The digital art culture 'demoscene' of the retro PC that started from cracking the game is registered as a UNESCO intangible cultural heritage

The culture of developing programs that render images and music in real time on PCs used in the 1980s and enjoying those images and music is called ' demoscene. ' The Finnish Cultural Heritage Agency announced that the demoscene, which was said to have begun in Northern Europe around 1980, was registered as an intangible cultural heritage of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) .

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The origin of the demo is said to be ' Crack Intro, ' which appeared in the period from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. Crack Intro is a self-made movie or music that a hacker tampered with and interrupted the program when the hacker released copy protection of game software for home computers such as Apple II , Commodore 64 , ZX Spectrum .

Crack Intro had the implication that 'a hacker who broke copy protection will appeal his technical skills to his friends', but the number of movies and music with complicated and flashy contents gradually increases, and gradually The aspect of 'a kind of digital art' has become stronger. Eventually, these self-made movies and music became known as 'demo', and in the 1980s, demo viewing and production became popular among young people in Scandinavia.

For example, the following movie was inserted in a pirated version of the Apple II version of 'Tetris II' and is said to have appeared around 1989.

Apple II-Tetris II Cracktro by The Brain Trust-YouTube


The following movie, produced in 1988, features an animation with Derek & the Dominos' masterpiece ' Leila Itoshi ' as the background.

X Ray 'Layla' Commodore 64 Crack Intro Full Version-YouTube


Like the chip tune culture that composes using the sound sources of PCs and game consoles in the 1980s, the demo scene still has many fans all over the world as a retro digital culture, and various works have been announced. . The demo of the Commodore 64, which was created around 2010, uses a variety of expressions from colorful dot paintings to 3DCG.

C64 DEMO WE ARE NEW by FAIRLIGHT-YouTube


The following movie is a movie produced in 2014 as a demo of Commodore 64.

Booze Design-Uncensored-C64 Demo-YouTube


And announced in 2019 The demo for is below.

Eon by The Black Lotus (compo version)-YouTube


Such a demo scene was registered with UNESCO as a Finnish Intangible World Cultural Heritage along with ' Kantele 's Performance', ' Music Saw Performance', 'Reading Before Sleep' and so on.

The Finnish Cultural Heritage Agency said, 'Demoscene is a worldwide movement of real-time demos, programming, graphics and music. The works of the Demoscene were initially distributed on floppy disks, but later distributed online for free. The demoscene, which started in the 1980s, has hundreds of groups in Finland alone, each with a few to a few dozen members. It's one of the key identities, and it's one of our key identities. '

Demoscene-The Art of Coding, a site that sends information related to the demoscene, 'is the first time in history that digital culture has been registered as a UNESCO Intangible World Cultural Heritage site, and it is a wonderful moment,' commented with joy. .