Best. Demo. Ever.

By Ara Pehlivanian on Monday, April 16th, 2007

The nostalgia I have for the good ol’ days of the demo scene was rekindled–if not set ablaze–today by Christian Heilmann who pointed me to a recent release by Farbrausch called “Debris“. In my opinion it’s one of the best demos ever. You can download and run the Windows executable from pouet.net, or you can watch a recorded version of it on YouTube.

When watching it though, keep one thing in mind. The entire demo has a tiny 177kb footprint. That’s right, 177kb (whereas the low res .avi is 164MB and the high res .mp4 is 197MB). Man I love the demo scene.

Don’t see anything? Then try viewing it at YouTube: FR-041: Debris by Farbrausch.

★

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Comments

  1. Luke on April 16, 2007 at 11:38 pm

    I saw that the other day. I was blown away. I have no clue how they managed to pack it all up in 177kb. I mean I have low resolution JPG files that are bigger than this.

  2. Ara Pehlivanian on April 16, 2007 at 11:42 pm

    Luke: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.werkkzeug

  3. Luke on April 16, 2007 at 11:48 pm

    Oh, LOL! I forgot. I actually have that tool. I never really took the time to figure out how to actually make something useful with it. :P

    Still, it’s impressive how drastically does it cut the storage size. But I guess you pay for that in load times. When I actually ran the demo, I sat there for like a minute staring at the progress bar and then I killed it and watched the YouTube vid. :)

  4. jon deal on April 17, 2007 at 1:35 am

    Wow, that’s some *very* impressive stuff. Thanks.

  5. TOMAS on April 17, 2007 at 1:46 pm

    Amazing stuff! So Ara, where’s your demo?

    :)

  6. Ara Pehlivanian on April 17, 2007 at 2:24 pm

    Tomas: Burned on an old Archives CD. Actually the two demos that I was involved in during my demo scene tenure no longer function on normal machines–unless you have a Gravis Ultrasound installed. It was the sound card of choice back in the day and it was a requirement for the demos. :-/

    I did come across all of my old music files too. I might release them, tests, incomplete and all. Y’know, for archival purposes. Thing is though, not many players are available to play those formats anymore. (mainly S3M & IT…)

  7. TOMAS on April 17, 2007 at 2:47 pm

    It would be cool to check them out! Hopefully someone has figured out how to port everything to a current “bloated” video and sound file format. :) This is the first I’ve heard of the demo scene, it looks like I really missed out.