Interlude
First there was Menace. Now Psygnosis presents, check the D-N-A of every Demozoo vein....Blooood monkeeey...

Maybe you recognize the start (a Byte modified) followed by asteroid field bouncing the screen in Blood Money (1989)? In Demozoo, data is bouncing rapidly and constantly refining the shape of information. No possible time to settle down with static catchphases like "Where information meet preservation" inside a team production (DZ ad, 2018). I do expect more slogans to show up over time, but this is not the core. Menace has of course built up a strong team for this project. It's not a coincidence way of acting to achieve this. Enjoy the article by the co-founder of Demozoo. (Interlude written by Browallia)


Intro
Hey. I am Menace of Spaceballs, Accession, Keyboarders and Boozoholics, and I co-founded the demoscene website Demozoo with Gasman. I also co-organize the demoscene event Solskogen each year, that you should all come to, and in the past also helped organize Kindergarden, The Gathering, Eastergarden and not least Robinson Boozoe. I am also one of the file archive admins at scene.org, and I also admin ftp.modland.org and ftp.amigascne.org. I also make the diskmag Irregular Review with Slummy and h0ffman, where we snarkily talk about all the Amiga releases.

Origin
I was asked to write a little about the history of Demozoo - so, basically, I was a part of making the Amiga-only demoscene database Bitworld (also known as Kestra and later Janeway) for a number of years, but felt frustrated that none of the other people working on that were interested in expanding beyond the Amiga things. I'm a pretty platform-independent guy, I am interested in the _demoscene_, whether it is on an Amiga, on a Playstation, or a cutting edge pc. A while earlier, Gasman had launched Demozoo - which was basically at the time Pouët with some credits. For whatever reason, Demozoo wasn't around for long, but it was clear to me that it was clearly the platform that was closest to what I was interested in achieving, so I sent an email to Gasman, and proposed a partnership, if he was interested in starting it up again. I wanted a demoscene database that was complete - in that it covered graphics, music, ascii, all sorts of productions, and that it would be fun and easy to navigate. If you're interested in the further history, I propose you go and search for "demozoo revision seminar" on YouTube, and look at the seminar we presented there on where we were. Half a year later, in december 2013, we launched.

The Journey
Some of the things that I remember best from the experience was the mad rush to reach our internal goals in the last weeks before we launched. I got up at four in the morning to have a solid two hours work before waking the kids every day, and we got there in the end. I also remember all the "you can't do this, building this database from scratch, it's just not possible" naysayers. Never underestimate a determined motherfucker, I say.

The thing I am most proud of, I think, is the amazing community we've built over time around the site. Especially the gang that hangs out over on our Slack (http://slack.demozoo.org to get invited!), and the way everyone pitches in, helps, figures stuff out, and how we develop the site further pretty much out in the open. I am also very proud of how the site has evolved over time, and is continuing to. Our entire site is available on GitHub, so people can pitch in, as well as file issues or whatnot pretty easily. And I love the openness of the site. That we're empowering our users to edit, add, improve almost everything. See something wrong? Fix it!

The Continuation
Demozoo is my life's work. Not a day goes by that I am not poking at some details, researching something, putting a screenshot up, adding a small bit of trivia or some credits. I'm pretty blessed to be able to share it with the world, and have so many others participate in it.