Scenial

By Adok/Hugi


Scenial was a diskmag by the Belgian (Flemish) group Beans, with Venior being the "prime" editor and Lord Cyrix the coder of the engine. Three issues were released, #1, #2 and #4; number 3 was skipped. Scenial #1 does not work on my current PC, but the other issues work well with DOSBox. The Scenial issues were downloaded from scene.org more than 3000-4000 times each.


Scenial #1

Scenial #1 was released in September 1994. What later became the group Beans was called "Access Denied" back then. The subtitle of Scenial #1 was "The Real Thing". As one could read in the mag, the main persons behind the new diskmag, namely the coder Lord Cyrix and the chief editor Venior, had already had the idea to make a PC diskmag before Imphobia's first issue came out, in 1991. Now their dream had come true: Scenial was born.

Already this issue featured quite a lot of articles and contributions by well-known people, including the Future Crew stars Pixel and Purple Motion. Yet the quality of the graphics was pretty low, the texts were hard to read since the background colours had influence on the foreground colour (like in old Daskmig issues), and there was an annoying intro consisting of a logo, some colour effects, the credits and a couple of blurred 3d objects that was always played after starting the magazine without any way to stop it.

Content-wise, Scenial was slightly different from the other diskmags of that time. A serious, objective writing style was deliberately avoided. The magazine contained lots of polemics, brutal flames, and arrogant elite talk crowded with four-letter-words. There was even an anarchist corner with subjects like how to get food for free or how to commit suicide. Venior's arguments against democracy should, however, not be taken entirely seriously; the whole magazine is, as the staff keeps emphasizing all the time, for pure entertainment only.

"Pure Entertainment" was also the name of one of the sections in Scenial issue one. This one was a non-scene corner deadling with topics like how to get to fuck a girl easily. The other sections were "Home Base" (the editor's ramblings), "Scene Hall" (the more serious scene-related texts), "The Lobby" (place for all kinds of rants about the demo scene), "Serious Computainment", "Fun Computainment" (general computer related), "Technical Warp", "Interview Torturing", "Charts", the already mentioned "Anarchy Class" and "Greetings".

Scenial #1 also featured a review of the Imphobia disk magazine. The author, Venior, behaved with reserve. While obvious flaws were criticised, the good points about Imphobia got the praise they deserved. For that reason, it may appear strange to most readers that it was Scenial who would later turn out to be Imphobia's greatest enemy - and which would lead to one of the few mag wars in the history of the PC Scene.


About the Imphobia vs. Scenial "war"

If you looked behind the scenes, you could notice a remarkable personal fight between Darkness, the Imphobia main editor, and Venior that had been going on for a longer time. In one of the first Imphobia issues you can spot an interview with the group Access Denied. Their half-childish elitist behaviour, such as sending not only greetings but also "fuckings" to other demo groups in their prods, was then heavily criticised by the Imphobia editors. And it remained a reason for occasional arguments for a long time. Even in Imphobia #10 Darkness still refered to that old interview, stating that as Scenial showed, their attitude had not changed at all.

There are two main reasons for Scenial's disdain of Imphobia. One is political. While Darkness' native language is French, the Scenial staff members come from the Dutch part of Belgium. Like many of the Flemish people, Venior does not like the French-speaking people.

The second is that Scenial wanted to start a "war" with Imphobia to get attention in the scene and in this way gain new readers. For this reason, Imphobia tried to ignore Scenial as long as possible. However, this was not possible for ever.

In the beginning of 1995, a fake bugfix for Imphobia #9 appeared in the scene. The file_id.diz said it had been made by an unknown group called "Templar" and would fix a cursor bug. When this "bugfix" was executed, suddenly a new, fake title picture appeared in Imphobia #9, and some additional typos appeared in the mag. For instance, Imphobia's coder "Wizard" became a "Lizard".

Darkness of Imphobia immediately spread a newsletter warning from the "bugfix". He also stated that the fix might do some more harm than just modifying some words; perhaps even a virus was included in the code. As it turned out later, the bugfix was, however, harmless. It also turned out that the creator of this fake bugfix was Lord Cyrix, the coder of Scenial and then member of the Belgian division of Surprise!Production.

Because of a request from the S!P organizers, who did not want any damage to the reputation of their group solely because of a stupid action of one of their Belgian members, Imphobia did not immediately publish this information. However, when Venior started spreading "fake rumours" around the scene about Imphobia having published a letter he had not written under his name, Darkness felt forced to publish a second clarification newsletter with several BBS logs which was to prove that the published letter had really been written by Venior.

After being kicked out of S!P, Venior and Lord Cyrix founded Beans.


Scenial #2

Scenial #2, from May 1996, was already released under the Beans label. At about the same time when Beans was founded, the Polish division of S!P left their mother group and formed Pulse together with the French artists from Infiny. Beans

managed to persuade their ex-groupmates to stop releasing their Polish/English magazine Bad News and to contribute to the second issue of Scenial instead. With music by Scorpik and graphics by Niko and Teevaan, Scenial #2 looked much better than its ugly predecessor. Also, the intro was skipped in favour of

a good-looking title picture showing a woman's face and the logos of the two groups (Beans & Pulse). The fact that it took the staff almost two years to make Scenial #2 was the reason why many articles were outdated. That is why the party report section, for instance, was named "Ancient Party Reviews". In general, not much about the writing style and the type of contents had changed since issue one. Apart from the party reports two new sections were introduced, "Culture" (about the Chechnya war, boosting memory with drugs and French fries in reality being Belgian fries) and "Music Corner" (with articles on grunge, punk rock and other things). Also a few articles by the pretty experienced writer Unreal, who had previously supported Imphobia and Bad News, brought some variety into the mag.

In the article "Hello from Unreal", we can read that Unreal decided to stop writing for Imphobia as he was getting bored by the often repeating background graphics made by always the same graphic artist, the section structure that had been kept unchanged for a couple of issues, and the far too serious writing style. He enjoyed the freedom he had in the pure entertainment magazine Scenial. However, I was told that this anti-Imphobia part had been added to the article by the Scenial staff. Unreal got quite upset about that and later decided to write for Imphobia again.

The interviews were conducted with Brian of Legend Design, Necros of Five Musicians, Otto Chrons and Ryan Cramer of Five Musicians. There were also charts with the categories: groups, demos, intros, coders, musicians, graphic artists and countries.

This issue looked fine, had good English and also got some positive feedback from the scene, but some readers were shocked by the anarchist corner and the dirty words that were used all over the mag.

A two-column layout like in Imphobia was used. Actually the engine supported smooth scrolling, but using DOSBox this doesn't work. Here the articles scroll the same way as in Dragon #4. This has the effect that the last page of some of the articles cannot be read.


Scenial #4

In July 1997 Scenial #4 was released. The infofile of Scenial #4 claimed that issue 3, with the subtitle "The Original", had been released six months before, but in fact Scenial #3 does not exist.

Scenial #4 was mainly a satirical magazine with only few serious articles, such as Luxemburg and Norwegian scene report, some coding tutorials (Bezier curves, lenses, tweaked video modes) and the interviews (Niko of Pulse, Barti of Nooon, DJ Paradise and Sofie). A striking example of this was the advert section.

The adverts had been taken from Imphobia and modified to fool the mentioned people. According to these fake adverts, various people, among them Scenial's former collaborator Unreal, were living in India, others were trading sexpics, and some who wrote "No warez please!" in their original adverts were looking for "warez only". The reader could also find instructions on how to make decent "Orange" juice or a true "Melon Dezign" melon. Somebody announced the foundation of a group called "Europe" whom everybody could join; Future Crew, Orange, Nooon, and others would already be part of it. The invitation ended with an ominous Egyptian address. Obviously that was a parody to the European Union.

From an technical and artistic point of view, "Scenial 4: The Kick Off", the self-proclaimed winner of the Wired 1997 diskmag competition, was very good. The background graphics looked very much like in issue 2 but were more colorful. Some simple effects had been added to the zine. Also, coloured cliparts could be embedded into the articles; this was a pretty innovative feature, as the only PC diskmag that had featured cliparts before had been Daskmig.

The bug from issue 2 that prevented seeing the last page of some of the articles could be circumvented in Scenial #4 since it was now possible to switch between "smooth scrolling" and page flipping.

The attached votesheet for Scenial #5 had been ripped off from Imphobia and included the poll question "What should be improved in Imphobia? Any suggestions?" The possible answers were: "I think the articles are way too serious", "Isn't that a music disk?", "I hate the spelling errors (twenty spelling errors per article)", "Less Clean & Cool, more Dirty & Bastard", "It should be more boring", "I can't make up my mind, I guess all of'm".

Also in the editorial, Venior continued his anti-Imphobia campaign. "There are only two diskmags - Imphobia and Scenial", was the essence of what he said. He concluded with an appeal to all sceners to start making new magazines and support every mag except Imphobia in order to finally break the monopoly of Imphobia.


Scenial #5?

This appeal came pretty late. Imphobia had already stopped releasing a year before. With the end of Imphobia, also Scenial seems to have become obsolete. "Scenial 5: The Generator", promised to be released "soon" after Scenial #4, never came.

I had contacts with Venior in 1999/2000. He told me that he was working on Scenial #5 and even on Scenial #6. But I never got to see even a sneak preview of one of these magazines.


Adok/Hugi