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- The new quality was born.
- In vino veritas.
- We aren't the best. But nobody is better than us.
Founded by :
Brian, Jay, Matrix & Maxwell in October 1990
Dissolved in :
October 1994
Group Types :
Demo Group, Music Group
Base Country :
Hungary
Trivia :
including divisions:
Superiors Aural Department (Music Group)
Superiors Gameware Production (Game Development Group)
Double Design (graphician duo)
Smartworks (Game Development Group)
Kukisoft+Halálsqad (fake group with Cellux/Faces)
In August 1990, after the change of regime, when the Chromance group was organised, Quality, which was the most professional demogroup in Hungary next to Trays, was no longer active. Their last megademo, "Back to Life", remained unfinished. In September, Jay (ex-Genie from Quality) and Brian from Tomcat decided to work together to combine their Commodore 64 skills and produce much more serious works. The new team was called Graffity. (It's an Italian word meaning mural, and has nothing to do with being a fan of hip-hop.) They changed the last letter of the word from "i" to "y" because the "g"-"y" letters ascender can provide greater visual creativity in a logo. Jay's membership in Quality and Brian's experience as a music editor (Tomcat's Mini Music Editor) were the guarantee that they could take the Quality approach forward. Maxwell (Hepido 19, former Tomcat member and schoolmate of Brian) and Matrix (Jay's friend) joined them. These four guys were the founders of Graffity.
The first result of this merger was a digisample editor and a music editor (GMC - Game Music Creator), but they also released 2–3 cracks and wanted to develop games. GMC was the first professional music editor developed in Hungary, so they made a lot of music with this program, but they really did it to sell it to Magic Disk. The first Hungarian professional music group (The Superiors Aural Department) was formed within Graffity with Brian and Jay. They had a good relationship with a group called Trays, one of whose members, Hetye, was a classmate of Brian's, and released their innovative megademo Promethida in November. Hetye had an apartment where he lived without his parents, Maxwell, the oldest member of the group, had a car, so they organised many mini demoparties in a friendly atmosphere, releasing a Mandelbrot and a Christmas demo at the end of 1990.
By March 1991, DMC 2.0 (Demo Music Creator) was ready and became a de facto scene standard, and a mass of versions were made. They held homeparties, and were friends not only with the Trays but also with the Gentlemen, for whom they produced a lot of music in exchange for logos. In March 1991, at a demo party of a group called Art-X in Eger, they met two graphic designers, Cybortech and Davis/Double Design/Ruler, who were unhappy with their group at the time and took a liking to each other, so in April two new members joined Graffity, who did not have members exclusively devoted to graphics. Jay started writing a game called Jumping Jack. Magic Disk bought the game so Jay could buy his first PC. Maxwell and Cybortech attempted to port Prince of Persia to C64, but didn't get as far as beta.
After a short time, new members joined - Grabowsky and Hetye (who later took his former team name) from Trays, and Canny, Hammer and Anarchy from Gentlemen. As the group got bigger, the members decided to change the name to "Violence", but two weeks later they withdrew it. Graffity was thus ready to release a megademo, Justincase, which received considerable acclaim abroad. They had organised a demoparty in the summer, but it was cancelled. Hammer left the scene and Matrix was fired. In August, they were joined by Calt (ex-The Force – Hungary), who was an active swapper and took over Anarchy's contacts.
At the end of 1991 Brian, Maxwell and Anarchy went to Amiga, Jay and Trays to PC, the remaining members only releasing a Christmas demo with Canny's code. Jay offered them a new member: Cheesion, who was a schoolmate of Jay's. This new member became a worthy companion for Grabowsky, because of his impressive programming skills. In August 1992, the innovative megademo Justintime – with new coder called Eaglet/ex-Dynax) – was published to positive Western reviews. Grabowsky, Trays and Davis released Amöba under the name Smartworks (but Mr. Wax released it on the scene before its official release, although he was asked not to.)
The development of the next Justinblue, the last one to be released in 1993, had problems, because learning, the PC platform, the obsolescence of the Commodore C64, financial and personal problems, disinterest, and therefore real life took away the enthusiasm. Therefore, development of Justinblue was slow and in later years much of the source code became obsolete. But much to his surprise: in the summer of 1993 Brian returned to the Commodore 64 scene and wrote the famous DMC v5 with a lot of great music designed for Justinblue and joined the music project The Syndrom's TIA (The Imperian Arts). DMC v6 remained in beta for a short raster period. With Grabowsky, Trays, Davis and Canny leaving the scene, the all-classic-Graffity was effectively inactive by 1995.
In 1996, Graffity got a refresh: with the help of Clarence and Ollie (Chorus members), they released the mega demo "Higher Love", and 3 years later they came out with a world record one-part demo called "Gear up!". These last two demos were really Clarence's Chorus project.
Brian also released several things on PC, proving his prowess on other platforms: AMC 3.0 (AdLib Music Creator, 80x50 MS-DOS, 1993), AudioSim (VGA MS-DOS, 1996), DreamStation 1. 0, (Win32, 1998–1999), DreamStation DXi (Win32, Twelve Tone Systems, 2000), GameBoy Music Creator (for Nintendo GameBoy Color) and related GB game music for Cosmigo, DreamStation 2.0 (Windows XP, 2007).
Cybortech's graphic design skills helped Brian to create music software (DreamStation) and he released two graphics for Justinblue in 1996–1997.
Our 1991–1992 activity could have been more productive and therefore more successful worldwide, but we wanted to release complete megademos that were unique and unrepeatable and we didn't want to release a bunch of demos in two weeks just to break records over and over again. We didn't make dozens of lame gamecracks just to get our name out to as many sceneries as possible, not to mention the fact that the professional game industry died in 1991 after Last Ninja 3 and Creatures. Why would we add our name to a devolution in the games industry, e.g. boring logic games? It wasn't a challenge for us, not to mention that we didn't run a BBS because it was technically impossible in Hungary at the time.
The Commodore 64 demoscene started to sink aesthetically after 1994 and we didn't like it. The codes were good, but we didn't want to do the same 4/4 time techno and 4x4/8x8 px effects trackmos as everyone else. Why would the Commodore 64 copy the Amiga and PC when it never caught up with them? Vector objects and interlace graphics were never our style either. That's why we've always insisted on keeping the Graffity image: "Graffity's old fashioned demos". Fortunately since 2000 things have been cleaned up, there is more normal music and concepts in the demos, this is of course also the influence of the internet and PC.
It was a real surprise for us when we noticed, first in Hungary after 1995 and then abroad after 2000, that our team was the most highly praised. I and my friends all agree that Commodore 64, the scene and Graffity were one of the best parts of our lives between 1990 and 1993.
Graffity: Brian (music, founder) Calt (swap) Cheesion (code) Cybortech (graphics),
April 2011.
Current Members :
| Brian | (9-1990 -> ) | .... | Coder, Musician |
| Grabowsky (inactive) | (5-1991 -> ) | .... | (Unknown function) |
Releases : (47)
Submitted by Cybortech on 24 November 2014
Submitted by wacek on 14 October 2013
...and their famous sticker ;)
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Submitted by Cybortech on 21 January 2011
| many unofficial/illegal extended DMC releases... |
Submitted by jailbird on 23 March 2002
| An excellent demo group! The "Just in..." series are one of the brightest gems in my demo-collection. |
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