Future Crew's Second Reality

1993

Date: 29 July 1993 · Place: Assembly demoparty, Helsinki · Figures: Future Crew, Finnish demogroup · Purple Motion (Jonne Valtonen), music · Skaven (Peter Hajba), music · Psi (Sami Tammilehto), code · Marvel (Mika Tuomi), code · Tags: Demoscene, 486 PC, Real-Time Art 01. Eight Minutes On A 486 At the Assembly 1993 demoparty in Helsinki on 29 July, Future Crew premieres Second Reality, an eight-minute audiovisual demo that runs in real time on a 486 PC. Purple Motion and Skaven compose the soundtrack in Scream Tracker. Psi and Marvel write the code. The plasma effects, 3D vector cityscape, and Stargate-style tunnel sequence are computed live, not pre-rendered. It wins the PC demo competition by acclamation and is included on the cover CD of the October 1993 PC Format magazine, putting it on millions of home machines. 02. The First Native Internet Aesthetic The demoscene is the first artistic subculture born on Usenet and FTP, distributing executables through alt.binaries and Hornet Archive. Future Crew's members go on to found Remedy Entertainment (Max Payne, Alan Wake) and Hummingbird Studio. Purple Motion scores Angry Birds films decades later. Second Reality is a Library of Congress-inducted artifact in 2020, the first demo so recognized. The grammar of the kinetic title sequence, the impossible camera move, the synchronized drop, descends from here. "We just wanted to make something that would make people in the hall stand up." — Sami 'Psi' Tammilehto, Future Crew, interview in Pelit magazine, 1993 Sources • Future Crew, Second Reality release notes (Assembly 1993) • Library of Congress, 'Selections to the National Recording Registry' announcement (March 2020) • Lassi Tasajarvi, 'Demoscene: The Art of Real-Time' (Even Lake Studios, 2004)