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Ok, as I am like I am thanks to the demoscene I decided to create a section on my site just to explain to everyone what it is all about and what it did to me, and also why I'm still doing stuff for it.
From my point of view, the demoscene is one of the most interesting movements in the digital world. This scene is mainly moved thanks to the competition and the ambition. Competing with awesome people and also trying to achieve things that nobody else thought it was possible. The end result of all this process it's usually a computer program for any platform (PC, Mac, Amiga, Commodore 64, Game boy,... anything programable). A computer program that shows a couple of visual effects one before the other and sometimes synchronized with the music in great ways.
A bit of history
It all starts more than 20 years ago, when the games were released in tapes for those old computers. Even on the early days people didn't want to pay for games, so they used to copy the tapes. The guys that were doing the games didn't like that so they introduced some protections for their games. That's when the crackscene started. Some clever guys started to crack those protections so they could still copy the games. A bit later looking for a bit of 'fame' they started to put a screen with their names before the game.
For some reason (probably because coders always want to show what they can do :D) they started to do those screens cooler and cooler, having their name with a nice font / colours / gradients and maybe a text jumping around saying what they had to say about the crack, or even sending greetings to other crackers.
Those coders wanted to show their names in a cooler way every time, at the point that sometimes that screen was more interesting than the game itself, showing things that you couldn't imagine being done in that machine. It's at this point where the demoscene starts. At copyparties (computer meetings where the people mainly copied tapes/disks) started to happen competitions about those crack screens, detaching them from the cracked game. Having their own music and not only one effect but a couple of them, showing what the developer was able to do with the hardware.
If you want to know more about the history of it, you may want to check the demoscene entry in the wikipedia.
How it evolved
On the early days (I'm talking about the 80s-90s), the demoscene was the place were all the most impressive audiovisual things done with computers where happening. Computer magazines were even including those computer programs on their CDs since they were a great thing help the sellings. At that time you had very limited 2D animation programs, or 3D animation programs, so it was hard to do something cool with them. Since then, the things have changed a bit. Nowadays, with the actual 3D programs, or even with After Effects, you can do cooler things than what you can see on the demoscene. Still, there are great productions that explore on things that are hard to do with the available software.
Also, the main idea of showing what you can do with the hardware got distorted a bit and there are a lot of productions that just runs on the hardware, doesn't show anything new. I believe that the problem in all this is the lack of creative coders or even artists. A lot of coders know how to create a 3dengine, but that's it. They usually won't try to do something new with that 3dengine, they will display a cube and they will try to add a glow on it. But they need to work with an artist or someone else to explore and try to do something more innovative.
Of course there are exceptions, where the coder not only does a 3dengine, or a fire effect, but also spend hours modifying the effect to get a new effect. And thanks to people like this is why the demoscene is still interesting.
What do you get from this?
As you may guess, to do all this you need to spend a lot of time, and the people will directly think if there is somebody paying me for doing that or something... A couple of years ago I didn't know how to answer this question, I just felt that was cool and if you don't know the answer you may try to leave the scene a couple of times.
But now I know the answer for it. You may like to hear the main 3 things you may get directly/indirectly for doing all this:
Knowledge and experience
The demoscene is just a very cool excuse to learn and get experience. Since the early days I've been learning a lot of software programs, a lot of theory about computers, Photoshop, 3dsMax, modeling, even creating music... Just because you want to compete on a contest with a Demo and you have to came up with an idea, and for being able to produce that idea you need to learn how to build a city with 3dsMax (for example).
As it ends up being like a team work, you get the experience of working with other people, being as helpful as possible but with the good difference (compared with a daily job) that you will probably enjoy very much what you're doing ;)
Friends / Contacts / Job opportunities
First thing will be that you will get good friends that like this stuff, and things similar to this. Also, there is a lot of clever people doing these things. It's like an underground world where doesn't matter where each person work, they do demos and you may end up working with people that work in very interesting companies. And they may offer you a job there. And it even doesn't have to be with people that you work with. If you do your best you will get surprised of what you're getting just for staying up a couple of night working on something.
Altought, I've to say that I've accepted only one of the offers in my life by now, and that was long time ago.
Money
To be honest, money isn't something important in all this, but sometimes you can get a nice prize for working only a couple of weeks. So yeah, if you feel like the money is important for you, you may try using that excuse for doing demos :D In fact, there were some people that used to compete in a lot of parties and with that were able to get quite enough money for a teenager income standard ;)
Oh! that's cool! How do I start?
pouet.net
Well, first you can start watching a couple of demos, trying to run them on your system, learning why doesn't work in case that they doesn't...
pouet.net is a database-site with all the prods, spend a bit of time checking a couple of them.
If you don't have much spare time here you have some of my favourites: Planet Risk, Aesterozoa, Electric Kool-Aid, Heaven 7, ...
demoparty.net
Going to a demoparty and speaking with people can be also a great way to get you introduced in all this...
demoparty.net has a list of all the upcoming parties (as you can see, this is mainly big in EU).
escena.org
In case you are spanish, I would recommend you to start posting around here.
The main point is that in order to get started you have to show yourself and say that you want to do some of this stuff, it doesn't matter you use a demoparty as a channel of doing this or pouet.net forums (but be prepared to get a 90% of trolls answering you and 10% of interesting people, pouet.net it's like that :P).
Ok, this is just a temporal list of ALL the demos/intros I took a part worked on... I'll try to put a screenshot and write atleast what I did for each of them:
xplsv
Sokuseki
Hofn
Mudballs
Tokyo
Holy Guadalupe!
Tube
EndOf1stPeriod
x74
r08064
Sound Pressure
Codename Serotonin
vslpx
Blue Tuesday
r08080
cow playing an organ in kasparov's parking
zxlkcm
Pilgrimage
minimal animal
w3'r3'b4ck!
Messiah
Kosmoplovci
threepixels sux
Spöntz
die Ă„nderung
ReBoRn
base
Comeback
anti macaw brigade
macawsux 2
macawsux
threepixels
mdma (reremix)
r08028 (original)
mdma (remix)
Insert Coin
r08028
dylandrazen is my superhero
Duotone
minimalanimal sux
art2k3
bcnparty'10 invitation
mdma
Cuatro
A little urban fable
Postmortem 01.02
Nature v2.0
bcnparty'01 invitation
Black Matters
Hansa
The Flowjob
fuzzion
ofFlimitS
bcnparty'00 invtro
kukka:r0kasit7e!aarku
da cube 1.5
Style 4k
Ignition
Once Again
Primpëran
South Party'00 Rapport
Puka Muka
da cube 2
savage
Corruption
The cube
Men Machine
Robot Island
mcd
Euskal Party 6 Intro Invitation
Novice Level
Skull Benchmark