"The scene is dead" has become a meme by now. For example the "new talent" Meteoriks award is introduced with "For a scene that has been dead since 1999, our walking dead are pretty fresh".
It is well alive. Sure, we still see some of the same people from 1989, and the average age is certainly going up, but it absolutely doesn't mean we aren't seeing new blood. Styles change, technical achievement is usually seen in the sizecoding or "wild" competitions, while PC demos tend to be more cinematic and focused on art. We are seeing new things, like livecoding shaders and fantasy consoles. Of course, the Amigas and other oldschool platforms are still there, with new tricks being discovered year after year.
There are still regular demoparties. Revision, the successor to Breakpoint and Mekka Symposium is doing well year after year. With the addition of some online events like Lovebyte.
Things come and go, but there is no sign of the scene really being dead. Heck, we even seen older demosceners bring their children to the parties, with some of them already doing cool stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFXIGHOElrE
https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=59105
Revision 2012 though...
Yes? The point is that it was already "dead" back then yet here we are in 13 years later and guess what it's still not actually dead.
62K impressive.
Computing in general is /huge/ now. X is dying is funny in tech. By raw number of participants has it ever really changed? Take MUDs for example, I remember my MUD days. There are still hundreds of active MUDs. Is X really dying? Who knows.
I remember playing MUDs in high school because my system admin blocked all online games, but didn't block telnet. I credit it with my high speed typing and finally getting better than 50/50 at spelling. I'm towards the later part of my thirties. Just checked out their website and they still seem to be alive and well. Don't even require telnet anymore, lots of browser or desktop apps to do what a telnet terminal did
The demoparty I help host is doing a "the scene is undead" theme this year since it is on Halloween.
Exactly; it’s like model railroads or stamp collecting. Never truly dead!
(I mean this with deep sarcasm.)
I think one of the difference between stamp collecting and the demoscene is that while stamp collecting was quite big for a time, the demoscene has always been a niche thing.
For a time the demoscene looked bigger than it was, mostly because of all the cracks. But for the people who actually produced stuff or went to demoparties or even just seek out productions that weren't cracks, it has always been a small world, like a few thousands of active people worldwide.
I think there's still people hacking around doing cool stuff.
Things like PICO-8, etc.
It's much harder to throw a big party these days in general, and especially so about technical niches. Hack Club is popular with youth, but much more about smaller gatherings.
PICO-8 is super fun way to explore the joy of constraints.
Over the summer, we hosted a vibecoding PICO-8 game jam in Amsterdam. It wasn’t a demoparty but we nevertheless had some amazing demoscene folks show up with c64s and example demos. We attracted a handful of teenagers and had nearly equal gender balance—and made some really creative games. We definitely experienced some hateful online vitriol about vibecoding (eg “you are the human equivalent of cancer”) but that was to be expected—this event was almost deliberately about the tension between deep understanding and rapid iteration cycles. I found the tension between vibecoding and demoscene to be really enjoyable and productive.
I went to a coin/stamp shop not too long ago to kill some time downtown and the guy said basically nobody cares about stamps anymore. Still plenty interested in coins.
With the decline of interest in stamp collecting, are the prices of rare stamps and collections also depreciating?
Or maybe the prices are even higher because the few who are interested know that stamps are forever a thing of the past, and in a way that makes them more unique and have timeless value.