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Spaceballs (demogroup)

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Spaceballs is a Norwegian Amiga demogroup, originally formed in Halden in 1988-1989. The group is particularly known for its demos in the early 1990s, such as Wayfarer, State of the Art and 9 Fingers, which won awards at international demo parties. It is the oldest existing demogroup in Norway.[1]

History

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The group was founded by Rune Winsevik, a young computer enthusiast, and named after the 1987 Mel Brooks film Spaceballs. Winsevik used the pseudonym "Dark Helmet", inspired by the villain of the film. The group was soon joined by Lone Starr, Major Asshole, Defender (later President Screw), Yoghurt and Vinnie. Most of the other members also based their nicknames on characters from the film.[2][3]

Spaceballs began producing and releasing demos in 1990. In June 1991, the group presented one of their first demos, Spasmolytic, at the Amega Party 1991, held in Porsgrunn. The demo finished in 5th place, though it received positive feedback due to the coding by Lone Starr and Major Asshole and the music composed by Vinnie, despite the group not having a graphics artist. In Lone Star's case, people were impressed by his ability to make his own 3D vector graphics engine at a young age, faster than the other older coders.[4] In April 1992, Spaceballs presented Wayfarer at The Gathering in Lillestrøm, which ranked in 1st place and won.[3][5][1]

Spaceballs' first breakthrough was State of the Art, released at The Party.[6][7] The demo, produced between the summer of 1992 and December, made use of graphic effects and footage of dancing women synchronised to techno music, using a trackloader.[7][1] Lone Starr was inspired by an animation created by Major Asshole with Deluxe Paint to program a genlock overlay tool.[8][1] Jannicke Selmer-Olsen (who was dating Lone Starr at the time) and Anne-Lene Løvig Glomsrød were specially requested since they were entrants to disco dancing competitions at the time.[9][1] The group created the demo by videotaping the dancers' movements and converting the footage to vector data using Lone Starr's tool,[10][11] with the footage itself rendered via geometric shapes.[12] They also vectorised dance scenes from music videos by Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch, shown on MTV, and the women from the title sequence of the James Bond film Licence to Kill.[6][10] In order to fully achieve the effects, the group hacked the Amiga's chipset to use the hardware's processing power. The demo also used memory from an extension port instead of the original Amiga 500.[13] The spot illustrations and graphics were done by TMB Designs, while the song "Condom Corruption" was composed by Travolta.[1]

Despite ranking 1st place and winning, opinion was split on State of the Art. It was well-received and considered impressive at the time, though other demogroups were jealous of the demo, criticising it for its focus on visuals and usage of techno music, compared to other demos which focused on outperforming each other,[6][14][7] and arguing that it did not rely on realtime processing.[15] The demo would attain a cult following in recent years. It only ran on one floppy disk on an Amiga 500, but crashed when running on the Amiga 1000 and Amiga 1200. In 1993, the demo was fixed by Stingray from Skid Row, another demogroup, in order to make it run properly on other Amiga models,[16][1] during which he added a message at the end about the demo winning, calling its coding "lame" and its trackloader "useless".[12][7] State of the Art was broadcast on MTV and other television channels,[17][18][1] such as France Régions 3 on the program Micro Kid's.[19] Other releases by the group included Mobile: Destination Unknown at The Gathering in April 1993 (3rd place), 9 Fingers at The Party in December 1993 (4th place), and The Last Finger at The Gathering in April 1995 (2nd place),[20] with the group themselves competing with other demogroups. Lone Starr came up with the name for 9 Fingers when he broke one of his fingers during production, and thus had to finish the coding with only nine fingers.[21] The footage of the dancers was recorded by Major Asshole, with each frame digitised and traced using the NewTek DigiView and Lone Starr's program. The demo utilised high-resolution polygons and details on the dancers instead of silhouettes.[22] 9 Fingers ran on two floppy disks and was also popular, although not as much as its predecessor.[23][24]

As a result of Spaceball's success, other demosceners left their groups to join them, including Danny, Slummy, SuperNao, Facet, and Magnar/Lizard.[25] In April 1993, the group also recruited Lord Helmet, Perplex and Kingpin, the producers of the disk magazine R.A.W, for which they released nine issues.[1] In 1994, Spaceballs and another demogroup, Reality, had plans to organise the demoparty Somewhere in Holland in the Maaspoort in 's-Hertogenbosch,[26] but it was eventually cancelled. In 1995-1997, Spaceballs' early success faded as many members left the group to work at game companies,[27][18] such as Funcom (on Winter Gold) and Innerloop Studios (on Joint Strike Fighter); Lone Starr, going under his real name Paul Endre Endresen, used his program on Winter Gold to convert real video footage into filtered polygon graphics.[28][29] During this time, Reality released a parody of 9 Fingers called One Finger at Symposium in April, which ranked in 5th place.[30] Slummy, the group's only remaining coder,[27] quietly released some demos, such as Trip '96, Pinch, FastLoff and The October Session. Following a long period of absence, Yoghurt reorganised the group in early 1997,[31][27] hiring new members (Zack, Duck-Hunter, Loverbee, Hardfire, Boo, Psalt, Thor, Useless, Wipe) and bringing back some of the old members (Kingpin, Major Asshole, Sator, Scott, Vinnie). Spaceballs ranked in 1st place in the intro and demo categories at many demoparties, including The Gathering with Hippie Machinery and Quakeroo in 1998, Fusion Is No Good For Me and Supermonster in 1999, Hypnopolis in 2000, and BadAss 5000 in 2001; Kindergarden with N2O in 1998, and Remedy with Popjunkie and Deja-Vu with Sci-Fi and BetaMAX in 1999.[32]

In 2007, members Useless and Loverbee formed a synthpop band, Supercraft.[33][34] Jannicke Selmer-Olsen worked for the Norwegian Design Council,[35] and currently runs Solgård Design with her husband Øivind Solgård-Jensen in Drøbak,[36] working for brands such as Lerum, Kolonihagen, Mesterbakeren and Baxt.[37] As of 2024, the group still remains active to this day.[1]

Members

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Current members

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  • Yoghurt/Joghurt a.k.a. Tomas Andersen (composer, graphics artist, coder)[38][31]
  • Slummy a.k.a. Remi Johan Pedersen (coder, graphics artist, composer, co-organiser)[39]
  • Menace a.k.a. Glenn Lunder (graphics artist, co-organiser, editor)
  • Useless a.k.a. Egil Thomas Hansen (composer)[40][41]
  • Boo a.k.a. Ulf Dahl (graphics artist, composer)[42]
  • Duck-Hunter a.k.a. Dihn Hai Nguyen (composer)
  • tEiS a.k.a. Craig Bynum (composer)
  • Loverbee a.k.a. Geir-Arne Johansen (composer)[33]
  • Thor a.k.a. Mahavishnu Nisse Borin (graphics artist)
  • Zack a.k.a. Arild Ravlosve (graphics artist)
  • Hardfire a.k.a. Johan Roirand (composer, graphics artist)[43]
  • lug00ber a.k.a. Ola Christian Gundelsby (composer)
  • Exocet a.k.a. Hervé Piton (graphics artist)
  • Dominei a.k.a. Reid Hauke Tønnesen (composer)

Former members

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  • Dark Helmet a.k.a. Rune Winsevik (founder, graphics artist, coder)
  • Lone Starr a.k.a. Paul Endre Endresen (graphics artist, coder, editor)[2][29]
  • Major Asshole a.k.a. Sverre Rekvin (coder, graphics artist)[44]
  • Defender/President Screw a.k.a. Andre Hubert Johansen (coder, graphics artist)
  • Vinnie a.k.a. Pål Granum (composer)
  • Sator a.k.a. Tom Erik Larsen (graphics artist, editor)
  • Scott a.k.a. Trond Christer Berg (composer)
  • Travolta a.k.a. Rune Svendsen (composer)
  • TMB Designs a.k.a. Tore Blystad (graphics artist)
  • Danny a.k.a. Danny Geursten (graphics artist)[45]

Timeline

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Selected productions

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  • Spasmolytic (5th at The Amega Party, June 1991)[4]
  • Wayfarer (winner of The Gathering, April 1992)[5]
  • State of the Art (winner of The Party, December 1992)[6][7][1]
  • Mobile: Destination Unknown (3rd at The Gathering, April 1993)[20]
  • 9 Fingers (4th at The Party, December 1993)[24]
  • The Last Finger (2nd at The Gathering, April 1995)
  • Hippie Machinery (winner of The Gathering, April 1998)
  • Hypnopolis (winner of The Gathering, April 2000)
  • King of Fuck (2nd at Assembly, August 2001)

Further reading

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  • Botz, Daniel (15 June 2014). Kunst, Code und Maschine: Die Ästhetik der Computer-Demoszene, Germany: transcript Verlag. ISBN 978-3-8394-1749-2.
  • Maher, Jimmy (26 January 2018). The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga, Cambridge: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-2625-3569-4.
  • Boucourt, Christophe (23 February 2021). Demoscene: The Amiga Years: Volume 1 (1984-1993), France: Éditions 64K. ISBN 978-2-9575-0800-6.

References

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  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Balabanov, Marin (1 January 2024). "Demo Beats and MTV Vibes: History and Analysis of State of the Art by Spaceballs". Marin Comics. Retrieved 22 March 2025.
  2. ^ a b R.A.W 02: Interview with Lone Starr, New Wave and Pure Metal Coders, 22 February 1992.
  3. ^ a b Tamás, Polgár (17 April 2016). Freax: The Brief History of the Computer Demoscene. CSW-Verlag. pp. 338–339. ISBN 9783941287976. Retrieved 25 May 2025.
  4. ^ a b Boucourt, Christophe (23 February 2021). Demoscene: The Amiga Years: Volume 1 (1984-1993). Éditions 64K. p. 426. ISBN 9782957508006. In 1991, during the Amega Party 1991, Spaceballs introduced Spasmolytic, a demo which ranked 5th in its category. Lone Starr was only 15 then, and the very clean vector engine he had programmed was better than more experienced programmers, leaving a lasting impression on the demoscene. Thanks to their fantastic coding skills, Spaceballs could compensate for the lack of graphic designers.
  5. ^ a b Boucourt, Christophe (23 February 2021). Demoscene: The Amiga Years: Volume 1 (1984-1993). Éditions 64K. p. 426. ISBN 9782957508006. In 1992, Spaceballs made several productions such as Spaceballs Memtro and Made In the Name of the Schwartz, but Wayfarer won the competition at The Gathering '92 in Lillestrom.
  6. ^ a b c d Botz, Daniel (15 June 2014). Kunst, Code und Maschine: Die Ästhetik der Computer-Demoszene. transcript Verlag. pp. 297–298. ISBN 9783839417492. Retrieved 25 May 2025.
  7. ^ a b c d e Maher, Jimmy (26 January 2018). The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga. MIT Press. pp. 188–191. ISBN 9780262535694. Retrieved 25 May 2025.
  8. ^ Boucourt, Christophe (23 February 2021). Demoscene: The Amiga Years: Volume 1 (1984-1993). Éditions 64K. p. 243. ISBN 9782957508006. One year before State of the Art was released, Major Asshole paid a visit to Lone Starr to show him an animation created manually with Deluxe Paint after borrowing a genlock from Dark Helmet. There were only a few images, but the main idea was there. Inspired by this, Lone Starr worked on a vector drawing package that could not only create, but morph, zoom and move objects across 4 bitplanes. The tool took 5 months to finalise, and it was still a manual process to create the vectors.
  9. ^ Spaceballs (29 December 1993). 9 Fingers (Amiga 500). Spaceballs. Level/area: Credits.
  10. ^ a b Boucourt, Christophe (23 February 2021). Demoscene: The Amiga Years: Volume 1 (1984-1993). Éditions 64K. pp. 244–245. ISBN 9782957508006. One second of animation = more than one hour of drawing. Major Asshole had a VHS video recorder that took video snapshots of very good quality. We used it to scan through MTV videos and manually drew the contours of what we wanted to capture. Lone Starr programmed drawing software specifically for this demo. Unfortunately, this software has been lost since.
  11. ^ Boucourt, Christophe (23 February 2021). Demoscene: The Amiga Years: Volume 1 (1984-1993). Éditions 64K. p. 247. ISBN 9782957508006. I developed a piece of software to trace vectors from digitised images. Lone Starr used it quite a lot. It was a faster method, but it still took a lot of time. All videos of the demo are filmed by members of Spaceballs. The women dancers were girls that Lone Starr knew.
  12. ^ a b Green, Dave (July 1, 1995). "Wired July 1995: Demo or Die!" (PDF). Wired. Retrieved May 25, 2025.
  13. ^ Hartmann, Doreen (14 April 2014). Animation in the Demoscene (PDF). Retrieved 2025-05-31. Although the pictures and animations were not computer-generated in itself, creating this demo meant digging deep into the platform specifics. Spaceballs had to hack the Amiga's chip architecture in order to use the processing power of the hardware to full capacity. The demo used memory of an additional extension port rather than request memory from the original Amiga 500 platform.
  14. ^ Tamás, Polgár (17 April 2016). Freax: The Brief History of the Computer Demoscene. CSW-Verlag. p. 356. ISBN 9783941287976. Retrieved 25 May 2025.
  15. ^ Furmanski, Todd (2017). Media of the Abstract: Exploring Axioms, Techniques, and Histories of Procedural Content Generation. Media Arts and Practice. PhD dissertation, University of Southern California. p. 68.
  16. ^ Boucourt, Christophe (23 February 2021). Demoscene: The Amiga Years: Volume 1 (1984-1993). Éditions 64K. p. 246. ISBN 9782957508006. As the demo only worked on a fast RAM Amiga, Skid Row managed to fix the issue before we had time to solve the bug.
  17. ^ Fish, Rumble (10 December 2012). "State of the Art by Spaceballs". Nexus23 Brøderbund. Retrieved 31 March 2025.
  18. ^ a b Sickenger, Ricki (8 March 2023). "Demo: Spaceballs – State Of The Art (Amiga, 1992)". Spillhistorie.no. Retrieved 19 March 2025.
  19. ^ Boucourt, Christophe (23 February 2021). Demoscene: The Amiga Years: Volume 1 (1984-1993). Éditions 64K. p. 426. ISBN 9782957508006. That same year, their most famous production, State of the Art, was released. This demo left a lasting impression in the Amiga world; it was even featured on French national TV channel FR3, in the Micro Kid's TV series and on MTV.
  20. ^ a b Boucourt, Christophe (23 February 2021). Demoscene: The Amiga Years: Volume 1 (1984-1993). Éditions 64K. p. 426. ISBN 9782957508006. In 1993, two of Spaceballs' productions respectively ranked third at The Gathering II with Mobile: Destination Unknown, and fourth at The Party II with 9 Fingers.
  21. ^ Boucourt, Christophe (23 February 2021). Demoscene: The Amiga Years: Volume 1 (1984-1993). Éditions 64K. p. 428. ISBN 9782957508006. Lone Starr broke one of his fingers while creating this production, hence the name 9 Fingers.
  22. ^ Boucourt, Christophe (23 February 2021). Demoscene: The Amiga Years: Volume 1 (1984-1993). Éditions 64K. pp. 424–425. ISBN 9782957508006. A "making of" video for the demo showed how the Spaceballs team had made the images, but details about the real-time rendering process were not given. However, here are some hints: the demo read a sequence of images and computed graphical data at runtime, and then created polygons and used the blitter to fill them up. Once the video was converted into a bitmap with a program, lines could be created at runtime, without requiring a lot of disk space. Even though this sounds simple today, it required a lot of work then.
  23. ^ Tamás, Polgár (17 April 2016). Freax: The Brief History of the Computer Demoscene. CSW-Verlag. p. 380. ISBN 9783941287976. Retrieved 25 May 2025.
  24. ^ a b Boucourt, Christophe (23 February 2021). Demoscene: The Amiga Years: Volume 1 (1984-1993). Éditions 64K. p. 424. ISBN 9782957508006. 9 Fingers was the sequel of State of the Art, and became a cult demo for a reason: this demo was a real video clip that could have been broadcast on MTV. It was not a mere animation with graphics, but also a real technical feat that could be run on an Amiga 500 and on only two floppy disks.
  25. ^ Boucourt, Christophe (23 February 2021). Demoscene: The Amiga Years: Volume 1 (1984-1993). Éditions 64K. p. 427. ISBN 9782957508006. In 1994, Spaceballs attracted other talented people such as Danny, SuperNao, Facet and Lizard. They eventually contributed to productions such as SIH'94 Invitation and Supernao Tapes.
  26. ^ "Amiga News Juin 1994 n° 69: Somewhere in Holland 2" (PDF). Amiga News. 1 June 1994. Retrieved 19 June 2025.
  27. ^ a b c Boucourt, Christophe (23 February 2021). Demoscene: The Amiga Years: Volume 1 (1984-1993). Éditions 64K. pp. 427–428. ISBN 9782957508006. From 1995 to 1997, a lot of transitions affected the group; quite a few coders were poached to work commercially for software firms, while other members decided to leave the group, apart from Yoghurt who decided to reorganise the remaining staff. Despite these changes, Spaceballs kept enjoying a lot of success; thanks to a very good coder, Slummy, Jobbo TG'95 54K Intro finished first in the Intro 64K category, and Babenoise also finished first in the Intros 4K category.
  28. ^ Funcom (November 1995). Winter Gold (Super Nintendo Entertainment System). Nintendo. Level/area: Staff roll.
  29. ^ a b Boucourt, Christophe (23 February 2021). Demoscene: The Amiga Years: Volume 1 (1984-1993). Éditions 64K. p. 425. ISBN 9782957508006. 25 years ago, when animation was still in its infancy, Paul Endresen (Lone Starr) later joined Funcom, a software firm, and helped develop the Winter Gold game on SNES. He used the same technique to convert real images into computer-generated images.
  30. ^ Boucourt, Christophe (23 February 2021). Demoscene: The Amiga Years: Volume 1 (1984-1993). Éditions 64K. p. 426. ISBN 9782957508006. In 1996, the Reality Group made a parody of 9 Fingers with its demo One Finger.
  31. ^ a b Showtime 7: In Focus: Yoghurt of Spaceballs, Darkage, 6 November 1997.
  32. ^ Boucourt, Christophe (23 February 2021). Demoscene: The Amiga Years: Volume 1 (1984-1993). Éditions 64K. p. 428. ISBN 9782957508006. From 1998 to 2000, Spaceballs remained at the top, especially in the intro category, but they also maintained a presence in the demo category by being nominated at The Gathering '98, Kindergarden '98, The Gathering '99, Remedy 1999, Deja-Vu II Party, The Gathering 2000 and The Gathering 2001.
  33. ^ a b Strand, Tommy Rølvåg (January 2009). "Amigaguiden 18. Årgang - UTG 55: Scene: Useless of Spaceballs" (PDF). Amigaguiden. Retrieved 18 June 2025.
  34. ^ Bernard (28 November 2024). "ETH launches 'The Ghost Of Your Name' single – Out now". Side-Line. Archived from the original on 26 April 2025. Retrieved 27 May 2025.
  35. ^ "Min Kake". Norsk Designråd. Archived from the original on 9 February 2009. Retrieved 9 February 2025.
  36. ^ "Vi skaper lønnsom vekst for merkevarer". Solgård Design. Archived from the original on 1 November 2020. Retrieved 27 May 2025.
  37. ^ "Kontakt Oss". Solgård Design. Archived from the original on 21 January 2025. Retrieved 28 May 2025.
  38. ^ Magbox 4: Interview with Yoghurt of Spaceballs, Balance, 30 January 1993.
  39. ^ D.I.S.C 12: Interview with Slummy of Spaceballs, Gods and IRIS, January 2002.
  40. ^ Strand, Tommy Rølvåg (January 2009). "Amigaguiden 18. Årgang - UTG 55: Scene: Useless of Spaceballs" (PDF). Amigaguiden. Retrieved 18 June 2025.
  41. ^ Strand, Tommy Rølvåg (January 2009). "Amiga Guide Issue 1 - 2009 - Volume 3: Scene: Useless of Spaceballs" (PDF). Amigaguiden. Retrieved 1 July 2025.
  42. ^ SeenPoint 03: Interview with Boo, Sardonyx, August 1996.
  43. ^ Retro 2: Interview with Hardfire, Instinct, 15 January 1998.
  44. ^ "Sverre Rekvin on Twitter: ""Demoscene: The Amiga years" was the last book I bought. Here you can read about my great achievements as a coder in "Spaceballs", about 30 years ago."". Twitter. 28 December 2022. Retrieved 1 August 2025.
  45. ^ Upstream 9: In Focus: Danny of Spaceballs, Balance, 26 August 1994.
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