming. He offered me to join him many times there, but my ignorance of the german language was not to the liking of the companies' human ressources.

As a result, we never actually released a demo, altough that was our premier objective. Today, it would not make much sense, at least on the technical side since there are 3D cards whose power double every six months. Most demo sceners have become "serious" people, some working for gaming companies, other in IT firms, and some still doing those kind of things, like the MadOnionh guys with their 3DMark2001 benchmark (which could be considered as a demo with no size limit).

We had other projects, but we where always out of time or outdated, since we had more urgent serious responsibilities to attend. Life happens to everybody...
 
However, this was an excellent period of our lives. We had a lot of fun by meeting huge amounts of interesting people from all over Europe, and a lot of ideas that we could still use today, but in a different manner. I believe that today we would be more inclined towards design rather than technique, with a more artistic approach, although without pretensions and merely for fun. This is clearly the most important side of it all, and will likely be our future driving force. Since we have been shown that technique evolves and outdates, while pure creative beauty, lying in the eye of the beholder but in the heart of its creator, is eternal.
 

- Newsdee, June of 2001.

Greetings

(to be completed)

Orange Juice [the best repository of scene information]
Skytech [created almost at the same time of KB and considered as a "brother" group. Their utter dedication to the demoscene brought them to greater heights].
Arf! Studios [keeping the demo spirit alive !]
Citeweb.com (formerly known as Fury! BBS)
Aegis Corp.
Psyko
Fuel (guys whose network we screwed up constantly in Wired97 :-) ).
A.C.E. (the last best mainstream BBS)
Bad Taste (the last best underground BBS)
Lone Runner (now works for Nullsoft, creators of Winamp).
 
 

Kaotyk Projekts

For the first time in the history of the web, here are the compiled works of Kaotyk Brein. These have been gathered from our personal archives, and will maybe be updated should we find forgotten material or someday decide to produce something new (who knows …).
 

Downloads: