The demoscene as a UNESCO heritage in Sweden
88 comments
·March 31, 2025chaosprint
prisenco
I use to mess around with Scream Tracker (and later Impulse Tracker) back in the day, so this is bringing back memories while showcasing a completely new approach.
Incredibly cool project.
bane
As a scener since the early 90s, I'm thrilled with these announcements. Personally, what I'd like to see come of it is an increase in the amount of academic studies of the scene at the intersection of art, technology, and anthropology. A careful study of the scene, what makes it unique, how it bleeds into other adjacent scenes (and what those are), sub-scenes, core elements of demoscene art and tech, all those things would be really interesting.
They've all been written about by sceners in the past, but I think more outside observations would be enlightening. As a demoscener, you know what is scene and what isn't, and basically how it works. But I've found it nearly impossible to succinctly explain it to non-sceners without sounding like I'm crazy, or making it up, or giving them a very wrong understanding of core demo elements (e.g. "so it's all about doing things in small sizes?")
One leg up, the scene has done a very good job archiving information about scene groups, sceners, scene productions, and sub-scene productions, giving future researchers a lot of information to start from.
velo_aprx
Here is the official announcement (in Swedish): https://levandekulturarv.se/forteckningen/element/demoscenen
diggan
Hastily thrown together translation, because I thought it captured the hacker mindset so well:
> A fundamental driver of the demo scene is to make a machine, such as a computer, do something it has not done before. This could mean, for example, creating a tailor-made program for a particular type of machine. Technically, it is about exploiting the capabilities of the machine in an efficient and novel way.
It's sad to think that the computing devices our newer generations are growing up with are trying their best to shoot down this exact use case; making the device do things no one made it do before.
Instead, everything is locked down in the name of safety, and people loosing out on the ability of just having fun by modifying devices we already own.
_the_inflator
I think the demoscene is what it is: a treasure, a heritage.
I was/still a part of it, but essentially, every demo evolved into a video during the 90th.
A shift came with the more powerful machines, especially on PC.
C64, Amiga 500 - technical prowess was necessary for certain optical illusions; the video illusion stems from hacks. This reversed.
I think that this is ok. Device hacking is now the new old low-code hacking.
Today's demoscene is also totally meta. From fighting emulators to accepting to utilizing was quite a ride.
The massively impressive demos of today on C64 or Amiga are a testament to the heritage they capitalize on. Here and there, a minor tweak or final secret was finally totally understood; differences between serial numbers of C64 were a thing, too - and that's it.
I am impressed by what has been done and achieved in the early days by machine code on C64 during the 80th.
Massive influence was also time. The Scandinavians find a cool thing to do during the winter months and hack for days and nights - hardly anyone would do this today.
There was no harddisk, code revisioning. Compiling took time, and saving the stuff on disk was a tedious procedure during debugging. Printed Assembler code etc.
Today, you can dump the most elaborate code and data on emulators within seconds, all well compiled and checked - it is a wonder. IDEs, etc., are standard.
Even back then, some elite coders used cross-development platforms, such as Amiga and C64, to deal with the burden of memory and slow compile times on C64.
But the thing is that you had to develop the tools yourself. An advantage of this scale was earned.
Anyway, it was a fantastic time. Copy parties, puberty, trash talk - and, to be honest, a lot of doxxing and mobbing in retrospect.
I am glad I was part of the scene from 1987 to 1994 and attended Venlo and other infamous Copy parties.
Greetings from Beastie Boys/C64
Sharlin
I don’t know, real-time graphics programming is and has always been about hacks. Today it’s perhaps not often hardware-level hacks, but the ethos is still “cheat as much as you can, and then some more for good measure”.
dahart
> everything is locked down in the name of safety, and people loosing out on the ability of just having fun by modifying devices we already own.
Do you have any specific examples? I’m not convinced this problem exists for demoscene.
For other kinds of hacking, maybe yes, but demoscene was always about pushing graphics and sound limits of the device, and that is absolutely still possible and not being traded for security. If anything, the actual problem to lament is that GPUs are so damn good that no crazy hacking is required anymore, at least not to work around the hardware, though just using the hardware as designed these days can sometimes be categorized as crazy hacking. The hardware now does far more than everything we wished it could do thirty or forty years ago. We got what we wanted in the first place: programmable graphics hardware. Nonetheless, people are still pushing GPUs to do things it wasn’t quite designed for.
I’m not sure anyone’s fun is being hampered, demoscene graphics hacking is alive and well:
randmeerkat
> It's sad to think that the computing devices our newer generations are growing up with are trying their best to shoot down this exact use case; making the device do things no one made it do before.
Buy a Steam Deck.
Lerc
I think the term "Use case" has done a fair bit of the shooting itself.
So many times I have seen people hold things up with "What's the use case" always transforming the problem at hand into convincing a person who doesn't comprehend that other people's experiences are also valid.
femto
> Instead, everything is locked down...
There's an argument that that just raises the bar.
joarv0249nw
Computers are mostly appliances, like dishwashers, now.
GuB-42
But demomakers have a good track record of turning appliances into computers.
I am not aware of a demoscene production running on a dishwasher, but I wouldn't be surprised if one existed.
karteum
It's 12 years old now, but I am still extremely impressed by this 64k intro https://geidav.wordpress.com/2013/04/14/making-of-turtles-al... and also by this 4k intro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YWMGuh15nE :)
And overall this website is extremely interesting with tutorials and code and great explanations https://iquilezles.org/
tobr
Fun to see goto80 at the top of HN. If there’s one song that got me hooked on the 8 bit sound as a teen, it’s Blox. https://archive.org/details/bliptv-20131104-213301-BleepStre...
skrebbel
As a demoscener, I think this cool (though maybe also a bit useless).
But the thing this highlights to me now is how weird it is that UNESCO heritage lists are per country. The design seems wholly unsuited to any sort of culture that has emerged after the invention of global communication networks such as the internet. IIRC demoscene is already recognized as UNESCO heritage in Finland and Germany, what are we going to do, go down the list of every country that ever produced more than a few demos?
I mean of course none of this matters, because there's not really any tangible benefit to one's hobby being on a list like this, but it's still kinda funky. As if culture stops at country borders.
DoingIsLearning
The biggest benefit is in bringing legitimacy to preservation efforts and curation of historic records (photos, videos, data, binaries, sources) on the history of the Demoscene.
There is a large chunk of software history prior to pre-cloud services that has died in someone's hard drive, floppy, CD.
Maybe because it was tied to IP or maybe just because they didn't think much about its historic value or didn't see it as ground breaking or note worthy.
cinntaile
I think it's fine that some things just disappear with the sands of time. Not everything needs to be preserved.
DoingIsLearning
> it's fine that some things just disappear
The thing about History in general is that we as present time people have a poor intuition of what is valuable historic data for people in a future (long time from now) time.
Today we draw conclusions from graffiti on Roman walls or Babylonian complaint records. Arguably at the time nobody would consider vandalism or customer service records worth preserving for posterity.
CursedSilicon
Who gets to define what's preserve and what is lost? And why?
skrebbel
> There is a large chunk of software history prior to pre-cloud services that has died in someone's hard drive, floppy, CD.
Sure but I don't see how being on a UN list helps fix that. Seems to me like efforts from people behind eg scene.org, archive.org (hat tip to jscott) etc are substantially more valuable to preservation efforts than convincing some folk dance geeks who work at the UN that rotating nipple balls are also cool (which of course they are)
EDIT: To be clear, I don't mean to dismiss the effort. The entire point of the demoscene is "because we can!", so obviously this also holds for getting our hobby listed by the UN.
robin_reala
UNESCO has funding available to use on heritage projects, which could support the existing archive efforts.
pjmlp
It helps when talking to politicians.
egypturnash
Officially proclaiming it part of the Cultural Heritage of your country means you can write letters like this:
Hello, person who controls government funding for the arts! The demoscene is now a UNESCO cultural heritage property in three different countries, including ours. We are a group dedicated to (preserving/documenting/continuing) this wonderful and unique expression of the artistic urge. You should give us a lot of money to keep doing this.
...in much more polite language, and with descriptions of exactly what you'll be doing with that money, of course.
You could apply for a grant big enough for your group to take a year off your day jobs and spend it hacking the hell out of your submission for a major party. You could get a chunk of money to keep your site full of demos running. You could get the state helping to pay the expenses for the party you run.
All of these things obviously have existing ways to pay their expenses or the scene would have died off long ago, but why not add another one?
null
squigz
GP answered why the UNESCO lists help, in their first sentence:
> The biggest benefit is in bringing legitimacy to preservation efforts and curation of historic records (photos, videos, data, binaries, sources) on the history of the Demoscene.
It's not necessarily about "effort" but perhaps more about "appearances" - it's easier to say "This history is important enough to be recognized by UNESCO: give us money to preserve it!"
amyjess
> IIRC demoscene is already recognized as UNESCO heritage in Finland and Germany, what are we going to do, go down the list of every country that ever produced more than a few demos?
Potentially, yes. Take a look at the following list and you'll see, for example, that 24 countries are listed for falconry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNESCO_Intangible_Cultural_Her...
eCa
> how weird it is that UNESCO heritage lists are per country.
Most things on the list are geographic (in some sense) so for those it kind of makes sense that they are country based. There are some that spans multiple countries, the largest of which that I’m aware of is Struve Geodetic Arc stretching from the Arctic to the Black Sea.
But I agree that some cultural evolutions are quite far removed from the physical space in which they happened.
dmbche
If I'm trying to see how it's useful, attaching your country's identity to a cultural practice is a good first step to then fund and prop up/support said practice - while the list itself doesn't change much, you can refer to it to show the demoscene is worthwile and argue for funding/support.
kilpikaarna
> fund and prop up/support said practice
I wonder how this would look in practice in the case of the demoscene.
I feel like there was a moment in the earöy 2010s-ish when there was an interest in the demoscene as one aspect of "digital art", along with games, animation etc. Seems to have faded a bit, maybe because the focus of the demoscene shifted towards size limits where the aesthetic accomplishments can be less immidiately obvious to the uninitiated.
w_TF
also not very punk rock to crave validation from unesco
makeitdouble
Would it help if you tried to have a demo class at a community center and could point at the UNESCO decision to get proper handling and shut down the "kids these days" arguments ?
ForHackernews
It's also unsuited to cultural heritage that predates the nation state or spans modern semi-arbitrary borders.
code_kate08
Fascinating that the Swedish demoscene is getting UNESCO heritage status. It's great to see this creative digital subculture, which has pushed the boundaries of what's possible with computer graphics and effects for decades, getting mainstream recognition. Kudos to the hard work of the communities and organizers involved.
Kolorabi
Absolutely deserved.
Never been a part of the demoscene per se, but I remember going to The Party in Denmark the year that Andromeda won the Amiga compo with Nexus 7. That is one of the great memories from my youth.
idispatch
Classic masterpiece, for those who experienced it in 1990s and wanted to know how it was done: https://github.com/mtuomi/SecondReality
herbcso
I remember being blown away by Second Reality! Thanks for the trip down memory lane! ;]
barcoder
It’s incredible to see what can be achieved with very few lines of code to produce visuals and sound. It’s often pretty easy to know who the demoscene is made by because of the artistic style. Similar to more traditional art forms.
huseyinkilic
We don't need no validation.
ChrisArchitect
FastTracker was Swedish? That's enough to justify this list add IMO
kookamamie
Yes, FT was Swedish and Scream Tracker was Finnish, from Future Crew.
danwills
And Impulse tracker is from South Australia! Jeff Lim is totally one of my local heroes!
amiga386
Soundtracker was German
Noisetracker was Swedish
Protracker was Norwegian
MED/OctaMED was Finnish
Really interesting to read about this! That's wonderful validation for a vital digital culture and its heritage.
As the creator of Glicol (https://glicol.org/), based in Oslo and working in the digital arts space, I'm always fascinated by how different countries foster creative technology. Sweden's approach in recognizing the demoscene this way is particularly encouraging.
It makes me reflect on the pathways to support here in Norway. While academic environments can be very supportive (as my previous supervisors have been), navigating the broader public arts funding structures for newer digital art forms sometimes feels more challenging, especially perhaps for those working outside of long-established networks.
Seeing Sweden's success in formally recognizing this kind of digital heritage is genuinely inspiring and offers food for thought.