
Demoscene, the secret behind Finnish game industry - velmu
https://www.janipenttinen.com/post/who-is-jani-penttinen-the-game-developer
======
pixelpoet
So much I'd like to write about demoscene, even though I didn't have the
privilege of first-hand exposure... Studying it from afar in South Africa, it
was clearly one of the strongest programming forces in the 90s.

In those days, the centre of the demoscene was Finland, with its Assembly
demoparty and associated acts of unparalleled programming power (e.g. Future
Crew). Those Future Crew and CNCD guys later were associated with a lot of
rendering tech, both on CPU (Umbra visibility middleware, which ships with
many/most modern games) and GPU (anyone remember the infamous BitBoys GPU
hype?); their demoscene efforts morphed into the benchmarking software company
Future Mark (with demoscene parody as "Maturefurk") as well as gamedev (Remedy
entertainment).

These days, Nvidia created a R&D lab in Finland just for them, and is a great
research effort led by Jaakko Lehtinen[1] (responsible much for the recent GAN
stuff that went viral), Timo Aila, Samuli Laine and Tero Karras (responsible
for the tech behind Nvidia's RTX [2], [3]).

[1] [https://research.nvidia.com/person/jaakko-
lehtinen](https://research.nvidia.com/person/jaakko-lehtinen)

[2] [https://research.nvidia.com/publication/understanding-
effici...](https://research.nvidia.com/publication/understanding-efficiency-
ray-traversal-gpus)

[3]
[https://research.nvidia.com/sites/default/files/publications...](https://research.nvidia.com/sites/default/files/publications/karras2012hpg_paper.pdf)

~~~
vardump
> anyone remember the infamous BitBoys GPU hype?

Shrug, probably the same guys who were behind the original Adreno. That
obscure GPU architecture running on hundreds of millions (or billion+?)
phones.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adreno](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adreno)

[https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/medfield-krait-
smartpho...](https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/medfield-krait-smartphone-
mobile-soc,3117-7.html)

~~~
david-gpu
The original Adreno GPU was a blend of Qualcomm's never-productized QShader
architecture and AMD's handheld GPU, which was based on the original XBox GPU.
The programmable shader core came from Qualcomm and the fixed function blocks
came from AMD.

The Bitboys folks were terrific, both software and hardware, but they were not
the only people working on this, or even the majority IIRC. I mis dearly
working with them.

Eventually, this combination of former Bitboys, AMD and Qualcomm folks,
working from different sites around the world and with vast cultural
differences resulted in a lot of internal politics and we lost many great
people.

Source: was there, did that.

~~~
vardump
Thanks for sharing, I had no idea! It'd be really interesting to hear more
about that era.

------
Mountain_Skies
During that era it was interesting to see demos coming mostly from countries
at far northern latitudes and wondering why the scene was so focused there. It
wasn't until visiting family up around Hudson Bay and discussing winter life
that the connection between demo coders and dark cold winters stuck. While the
long dark winter nights still exist, what's the future for Finnish coders in
an age of easy access to an entire internet of distractions combined with fast
hardware? Surely there will be more in quantity, as is the case almost
everywhere, but what of the quality forged on those long winter nights?

~~~
notkaiho
It's either that or start a metal band...

~~~
rgomez
Or even write a kernel!

~~~
raverbashing
Oh come on, it's just a toy project, it will never be something serious as Gnu

~~~
scrame
Hurd is just a couple months away.

------
scbrg
Swedish game studio DICE (Battlefield series, among other titles) also grew
out of the gaming scene. The demo group The Silents grew into Digital
Illusions and later DICE.

The Silents produced a couple of amazing demos in the early nineties, and I
very much recommend looking them up for those interested.

~~~
ekianjo
dice also made pinball illusions and fantasies on the Amiga on the early 90s.
Which were excellent.

------
finnjohnsen2
The finish demo "Second reality" of "future crew" blew my teenager mind and
still triggers goosebumps when thinking about how we sat in awe watching this
magnificent merge of art and technology

~~~
bjornsteffanson
The Second Reality source code is on Github -- it is fun to poke around
through the code and code comments with what seems like little in-jokes
between themselves. Also interesting to note the contrast of when English and
Finnish is used...you can run into gems like "pikkukuva" and "pakkaamaton
formaatti"

[https://github.com/mtuomi/SecondReality/](https://github.com/mtuomi/SecondReality/)

~~~
technomalogical
And don't miss Fabian Sanglard's review of the code. He was featured on HN
recently for the reviews of the engine behind Another World/Out of this World
and how it was ported to different platforms.

[http://fabiensanglard.net/second_reality/index.php](http://fabiensanglard.net/second_reality/index.php)

~~~
bjornsteffanson
I have not seen this at all, thank you for sharing!

------
arminiusreturns
If you like this, check out this recent documentary about the early day
demoscene bbs ascii art: [Safe Crackers: The Art of Warez)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd-s9htpHgQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd-s9htpHgQ)

Or this:
[https://www.youtube.com/user/DemosceneArchive/videos](https://www.youtube.com/user/DemosceneArchive/videos)

------
NKosmatos
Nice read, always fascinating reading stories like these about the life and
history of people inside the demoscene (the good old years) who then went on
to work for some great game studios.

Small trivia about the name: Utopos = The Good Place, The Place of Utopia

But according to the web, the following explanation also exists: “In 1516 Sir
Thomas More wrote the first 'Utopia'. He coined the word 'utopia' from the
Greek ou-topos meaning 'no place' or 'nowhere'. But this was a pun - the
almost identical Greek word eu-topos means a good place.“

------
kerpele
Wow, this article made me realize I was a part of the very early generation
game devs in Finland getting my first job in the industry in 2001. I was so
young and naive then that I didn't understand how early it was.

------
harryf
Would argue the demise of Nokia had a greater impact on game development in
Finland, pushing people with the right skills to try something new. Some
history on that here [https://m.phys.org/news/2013-11-nokia-mobile-games-boom-
finl...](https://m.phys.org/news/2013-11-nokia-mobile-games-boom-finland.html)

~~~
tsavola
Is that a guess?

~~~
harryf
I heard it first anecdotally from a VC who'd done investments in Finnish game
companies.

------
royjacobs
The Dutch demoscene also has a reasonably decent representation at Guerilla
Games, of Killzone and Horizon Zero Dawn fame. Plenty of people working there
now don't come from the demoscene originally, but still.

Additionally, Alex Evans (who is working at Media Molecule and dreamt up the
wonderful graphical architecture behind Dreams) did some wonderful demos in
the late 90s.

The scene's everywhere :)

------
stevefan1999
I'm still impressed by Second Reality [0], even till this day.

Rumor has it Tim Sweeney hired one of the member of the group who made that
legendary demo upon seeing it.

As such, the "Unreal" in Unreal Engine then should probably be referred as a
recall to the name of the track of Second Reality, Unreal II [1], or is it
just a coincidence?

Fun fact: 3DMark is also made by remnants of Future Crew

[0]: [https://youtu.be/rFv7mHTf0nA](https://youtu.be/rFv7mHTf0nA)

[1]: [https://youtu.be/Dmhtc5S4atU](https://youtu.be/Dmhtc5S4atU)

~~~
SyneRyder
The Future Crew demo before Second Reality was actually called Unreal [0],
hence that track name Unreal II.

The Unreal video game soundtrack was also from demoscene musicians. The one I
remember most was "Mechanism Eight" [1] from Unreal Tournament, written by
Andrew Sega, aka Necros in the demoscene. He's also got a couple of great non-
demoscene solo albums as The Alpha Conspiracy, worth looking up on Spotify.

[0] [https://youtu.be/InrGJ7C9B3s](https://youtu.be/InrGJ7C9B3s)

[1] [https://youtu.be/qR9kvbXt4tk](https://youtu.be/qR9kvbXt4tk)

------
maxden
I like how he carried the bee/wasp/hornet(?) logo from the 1993 Utopos game to
the ships on his current game Guntech.

~~~
invincing
It's an even older Aggression logo
[https://demozoo.org/graphics/148490/](https://demozoo.org/graphics/148490/)
(from times before Jani joined Aggression).

------
bhouston
It is also the secret behind three.js if you look at the main contributors
over time. Although not the Finnish demoscene.

~~~
skrebbel
The fun thing is that mrdoob, who originally wrote three.js, wasn't much of a
coder during his scene years. He did graphics and direction and the likes
(pretty well, I might add!). I've always been impressed at how well he managed
to design a library that was, I imagine, among his earlier serious pieces of
code.

~~~
feiss
That is part of the secret of the success of threejs: 1\. Early launch 2\. API
designed by an artist/user point of view, not hardcore graphics programer.
Flash API also helped

------
Ace17
off topic: vimium scrolling doesn't seem to work on this page. Seems like
vimium can't keep up with the creativity of nowadays web developers :D

------
jbverschoor
Anyone from efnet #coders or #nlcoders here? :-)

~~~
SyneRyder
Not from #coders, but I remember the days of #trax...

