Location

Revision is located in Saarbrücken (Germany) at the German/French border. It is the biggest pure demoscene event worldwide. The Party is held in a factory-hall that holds enough room for the over 1000 guests.

Amigas and other computers

If you're interested in obscure and rare computer systems, Revision did not disappoint. Besides a lot of PC-desktops and laptops, there were a lot of old-school systems. Quit a lot of people took their Amiga with them. Close to our place there was a table with rare Amiga systems. The Blizzard PPC for classic Amigas was up and running. One guy also used an Amiga 4000 with a PowerPC extension that was designed for 68K-Macs and a Voodoo graphics card. While this system won't run Amiga OS 4, some custom made software did run impressingly well. There were also some vampirized systems and of course a lot of good old classic Amigas. One of the more exotic system was a KC 85/4 a computer developed in the DDR. Individual Computers were tempting me to buy brand new Amiga and C64 hardware, so if you were looking for a turbocard for your Amiga or a new motherboard for your C64, you were at the right place.

People

Revision is big. While this gives you the opportunity to meet a lot of people you will obviously not be able to talk and drink with all of them. This means you might very well meet your favourite demo maker, but only if you're lucky. That said you'll meet a lot of interesting people and have fun. Party coding is also an option if you're together with some buddies you won't meet otherwise. The atmosphere is highly inspiring but also very loud. It is not the right place to do something very complex in my opinion.

Newschool

The quality of the compos was very high. This made watching the compos a lot of fun. It's a good place to release high quality prods. If you're beginner however, your entry might get a bit lost. Almost like a Revision tradition, also this year some releases achieved what was thought to be impossible. The 4k "Oscars Chair" for example achieved a level of detail and realism that has not been seen in a 4K yet. Also, absolutely jaw-dropping is the 64K "Silent Dims the Stars Above" and the 8K "One of those days" which shows a skier performing different stunts. The PC demo competition was solid, but a bit longish and repetitive. There was another demo starring Kevin from Spacebigs. Make sure to have a look at it. If you don’t know the other „Kevin demos“ yet, make sure to have a look at them also. You will definitely have a laugh.

Oldschool

The Old School demo competition did offer nothing ground-breaking. The overall quality of the demos was excellent though. Winner was the C64 Demo „We come in peace“. It’s a coproduction from the old rivals Censor Design and Fairlight. There were also two excellent Amstrad entries and other more obscure platforms competing. For example there was a demo for the already mentioned KC 85/4.

Amiga

There were several cool Amiga compos. Void probably managed a new record in the Amiga Intro competition with 4 entries . Oxyron presented a very good Amiga intro called Ochseneier with some new ideas for effects. I also liked the Overtone intro from Nah-Kolor. Definite highlight Amigawise was the Amiga demo compo. The winning demo "The Fall" from Lemon and the Deadliners is a true masterpiece. The theme of the demo is about the fall into the rabbit hole from Alice in Wonderland, which is a welcome variation to the usual science fiction or space based themes. Also have a look at invertebrates. It beats the better ranked AGA-demos in this competition in my opinion. Also, my mate Alientech made his debut with a little scroller called "Hello".

Conclusion

I could go on forever about this party. There's still so much not mentioned here. There were for example excellent music acts every night and live coding. There was also excellent tracked music released at Revision. Definitely watch (yes you read right) Wrecklamation from Hoffmann. But there were also a lot of great Amiga mods in the compo. If you're looking for a great place to meet people, watch the best demos and or just an excellent party, Revision is the place to go. The size of the party does bring some problems however. The sheer number of demos to watch and things to do can be overwhelming. A small party might be a better starting point if you're new to the scene. That said Revision is definitely more than worth visiting.