This article didn't dive too deep into the American demoscene as it didn't even mention the LayerOne Demoparty[0] which is next weekend, by the way, and has been going for several years now with submissions from all over the world.
That said, it's great to see an article about the American demoscene!
demoparty.net is the best resource. But smaller parties sometimes don't show up there. The scene is highly self-referential and entries in many parties are really "invitros" to another party as well.
I was born in the early 90s, in the U.S, and boy am I sore for having missed the demoscene. I realized when I was a kid that in the U.S. there really wasn’t much going on, especially near where I grew up. I still keep up with new demos occasionally, but I will probably never participate in a democompo, short of maybe if an interesting one pops up in the Bay Area. Oh well.
I did watch Tokyo Demo Fest a year or two ago via livestream, and it makes me wonder how the U.S. is so lacking, compared to seemingly many other countries.
It's kind of a paradox, given the tech scene near Silicon Valley and the large numbers of immigrants living there, that there's so little demoscene there. I've heard various explanations for it, but the solution is very simple...run your own!
Back in the 90s, I went to many parties with maybe 10 people in people's basements. In one case, we realized that there was another tiny party happening at the same time in a different state and we turned it into a larger party by virtually combining the two.
The "party" part of demoparty is literally that. We'd get together for a day to finish code or music or whatever, chit chat, get drunk and eat, watch movies and so on. Then have a quick competition, declare some winners and go home till next year. It doesn't have to be formal, and being quirky is completely okay. We'd even through in ad-hoc competitions like a 1 hour music writing competition at 2 in the morning. There's nothing at all stopping the scene from happening in SV and there's plenty of people who'd like to participate if you can get the word out.
Yep, it was a great time. If you had been there for it, being in the U. S. wasn't quite all that but it was still pretty exciting importing fresh European cracks and doing NTSC fixing, an arcane art that even only a few North American crackers have mastered (three come to mind, that's about it). We might have had a better scene in Europe, but the States had toll-free local area calling and Blueboxing, something we could only dream about in Europe in the '80's. We made up for that with copy parties, brutal fist fights, lots of alcohol and even more optimized machine code though. Both sides of the pond had their charms when it came to the scene back then.
A rare example of how cool it was when both sides came together was a group called North East Crackers (NEC), which later became North East Importers (NEI): their leader was a 1st generation European immigrant so their cracks, imports and intros had that European level of design and quality while coupled with American speed and ruthlessness. It was a well respected group and a great fusion of two different aspects of the scene:
Ah, I had heard of NVScene, but sadly I’ve only recently moved to the Bay Area. But I’ll have to keep an eye out, to be honest I wasn’t aware it ran at all since 2008, somehow (younger me was more interested in demoparties than older me, evidently.)
The NA demo scene has always sort of been dying. I remember the NAID series that I attended and then it died off back in the mid-1990s: https://demozoo.org/parties/699/
"Compared to Europe these Commodore machines were never as popular in the United States, where consumers preferred the superior computing power of IBM clones and other PCs."
That's hilarious: up to mid-'90's, a P. C. tin bucket was vastly inferior in hardware capabilities compared to even a basic Amiga 1200, let alone an A1200 with a Blizzard accelerator or an A4000. An A4000 ran circles around her contemporary P. C. bucket, and an A4000 with a Cyberstorm accelerator ate P. C.'s for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Because the underlying P. C. architecture is unchanged to present day, it will never be anything more than a tin bucket. It still has 64 KB memory segmentation, branch prediction security exploits and the like garbage ticking deeply in its bowels because it's conceptually inferior to an ATARI ST or a Commodore Amiga, to say nothing of being inferior to Sun and SGI architectures. It will always be inferior because it's based on inferior concepts and inferior hardware architecture. It's a tin bucket KLONKKLONK. Hear that metal sound?
That was a bit of joke for sure; I had an Amiga 2000 and my parents basement would be full every day with guys coming to watch demos and software dev on my computer vs the crap PCs they had at home. It changed fast when the (s)vga cards became common and better and the 386 was fully understood but it took a long time for demos and games and other software to come close. Many magazines of the time reviewed games and other software side by side on different platforms and the PC versions were always a vomitfest up to a point in time. And until sound cards became common the sound was often not even rated or rated a 1 star on the PC vs Amiga or Atari.
That said, it's great to see an article about the American demoscene!
[0] http://l1demo.org/