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my very own history ::.. well... where to start? :-) maybe i should start when it all began... at x-mas 1986 when i got my very first computer read more here it was a c128D and at first i started a "gamer lamer" carreer like most others did. computergames fascinated me so much that i used to spend up to 10 hours playing games in average. besides school this took most of my spare time. my parents didnt really like it but i didnt care much. in 1987 i started to be interested in all those cracker-intros when i started my games and tryed to do some myself. since i only learned a bit of basic they looked rather ugly. later on i used to "hack" intros and hack my own text into their scrollers. that felt really good at start until i noticed its still lame to steal other ppls code. i think i called myself "MCS" at that time. im not sure what it means (yea im an old man forgetting some stuff) - i think it means (M)ichael (C)racking (S)ervice... guess what - i never cracked anything hehe. in 1988 i didnt do much things myself but started watching alot of demos and enjoyed them very much. i think i spent more time watching intros and demos than playing any games at that time. in school i met someone who coded and cracked a little bit. his group was called "Monsum Design" wow that impressed me. he gave me all the hottest stuff (new games) for the c64 and i was happy. as far as i know he later on joined the group "Crazy" in 1989 i started some painting. at first i concentrated on making a few charset - and later on did a few logos in amica paint. after doing some logos for fun i got the feeling some of them didnt look too bad. so i made a logo for the demogroup Texiax 2022 (a scandinavian demogroup.) i picked Texiax because they seemed to be a demogroup of an average quality since i was realistic and knew that my logos didnt fit a high quality standard of the so-called "elite-groups." i called myself "TJS" at that time. i think it means "The jumping Square" or something like that (lame - isnt it?) a few days after sending them my logo and a few charsets i got the reply that they would be happy to have me in their group - and so i joined them. some time i was a happy member until i noticed the guys in Texiax became inactive. i joined the group Matrix cause i had lots of phonecalls with one of their members. today i believe he was the only member knowing that i was in - and they never used any of my graphics. btw around that time i started calling myself "Yazoo" --- it had nothing to do with the band. i was just getting it in mind and thought it sounded cool. some time later i noticed theres a music-band with that name. but i didnt care too much. in 1990 i met TTS in a local shop (in Flensburg), sitting in front of a c64 and coding a cool sprite-multiplexer for fun. we talked a bit and since we both were interested in the c64 demoscene - TTS decided to take me with him to a meeting of some local demofreaks in the cellar of SID. i was very impressed because they had some really good coders. the only thing missing was a graphician and a musician. that was the day i decided to join them and try to become famous with them. its much more fun to work with some local coders than only painting a logo at home and send it away by mail to coders i never met personally. btw that group was called "TIF" - The Incredible Fantastics. After releasing the T.I.F. megademo2 i talked to them and we decided to rename into "Gloom"... im not really sure if it was that time when i became leader of the group. maybe it was a bit earlier. most of the TIF guys didnt have any real contacts in the demoscene except for some local groups. since i was swapping with like 20 contacts worldwide (wow lol) i was the one who maybe could help them become famous - so they made me the leader i believe - im not really sure about this point. with Gloom we became a bit famous. my graphics werent the best, the code was ok and the music was ripped. but we became the most active demogroup ever i believe. i got in mind that we had to do something special to get famous... so i was trying to make the coders release their parts as hell - and so we spreaded a demo every 2-3 weeks i think ;-) the motto was quantity not quality. it worked well for some time. at the end of 1991 our coders had rised their level and gloom had some members we wanted to get rid off. so i was calling up most of the important members again and we decided to start a new group with less members. that was Oxyron (we didnt get any really good name in mind, so we took a dictionary and found the word "Oxymoron". since i didnt like Oxymoron too much we made it shorter and Oxyron was born). our first demo was planned to be released at "The Party 1991" in denmark held by bonzai. it was a very famous scene-party those days. slide, tts and me arrived at the party place and noticed we had forgotten half of the parts. cool... what to do... leave the party without having released any demo? no way! tts started coding, i started pixeling and at the end we finished our first demo called "burn it" right in time to have it taking part in the competition. i think we didnt sleep much that time. i dont remember the position we made in the competition but it was the beginning of one of the most famous and active demogroups in the c64 history. im actually not sure if it was at Oxyron or at Gloom times when TTS (our maincoders) computer broke down and he had to take a break from coding. at that time i left the group myself and joined "ROLE" - Raiders Of the lost Empire. i renamed myself from Yazoo into Rawhead but didnt release much at that time. when TTS started coding again i rejoined under the handle Yazoo. in the beginning of 1992 we were sitting at a local meeting at the place of AKC. we wanted to release our second megademo and were looking for a cool name. i think akc had a flyer of a local disco with a big coma light logo on it (im not totally sure about that) and so we decided to make a demo with that name. most of the sceners know --- coma light became one of the biggest demoseries ever. in spring 1992 we released coma light 4 at the light & phenomena party in sweden. that was the first time we had some real success with a demo at a very big party. we became 4th at the competition (more than 25 good demos took part of it)... that really felt good ;-) it motivated us to try concentrating a bit more at design and not to only release our "logo-effect-scrolltext" parts only. so coma light 5 became another success at the brutal party in summer (denmark on the isle samso) when we made it to the 5th place in the democompetition. we released more demos - and we became more and more successful. i think in 1993 after having a girlfriend (which was the ex-girlfriend of tts which was causing some internal trouble) i decided to quit my scene activitys on the c64. we were rising in the charts of most disk-mags and i somehow was a little bored. maybe because it was more fun to make a demogroup very wellknown and try to bring it up to top - than having it on top :-) im not sure if you understand what im trying to say (blame my lame english.) another point for me quitting the scene was that we had some good graphicians that time - and since i never was one of the real top-graphicians i didnt have much work to do anymore. most demos already were released with graphics of our other members. last time i was taking a visit at a demoparty being active in the c64 scene was the Data-Live party in dessau/ germany. to be honest i didnt do much there besides boozing and having fun with ppl like Biz-Kid, Charlie of Varsity (R.I.P.) and Axis. a tv-camera of a german tv-channel (sat-1) spotted me when i was actually putting some food on my head lol. before we travelled to the party we got ourselfes some food at a local snack-bar in schleswig/ northern germany. i was showing axis or tts (i think it was tts) a gas-gun. that wasnt good because the gas-gun decided to fire into the ground and the owner of the snack-bar (an ex-police officer) was not very amused. since that time some ppl use to call me "Yashoot" lol. after a few years of not being involved into the demoscene i started to be interested in the amiga-scene. Oxyron was very active on the amiga at that time (i think only graham was still coding on the c64.) one day in 1996 we were three ppl sitting at Axis's place (Axis of Oxyron, me and Ikari - a local guy who said he was in the famous IKARI cracking group years ago... whatever i dont really believe him ;-)) we were talking about the golden days on the c64 and decided to form a small group on the amiga. Axis was the coder - i was happy to do ugly logos again - and IKARI should do some music what he never did. so to be honest we were more or less only two real members. Axis had some nice parts ready on the amiga and so we started to do our first amiga-demo which was called "deathgreedy" - it was released at "The Party 1996) in denmark. im not sure about it, but i think we made it to the 9th place. that party was very stressful because we couldnt really finish the demo in time. axis and me were working all night long to fit the deadline, while ikari was sitting right beside us, staring at his screen and complaining about the party-place being cold. well ikari was right... it absolutely was cold. in the beginning of 1997 we kicked out Ikari for still not being active and we got two new members. one of them was DocD who had a job in a local internet-cafe (so he did the web-stuff for us plus online-magazine and we could surf for free since no one of us had internet in 1997) and the other one was Shylock who was a musician (most ppl didnt like his musix too much to be honest, but on the amiga it was supposed to be lame to rip music - which was ok on the c64. so we had no choice and let him join. in spring 1997 we released our second demo at the Mekka & Symposium 1997 party. the name of the demo was "Fear Factory" and we made an impressive 2nd place at the amiga democompetition with it. later on we calculated that we needed just 2 more ppl voting for us to be the no.1 ;-) well shit happens... Graham of Oxyron for example was sleeping when he should have voted for us - so did some others. we beat lots of nice demos... for example the demo of essence and only the group "Artwork" beat us. im still wondering how we could go this far - because the music was terrible and some ppl didnt like my graphics too. so with atleast a bit better music we should have won that compo. anyways for me and myself it was the biggest success i ever had in the demoscene and so i will never forget that day. espeially because we were only 3 ppl working on that demo. at the end of 1997 we let arsenic die... i really forgot why - maybe because i became inactive again. Axis rejoined Oxyron - and DocD and Shylock stopped their scene-activity i think (im not so sure about shylock). in 1998 Axis and me decided to release a small game (no-AGA) for the amiga. i called up a guy called holger maier from one of the last still existing german amiga papermagazines (called "amiga special") and he was very interested in buying our game to release it as full version on the magazine disc. so we did... name of the game was "get out" btw and it was a breakout-clone. he asked us to do more games for his magazines but we never did. that was the last thing i released... today im doing websites and search-engine optimization - and sometimes i think of the golden days on the commodore 64/ 128 and on the amiga. too bad theres no homecomputer market anymore because i still dont like pc too much cause of all that incompatibilitys. who cares. sometimes i regret to have left the demoscene - and sometimes in nostalgic moments i still look at old demos and games. i remember all those nice ppl i met at partys and all the fun we had to work as a team. thats what i miss the most i think. i still dream of a meeting with all (or most) the old members from Gloom - Oxyron and Arsenic. maybe that will happen someday... eventually organizing something like that will be up to me. oh and i forgot to mention that i started to do a disc-mag called "monthly news" when Gloom was still alive. When Gloom became Oxyron i renamed the mag into "Pravda" some ppl liked my mag and voted it into the top 20 of other mags - but to be honest it was crap, not filled with too many interesting news because i was a bit lazy. i just made that mag to have some more releases to spread around... but... shhhh ;-) at some time i had the crazy idea to release another magazine with the name "scene observer" but i never did. some time later when tts wanted to do a discmag on his own i told him about the name "scene observer" and so he was the one doing it (good job btw.) and heres a list of partys i visited. there will be missing some i forgot, and im not really sure about the year and the right order: to be continued... Yazoo of ex-Oxyron (C64) and ex-Arsenic (Amiga) |
(c) 2006 by Yazoo 
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