Because of the recent success of Finnish gaming companies we’ve heard many people abroad asking the above mentioned question. Well… our answer is that the water is good. In addition to water we know at least one thing that has been influencing the success of Finnish gaming companies climb to the top ranks…
When two of our company’s employees Harri Hätinen & Olli Pelkonen won their category in Payback 2013 demoparty couple weeks ago, we noticed that actually each and every programmer (including the CEO) at Grand Cru has their roots in the demoscene. Next week we’ll be at GDC, meeting lots of the most hardcore people in the game dev industry, many of who we realized also have a solid demoscene background!
We decided to sit down with Harri & Olli and ask couple of question about the party and demoscene in Finland.
So how was the party?
The payback demoparty was a quite small happening for demoscene activists worldwide, held in luxurious building with swimming pool and saunas, located by the sea in the most beautiful part of Helsinki.
Like all demoparties, it was a weekend full of computer art, and that’s why the party place was equipped with decent audio system able to deafen the whole neighborhood and enough projector power to make batman jealous.
How did you guys end up doing your winner demo?
Creating demos is ongoing process: trying out new techniques, exploring interesting algorithms and visualizing things no one has seen before. This particular demo included none of those, but it was built on top of the oppressive atmosphere created by music. Both composing the music and programming the visuals were done simultaneously, both sides affecting each other during the progress in a most agile way. Finalizing it all was done at the party place, which lightly disturbed our hard partying with friends and colleagues for some hours.
Could you tell us a little bit about the history of demoscene in Finland?
Finnish demoscene, as the demoscene itself, has its roots on 80’s piracy groups which started attaching their own advertisements into pirated games. These advertisements became the art of their own and thus demoscene was born, leading the way of using full potential of computers and beyond until these people started using their skills for the game development.
Finland happens to be a country with as much demoscene activity and brilliant talent as countries with tenfold number of people.Nowadays we’re quite organized, having own club houses in couple of towns and some kind of activities almost every week.
So how many of your current colleagues have you guys met while participating in the demoscene back in the days?
Sometimes it feels it’d be much easier to tell apart the ones who haven’t participated ever nor have had any contacts to demoscene, especially when talking about game industry veterans. Here at Grand Cru we have several people who have been making plenty of competition winning and some of the most celebrated demos during the last three decades.
It isn’t any coincidence that almost every Finnish game company has some demoscene veterans and the Finnish gaming industry is prospering.
More info on demoscene, check out the demoscene article on Wikipedia.
Here are some samples, which were made by Grand Cru programmers and their crews:
Olli & Harri, PC-Demo, 1st at Payback 2013:
Jarno Wuolijoki, PC-64k intro, 3rd at Juhla 1996:
Mikko Wilkman, PC-Demo, 1st at Juhla 1995:
Markus Pasula, PC-Demo, 2nd at State of the Art 2002:
Mikko Lindstedt, PC-Demo, 2nd at Breakpoint 2005:
Roope Kangas, C64-Demo, 2nd at X2006:
Janne Kaistinen, PC-Demo, Assembly 2005: