Text from Alive 25
| Description: | Scrolly |
| Text: | eight grade. 1991. i think it was the first night of the christmas holidays. i think the first night of the christmas holidays was the 17:th of december. i decided to take a stand and come out of the closet. i was a scener, or atleast i wanted to be. during the latest year i had got new friends from school and we all had one thing in common, the c64. something very displeasing and uncomfortable was the fact that the flow of c64 software was slowing down. the c64 was dying. if we could produce software ourselves, we would keep the c64 alive. i picked up the phone to tell my friends that we were now sceners and we would produce games and demos ourselves. martin had already given up the c64 for his pc 386, his silly pop band that played covers by roxette and belive it or not: he was too busy with school. fucking egghead! i called mikael and told him that he was a member in my group if he liked. he said ok and christian thought it was a great idea. we would keep the c64 alive, so what could possibly be a better name, than alive? during the holidays plans were made of what roles we would have in this group. somehow, i thought it was a good idea for me to become a graphician or cracker. it seemed pretty easy to paint and imagine having my name written in a cracked game, what a boydream coming true. martin taught my some tricks on cracking. simply load the boot file of the game and then make a freeze/backup with action replay. then make a backup and replace the first file with the freeze file. voila, un crack! martin and i were taking a french class together. i made some logos and pictures. some of them weren't as bad as i remember them, but the fact that you couldn't have as many colours you wanted in one char was killing me. i had always been a poor painter asweell. i soon found out that you could have a function in a group without no distinctive computer skills. why not become a swapper? i send some old demos to people from various groups. demos i had got from svenska hemdatornytt, a swedish computer magazine. the adresses were found in discmags from the same discs. no one replied. at the time i was using the handle 'vodka'. in late february 1992, we met david. totally disrespectfully and in violation of copyright and swedish law, he was announcing in the local newspaper for people to swap games with. he was a child and was in fifth grade. of some reason his brother knew some sceners and had also been swapping. from time to time packs of discs from all over the world came to their apartment. sceners who didn't know he had quit. i realised there was another graphician called vodka so i changed handle to zzap. david became a member of our group and i was given a disc with three days wares from the light/phenomena party. instantly i was writing down as many adresses i could find with the 100%-reply remark. wrote a note in the best english i could. i then realised that all the adresses i found were in sweden. nevermind! rushing downtown on my new 5-speed bike to buy proper dead expensive protected envelopes. i wanted to ensure that the discs were 100% ok at arrival. the shop was about to close, i rushed to the library to write down the adresses and to pack the discs. just before it was too late, i handed in the packs at the post box downtown. it was thursday and the packs could be delivered until friday. my first reply from a contact was on the following monday. mail scene at its best! in less than a month i would have more than a dozen of contacts and i thought i was elite. the ignition of my swapping career would somehow be the last point of my group. earlier we had found out that there was an other group called alive. bloody germans! we lied and said our group was found in 1990, so that perhaps we could keep our name and they had to change theirs. it didn't help, their group was found in 1989. and our offer to make a fusion of the groups didn't appeal to them one eight bit. we had two choices, the first was to change our name and the second was to carry on like nothing had happened. mikael was the smart ass and thought it was better to change the name. in retrospect, he was ofcourse right but i wanted to keep the c64 alive. i was in alive. also david and christian didn't get very good along. christian had taken and copied some of davids discs without permission. it was ofcourse wrong, but i think david made a too big deal out of it. mikael and david kept their business for themselves and one day david called me up and told me they had quit the group to form a new group with some 35-year old gamer/coder from the nearby countryside. i was watching the endpart of babygangs demo 'hexagone 2' together with christian. the music was sad. we were sad. ironically, alive was dead. my dream was over. we had been lamers with big ambitions. now we were 15-year old beginner sceners with realistic dreams. if this little demo would have been a proper alive release, it would have been the highlight of what we actually did. mikael made a 'demo' in the lunatic logoshower by trl-designs. mikael was the better graphician, but made a very harsh un-dithered logo. the design of this screen is a hommage to mikaels lunatic logoshower production. the font is ripped, but the rest is made by itch, grip and myself. the 'demo' by mikael featured a tune by steel. i couldn't make a cover that would do this music justice, but threw in a few notes to keep something from the original music. in december 1991, i had an idea of a screen with neon lights, stars and a city skyline and this is what i got on the day 25 years, a quarter of a century later. grip on the keys. for once i've got nothing to say, i just want to wish zzap happy anniversary: happy anniversary! please stay alive c: itch in da house! .. at first when zzap69 asked me if i could help him to code this demo part ( and maybe a whole demo ) i hesitated, not because i diden't want to help him, but because i had not been in the right c64 mood for quite a long time. but i thought 'what the hell maybe this will get my c64 juice flowing again'. so i said yes and here we are :).it was so fun to code again!!! .......... |
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