Preview
Yaka's short Report from the German NEXUS Demoparty
held in the night from 20.5.1995 - 21.5.1995 in Dueren/Germany
After a long trip in several trains i finally arrived at the railway station
in Dueren, a small city between Koeln and Aachen with about 70.000
inhabitants. The first thing we had to do was asking us through to the
"Stadthalle", where the Nexus-Party should take place, as we didn't see
any of those "Nexus"-Signs of which they wrote in the invitation.
The Stadthalle, which probably is the biggest hall in Dueren, was totally
overcrowded. And the hall didn't open at 18:00 or 19:00 as stated in the
invitation, but after 20:00. And the entrance fee wasn't 10.- DM, but 22.-,
because there also was a techno rave there, and the people who wanted to go
to the Nexus Party had to pay both. There was a big crowd standing at the
entrance when we arrived, and they advanced very slowly, because everybody
was examined for drugs and weapons... they almost took my hayfever medicines
because they thought it were drugs! Everybody had to leave drinks and food
outside the halls (you could have thrown them at other people!), but inside
the halls they sold beer in hard and well-flying bottles... i suppose the
reason why no own drinks and food were allowed was mainly that they wanted
to sell theirs.
Finally inside, i found out that the Nexus area consisted of two rooms sized
as bigger living-rooms and one stair between them. That was all! The big hall
of the Stadthalle was filled with the rave party. The lower room (overcrowded)
was the compo room, here was the "4 x 4 meter bigscreen" (well, actually it
was a 2.5 x 2 meter "small"-screen; the room wasn't even more than 2.5 meters
in height!).
I walked up the stairs to find out the "BIGGGG GRAFITTY-WALL" was about
50 x 80 cm big... but they had several paper sheets!
I met some guys of Dust, KeenLikeFrogs, LegendDesign and Xography in front
of the second Nexus room, and i asked them if we had a table in there. They
said: "Walk in and find out yourself!"... and that's what i did... and i
FOUND out! Imagine about 50 people, 20 tables, 10 computers and 5 stereos at
full volume together in one small room... that's what it was like!
So what i did most of the evening was simply standing around in front of
the hall and talking to people.
The compos should start at 10 pm, but it was way after 11 pm when they
actually began. (I didn't see much of the big-screen, because the room was
so crammed with people.) And they did it again, the biggest mistake! I have
been at the Assembly'94 and at the Party'94, and everywhere they made that
mistake - they tried to show the demos/intros without testing them before on
the compo machine! So several of them refused to run or crashed in the middle,
especially the PC ones.
I don't remember so much of the compos, and i haven't seen all of them;
there were several nice Intros (i remember the one from "Strontium90"),
and i heard the Amiga-Gfx were again much better than the PC-Gfx in the
Graphics-Compo. The winning picture was from Peachy/Masque (remember, he has
also won the Party'94 Graphics Compo!), and it was a Spitting-Image-Face of
Guenter Freiherr von Gravenreuth, a famous german cracker buster
And - Guenther was there at the Nexus Party! (I don't know what he said when
he saw the pic ;) )
The PC Demo compo was won by a 3-day-demo called "NOPE", a joke on "DOPE".
It is probably worth watching for the jokes, but not for the routines (the
best effect is a .fli! Just like in some Complex productions... ;) )
(Code was from Gi-Joe/Xgy, Data/FearFactory and PitBull/LegendDesign,
graphics and sound were from LD guys). Actually, the demo crashed twice in
the compo, but it was obviously still good enough to beat the opponents
(well, there were only 3 demos in the compo).
The music-compo consisted mainly of tekkno-songs (bumpfbumpfbumpf...)
and other tekkno-songs (trrrrrr-bumbumbumbumbumbum...) and again other
tekkno-songs (bum-b-bum--bumbum-b-bum-...), and it wasn't very interesting
to listen to that.
Somewhen after 3 am, we were thrown out of the Party Place ("Everybody is
outside in three minutes, anyone who is still here will be thrown out!").
We were really tired and had hoped that we could sleep at the party place,
but obviously that was not possible. So we walked back to the train station
and took the next train home.
Yaka/Xography