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Semi-related: Back when Windows XP was new and LAN parties were still a thing, *that* was a party: http://ms.demo.org/98/ we are (were) family ...

the article mentions that this party is one of the biggest (or THe biggest) ever to take place in North America.

You must remember, however, that these parties have been going on in Europe on an incredibly larger scale for over ten years.

To them, 1,000 people is nothing, and they do so much more at their parties (Demo Competitions, music compos, and even some good ol' fashioned C64 compos. In fact, gaming (and warez trading) is outright banned in some of the parties. You've gotta have respect for these people who see the parties as a chance for social interaction, learning new stuff, meeting new people, and writing kick-ass code. I just don't get why we (americans) just like to shoot stuff - how unimaginative! Probably has something to to with the present administration....

AltParty is not always the most popular of the demoparties - usually there is Mekka, but this year they have cancelled it. Speaking from the perspective of an 8-bit GameBoy scener, I can only hope that this doesn't have a negative impact on the scene - luckily there's Breakpoint this year. 8-bits still rock!

--j
P.S. if any of you langaymers are trying to get into Breakpoint, good luck. we DON'T allow gamers in, you'll be deemed 'non-creative' and possible ejected.

RIP Mekka. We will miss you. Apparently the organizers had some disputes they couldn't resolve. However, if you missed Dreamhack, Breakpoint looks like it's going to be the party to go to, with many of the organizers from mekka and other demoparties. (Note: FPS people need not apply - no gaming allowed, no warez allowed. sorry.) Hope to see you there!

--joshua

You should check out Planet Potion from Mekka Symposium 02, Germany. This is the winner 64kb intro for Amiga which has an advanced 3d engine, speech synthesis (vocoder style) and lots of other effects perfectly blended together and synched with the music (the music is awesome considering it's 100% generated with code). All in less than 64kb of course.

This blew everybody's mind at the party and might very well be one of the greatest speed/size optimization feats of the year.

For the Amiga impaired, there's a divx you can enjoy (digital videocam filming the bigscreen, so it flickers a bit). It's ironic that the original is about 0.001% the size of this divx :)

(Ok, so it's a bit offtopic, but it's in tune with amazing feats with ancient hardware :)

The Gathering isn't meant to be so much a "gamer" party as it is supposed to be for the Demo Scene .

Good examples of what demos are are here if you have a win32 or DOS box around.

More parties like Mekka, Assembly, The Party and others exist.

You should check out the 4k-intro 'void3' by shiva and franky from mekka symposium 2k-1 (http://ms.demo.org). It got a 303-emulator, vocoder and a 3d-engine. (I've written a 4k raytracer called Hooray. You can download the full source from http://home.haugan.net/geir/download.html .)