Public Incantation

By Adok/Hugi


Public Incantation was a diskmag by the Finnish group Data Warriors from the year 1994. The main editor was Fortune, the same man who also edited the Splash charts magazine later on. Two issues were released. They are available at scene.org. DOSBox will enable you to read the mag on a modern PC.


Public Incantation #1

Public Incantation #1 was released in April 1994. After starting the .exe, you would come to a spooky main menu with pictures of skulls. There you could select from among the sections Editorial, Scene Articles, Miscellaneous, RPG-Articles and Charts. There were not many articles in this issue. The scene-related ones dealt with the groups Data Warriors and Hard Spoiled. In addition, there was an interview with Otto Chrons of Virtual Visions. The RPG section contained only two fantasy short-stories. The charts was based on the votes of 10 persons. The categories were top ten groups, demos, coders, graphic artists, musicians, role playing games and computer games.

The controls in the mag are a bit unusual. In the menu everything works like normally, but inside the articles you scroll forward by pressing the right mouse button and backward by pressing the left mouse button. In order to return to the menu, you must press both mouse buttons at the same time. That's counter-intuitive and it should have been explained in the editorial.

All in all it's a rather modest issue.


Public Incantation #2

Public Incantation #2 (from October 1994) contained more articles than the previous issue. There was a rather big news corner. The group Capacala introduced itself. Demos and intros from Assembly 1994 were reviewed. Moreover, apart from a few fillers there were interviews with Fluz of FLP and with "Source of Error" of HS. There was no RPG corner in this issue (instead there was a corner named "Weird Stories"), and in the charts the role playing games category was dropped. There were only 14 voters in total.

This issue was better than the first one, but there would have still been much space for improvement.


Adok/Hugi