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16 February, 2008

Art vs Code: In the beginning...

...there was the cracking scene. Cracker groups were busy removing copy-protections from videogames, and there was a competition among the best groups, with score given for fastest releases, and fanciest features (i.e. game "trainers"). To gain visibility, those groups started to add small "intros" to the game they cracked, small works of code, art and music.

Soon intros became a matter of competition their selves, and a new "scene" was born: the demoscene. And it still lives crafting fine graphic demos on almost every device that has a way to display graphics and in varied sizes (256 bytes, 4k, 64k and unlimited).

Nowadays, generative art is a very active field, with many tools crafted specifically for the purpose, university courses, and many excellent artists all over the world.

sanchtv. pitaru. kinesis. shiffman. waltz. generator.x. evolutionzone. flight404. toxi.

Why the videogame industry has not yet learned anything from that? Is there too much specialization in our industry? Why coders and artists generally do not talk together well? There are examples of how the opposite is very possible. But in games, artists craft pixels, coders craft code, communication between the two is a matter of tools. Even in the areas of less risk, for example, the frontend menu, there's no exploration of other possibilities. I think that we are seriously hampered by that.
P.S. for the lazy guys, some YouTube vids of demoscene products, it's way better to download the real thing tho: Lifeforce IntelDemo^Fairlight Namatomorpha Debris TrackOne etc...

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