In all fairness, the conditions that saw the demo scene rising are so remote to be almost incomprehensible to the new generation.
"You see, when a cracking crew beat the protection of a new game, they would upload their hacked version to an elite BBS and repackaged it with a little intro and a trainer. They had to be very creative and skilled, often working directly in assembler, in order to achieve impressive imagery and chip music while still fitting on the same 1.4MB floppy."
blank stare
I love it when they would rewrite portions of the game with better compression tech then the original devs in order to get room for their cracktros or just make it a better download from BBS or later Internet.
In fairness, Fitgirl still does something similar, and continues to repack games to this day
I think the conditions of the demoscene arising were a software interface that consisted of coding, and people's first experience with a computer was
10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD!"
20 GOTO 10
RUN
This piqued the interest of curious youth, who then were further enabled by a hardware interface where you could write a value into an area of memory, which would then appear as a pixel on screen.
Exactly this. Whenever I talk about how I got started in computer art over 40 years ago, I always mention the fact that a screen back then was a one-way device: TV network to you. Basic home computers HAD to plug into the TV, and to a kid, this was magic and freedom.