The Demoscene was (and is) a horde of chaotic people, mostly unstructured, loud and unkempt, with high alcohol levels and bad manners. A wonderful resource for creativity with audio-visual works of art as a return. In short: The scene is a charming bunch of creative freaks who formed and accomplished a unique subculture. Despite this, in the early years, even on bad hair days, the scene was lacking organization. When the first visible structures emerged, and demo parties became more popular as an important meeting place and opportunity for competition, many sceners had already grown up. Entering the job, founding own families, finding new hobbies. By the end of the 90s the slow decay of the scene was obvious.

The infirmity was enough reason for an attempt to bundle the scene and to give a contact point for orientation and mutual contact, and to use the still young Internet as a platform. The idea for "SCENET" was born, and shortly afterwards, in the beginning of 1999, the website was already accessible. As a scene gateway, the web portal was supposed to keep the community together and connect them. In fact, however, the story began a little earlier.



Five years before, around 1994, when the Internet could not even wear children's shoes, the two Amiga sceners, Igo/The Black Lotus and Cesium/Session, had created and published smaller lists of email addresses of active Demosceners independently of each other. Around 1995 the Hungarian Amiga scene artist Lord/Absolute^Impulse^Crimson Jihad bundled the collections in an already quite impressive list, which became increasingly dusty due to its increasing inactivity. The list was finally adopted by the two scene journalists, Ghandy/Gods^Darkage and Dire/Eremation, with the agreement of Lord. It formed the basis for the SCENET project published in early 1999. However, the web portal should be more than just a bare listing of e-mail addresses. The aim was to become a centre of this subculture. Sceners should be able to connect with each other at this contact point and communicate together with the outside world. Interested readers should be provided with information about the Demoscene in a bundled form. The scene was understood as a whole: Amiga and PC, C64, CPC and other 8-bit computers went hand in hand for the first time. In the years of stumbling scene events like Assembly and The Party, SCENET was supposed to send a sign of life outside.



New areas such as the extensive and logically sorted collections of scene-relevant homepages, FTP servers, newsgroups and IRC channels were quickly built up. Numerous active employees - editors, graphicians, ascii artists, developers, and above all the visitors, who gave regular feedback, were to be credited that SCENET quickly became the most popular international scene website of its time. In the summer of 1999, SCENET was equipped with its own server, which was in deed quite expensive at the time, and it was possible to grow continuously in way of quantity and quality. With the help of tools and a lot of handmade work links and e-mails were verified and the content gradually expanded: scene parties, acronyms, slogans, ICQ numbers or Telnet IPs from Bulletin Board Systems flowed into the project, which had since been released under the label of the Amiga group Darkage.

And finally, the service portal SCENET became a real online magazine for the Demoscene, the largest of its kind at the time. About 100 interviews with scene stars like Moby, Jester, Mr. Hyde and Antony, and over 300 articles offered material to read from all areas of the Demoscene. All possible and impossible aspects about the scene, party reports, demo reviews, comments, editor's hideouts and special areas for each scene on Amiga, PC, Atari, C64 and other systems. Thanks to 150 supporters, SCENET became a vivid magazine that was updated daily.

A paradise for readers and scene lovers. SCENET had a golden future ahead of it if it hadn't been for the big crash in 2002. A personal dispute between Dire and Ghandy led to the cooperation being discontinued. As always, a girl was to blame for the shit. SCENET was dead as a doornail from one day to the next. The content was split up and ended up in two different web portals, but neither diskmag.de nor scenia.net survived the solo run unharmed. Both died a painful starvation.
"In retrospect, SCENET was an incredibly great project that received huge support from the scene," Dire recalls good old days. And Ghandy adds: "No woman, no cry", to quote Bob Marley. Seriously spoken: It’s been a good time. But with software like Telegram, Wire, Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp, only to name a few, nowadays nobody needs to know the e-mail-address anyway.” Regard the complete website SCENET as a pioneer for projects such as pouet.net, scene.org or Demozoo, which now are the first places to go for sceners.



What would SCENET itself look like today, would it not have fallen victim to an unnecessary dispute? Probably quite different than at that time, because the scene has shrunk and the need for information is less than before. Network systems such as Facebook groups can now be used interactively to stay in touch - SCENET might have introduced such a feature early on. But perhaps SCENET would come to an end by now at the latest, because the General Data Protection Regulation, which is supposed to protect personal rights in the European Union, would prohibit a public collection of personal data such as e-mail addresses without the consent of all parties involved. Now at the latest, the original meaning of SCENET would be legally razed to the ground. The fun would be wiped out in one fell swoop. A portal like SCENET would have an important task though, because the scene suffers more than ever from a weak unity and above all from a lack of public interest. It would be more important than ever for the Demoscene to own a strong fixed star.