alt Hacker NewsThe curious case of retro demo scene graphics
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> Theft from the outside world, however, is often taken lightly - especially when it comes to graphics.
One should not forget where the demoscene is coming from: crackers. The whole point of "intros" was to show off the skills of whoever cracked a piece of software. So obviously, the views demoscene held on intellectual property are not mainstream, if we can say it like that.
The shift to a more creative and law abiding art scene, led by adults and not rebellious teenagers is more recent development.
Demo scene graphics competitions these days tend to include work-in-progress images, as evidence of originality.
The Revision demo party is soon. From the competition rules for "Oldskool Graphics" [0]:
> Include exactly 10 (ten) working stages of your entry. All entries without plausible working stages will be disqualified.
Yikes...
The rules for "Modern Graphics" [1] and "Paintover" similarly also require work stages, but fewer.
[0]: https://2026.revision-party.net/competitions/oldskool/#oldsk...
[1]: https://2026.revision-party.net/competitions/graphics/#moder...
As it happens I'm just on a train to Airbnb with large group of demoscene and fractal art friends, full week ahead of the Revision[0] demoparty! Hells yeah
My top pick for pixel art would be anything by Made of demogroup Bomb, don't have a good link to hand sorry and need to change trains etc. Also check this amazing pixel art book: https://www.themastersofpixelart.com/
Let's not forget that most of these pictures were made by teenagers, doing the best they could (and hoping others didn't know about Boris Vallejo). The demoscene was very young back then. Copying is generally considered pretty lame in the demoscene these days.
I grew up in the era of the Amiga and got into computing in some part due to demoes like Technological Death and Unreal. Not sure if 10 years is too new to be considered 'retro', but "Intrinsic Gravity" by Still is my favourite demo ever. It's lots of different scenes that transition beautifully from one to another: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZxPhDC-r3w
> Farting around with Amigas in 2026 means actively choosing to make things harder for the sake of making things harder. Making that choice and still outsourcing the bulk of the craft and creative process is like claiming to be a passionate hobby cook while serving professionally catered dinners and pretending they're your own concoctions.
People wanting to explore the use of generative AI for vintage computers is happening not just for graphics but for code too.
I think in the case of code though, it's still interesting because I don't believe there's been any success yet. I hear of people having success with Claude in contemporary settings but it seems to fare less well when working for older computing platforms. There's a reason for that of course and it's worth exploring.
However, it will cease to be interesting as soon as the first person manages to create something substantial. At the point, the scene should probably shun it for the reasons stated in the quote.
Man, this really brings one back to discovering https://gfxzone.planet-d.net/ sometime around 1999 (when this was already fading into the past because the scene was dying, PC with 24bit graphics and painting software pushing out DPaint andAmiga palette stuff etc), reading all the old interviews where "No Copy!/?" was a core issue and looking at the galleries.
"Danny leaves the scene" (because it's just a bunch of kids with scanners and he's got a job at Eidos now) never forget!
constraints are what make demo scene art so good imo. when you have 64k to work with every single pixel has to earn its place. compare that to AI image gen where you can produce alot of variations at zero cost and somehow everything ends up looking less intresting. theres something about working within tight limits that forces real creative decisions instead of just iterating until somthing looks ok
The famous spinning head from second reality is directly taken from the book "How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way". Check it out on page 72
Well-balanced, well-written article. It linked to a site called demozoo that used Cloudflare bot detection to block me at least 6 times from my home IP that CF had heretofore permitted, which is damn nice of them considering nothing nefarious ever originated from this address.
So, no way to tell if the illustrations were illustrative.
This is a great examination, and I think reminds me of why I'm not so panicky about AI art -- there was pretty much the same kind of panic around the invention of photography.
It will change, but craft and "look what I did" won't go away.
Even great artists do it. Some of the most famous movie posters by Drew Struzan are originally photographs:
https://www.reddit.com/r/OldSchoolCool/comments/ejsb22/micha...
I like the case of video editing. This is a situation where oftentimes zero percent of the source material is your own creation. Most would still consider this an artform. Shaping the overall meaning of a pile of raw assets is usually way more valuable than any one asset in isolation.
Successfully integrating many disparate parts has always been the big ticket item. Dealing with the rough edges and making different ideas play together nicely is where all the value lives in most businesses.
Not sure I agree with the final takeaway point. At least from a personal standpoint anyway. I used AI images in a couple of Amiga intros, but actively admitted to using them. At the time there wasn't quite the backlash against their use, so now would completely steer clear, but not having access to a graphic artist is reflected in the output I've managed in the recent times (zero).
It's hard to get in the era of ubiquitous 32 bit color depth, but back in the day, part of the show was making merely your hardware output picture very close to the reference in as many colors as possible and good resolution too. This was where Amiga's special video modes could really shine.
Thus, some demos, like the one where Lazur's image came from [0] were just slideshows of very colorful images that were more than likely traced from something.
[0] https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=3715 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmhffwhGiK0
Nice video from the Ahoy channel on his recreation of a pixel art burger that I think offers a really nice insight into the process for creating images like these
Curious not to see the term rotoscoping mentioned. As a lot of what is shown in copying some pictures is effectively that, isn't it?
"Good artists copy, great artists steal" (c) Picasso
the attribution point is the real crux. the demo scene actually had a strong culture of crediting influences and techniques greets, shoutouts, releasing source code. the copying was open and celebrated. the problem with modern inspired by work isn't the copying itself,it's doing it silently and letting audiences assume full originality
On my device, low res versions of the images are displayed, I had to click them to open the full res versions — which I very highly recommend!
e.g. I zoomed in to view the matchbox texture described in the article, and found it a blur. (Clicking loads the uncompressed PNG.)
Personally, I think for this page, loading full res images inline is warranted. The resulting 3MB page size would be more than justified :)
I don't think anyone was selling demos commercially or trying to pass off the creative ideas as their own work. With this in mind, we should set aside ideas of plagiarism, copyright, etc. It was a showcase of technical prowess/creativity. People knew what Death Dealer looked like & if they saw it pop up in a demo, they wouldn't think the demogroup was passing it on as their original idea (I would assert this was a given). As such, it was meant to be a reference. People thought they knew the limitation of their computer. They would play Lemmings, or whatever, and think that's as good as the graphics on the Amiga can get. The point of the demo was to blow those conceptions away.
The creative part in a demo wasn't the the art itself, the subject, the composition, etc., no, it was representing something thought impossible. Eventually, kinda like how photography changed painters' relationship with realistic representation, more powerful tech did the same with these types of demos, so the medium moved on.
In the Lazur's 256 colour rendition, it is curious that they got the details in the front very well but messed up the third guys face completely.
I would contest that choosing not to reveal the use of AI is due to an agreement of the nature of the behaviour. In an ideal world that could maybe be the case, but I think the driving force behind secrecy is harassment.
There are those who use AI as part of their process proudly, but secretly, because they know they will receive abuse.
I really wonder how some people think of themselves as artists while simultaneously attacking another persons choice of self expression.
It would be so awesome to make a cartoon today using original techniques with hand-drawn scenes, multiplane cameras, and most importantly jazz music :)
These people literally gods to me growing up. My parents were poorer than others so we never had any computer better than an acorn electron but the demos my friends with amigas and Atari ST’s showed my blew my mind.
If only the demoscene wasn’t so horrible culturally. It’s absolutely full of old sceners who have “earned” being dicks to people, and unfortunately many newbies who think that the way to be a real scener is to copy that behaviour. The constant flamewars on pouet.net are embarrassing. It is a good reminder that the internet did not used to be a nicer place though
> Pixel artist Lazur's 256 colour rendition (left) of a photo by Krzysztof Kaczorowski (right). A masterful copy showcasing the sharpness, details and vibrancy achievable with pixel techniques.
Well - the edited image looks clearer in the rendition, but also more fake. So unless that was the goal, I prefer the more blurred image, simply because it is more authentic than that digital edit. Many AI images have a similar problem; they look very out of place. I noticed this in some games where AI generated images are used. The images look great but they simply don't fit into the game at hand or they have a style that looks alien. Case in point was mods for the game Baldur's Gate 2 EE, where these images are great but they look very outside-ish. And that's a problem that seems to be hard to get rid of from such generated images, at the least for most of those I saw so far.
That's was a great read and I agree with the author. Though to be honest, I don't particularly like the type of Amiga pixel art in the article. That is, pixel art with relatively high resolution and relatively high color depth. Everything looks too smooth and hyperrealistic in my opinion.
I think things can look much better for pixel art that is either very low resolution (e.g. the small characters and objects in a SNES game, which would usually be just a few pixels wide, so every pixel has to be placed deliberately) or has a very low color depth (a pallette between two to ~16 colors, like the backgrounds in a PC-88 game), or both (like the sprites in a Game Boy game).
An example where higher color depth can ruin the visuals is "Snatcher" by Kojima. The backgrounds for the original PC-88 and MSX versions were relatively detailed (200x100 pixels perhaps), while the color depth was very low (8 colors?), which greatly accentuated the pixel-art look. However, the later re-releases added more and more colors and smooth gradients, which only made it look worse, like a mediocre comic book.
>It's a place of refuge from the constant churn of increased efficiency
Increased efficiency also seems to be part of its appeal. The limitation is you can't increase efficiency by just upgrading computer specs, but instead have to find innovating ways to use the existing resources as efficient as possible to make something great. These kinds of optimization or compression problems seems like something AI would be very helpful for, so I think it is premature to try and ban its usage.
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Focusing on "copying" seems like missing the forest for the trees. There's the copyright angle, but copyright laws are unnatural obstacles designed to give the original author some control over what happens after publishing. They're not fundamental, we made the laws.
What is fundamental is this: every artist starts out by copying the works of others. It's how you learn.
And in that framing, once you publish your derived work, there is only one question that arises - if you don't credit the original author but sign your own name, you're fundamentally misleading your audience. Your audience implicitly assumes you made the thing. Maybe you made 95% of it, but if you don't give due credit, it looks bad once your audience discovers that.
On more than one occasion my perception of an artist has shifted once I discovered the "brilliant work" they created was actually a remake of somebody else's brilliant work. It's a feeling of being misled. It's never a feeling of "wow, this guy is a total hack and has no ability of their own".