Bytes of Art ■ The affection
Every demo ends with greetings. It is the oldest convention the scene has, older than most of the hardware it runs on: a list of names scrolling past at the end, the groups you rate, the friends you drink with at the party, sometimes a jab at a rival dressed up as affection. Nobody watches them. They arrive after the work is finished, the audience has already decided what it thinks, and the list rolls by like credits at a cinema where everyone is putting their coat on.
At Revision 2015, Conspiracy did something else with theirs. They built the greetings into the world.
Watch it first, then read on: Offscreen Colonies on YouTube. Four minutes.
What you are looking at
Offscreen Colonies is a 64 kilobyte intro, which means the whole thing, every surface and every note, arrives in 65,536 bytes and is generated while you watch. No stored textures. No recorded audio. A single executable smaller than the icon on your desktop, unfolding into industrial structures hanging in fog, machinery that turns, light that falls through dust.
Three people made it. BoyC wrote the engine and the effects, Zoom did the visuals and the direction, and Gargaj built both the synthesiser and the music that runs through it, a track called Onwards Fading Future, later porting the whole thing to the Rift and the Vive. They are Hungarian, they have been at this since 2002, and by 2015 they had been living inside the 64k limit long enough that it had stopped being a constraint and become a dialect.
It won the PC 64k competition at Revision 2015, the party that fills a hall in Saarbrücken every Easter, and the group's own release page records the detail that anyone who has ever shipped anything will recognise as the real boast: we finished before deadline.
The greetings are the architecture
It is easy to miss on a first watch, because the intro never once points at what it is doing.
The colonies you are flying through are named after other groups. Each one is a place, built and lit and inhabited, and each one carries the name of somebody Conspiracy admired. The greeting has become the geography. You cannot skip past it, because skipping past it would mean skipping the intro.
The proof of that sits in the comments underneath the production, where two people wrote the same three words within a day of each other: Rebels colony, followed by a little raised-arms emoticon. Somebody had spotted their own crew's name on a structure hanging in the fog and come straight back to the website to say so. Nobody has ever come back to a website to celebrate a scrolling list.
The group said as much in their own release notes, in the plainest language anyone has ever used for this: the intro is their way of paying respect to the groups who inspired them to stay in the game, some of whom they hoped to face in the very competition they were entering. Then, at the end: thanks, guys, we love you.
Sit with that for a moment. A competitive production, made for a competition, whose visual concept is a monument to the competitors. There is no irony in it and no positioning. They wanted to say thank you, they had 64 kilobytes to say it in, and they decided the honest way to do that was to give each name a place to stand rather than a line to scroll past.
The scene noticed. One commenter called it the ultimate greetings and doubted anybody could do it better; another, drier, filed it as a great visualisation of the circlejerk that is the demoscene, which is affection wearing a coat. And the objection is worth hearing too, because it is the honest one: a viewer who came for a narrative found a slide show of admittedly beautiful scenes and left a little cold. Both readings are available in the same four minutes. A production whose structure is a guest list will feel like a guest list to anyone who did not come for the guests.
Thirteen years of learning to say more with less
The reason it looks the way it does has a long run-up.
Conspiracy built their reputation on the intro rather than the demo, on the form where the constraint is absolute and arithmetic. Sixty-five thousand five hundred and thirty-six bytes behaves less like a target than like a wall: the compiler either fits or it does not, and there is no negotiating with the linker at four in the morning. Every group working in that form ends up building a tool, because handcrafting each production against the wall is unaffordable, and the tool is where the real engineering lives.
Theirs is called apEx. It grew between the summer of 2010 and the spring of 2021, carried eight of their productions, and Offscreen Colonies was the first serious intro they shipped with it.
Which is worth measuring against where they had been eight years before. In 2007 they went into a party with no tooling at all: the old engine had been retired, its replacement was running late, and they wrote a stopgap from scratch in a fortnight to have anything to show. Gargaj later described that one as the least advanced engine they ever had, in the flat Hungarian manner that makes a verdict sound like a weather report. The note attached to Offscreen Colonies is the other end of the same sentence, and it is just as flat: this is our first serious intro with this engine, and we could not be happier with it.
What a tool like that buys has little to do with compression tricks. It buys the ability to direct. When the scene layout, the material system and the timeline all live in one place and the whole thing rebuilds in seconds, the person doing the visuals can make decisions like a film-maker instead of a programmer: hold this shot, cut here, let the fog do the work. That is why Offscreen Colonies reads as composed rather than assembled, and it is why the Meteoriks jury nominated it for art direction rather than for cleverness.
In November 2023 they published the source. The repository carries the tool, the engine libraries, the interface, and the project files for eight productions including this one, under a Creative Commons non-commercial licence, which is not an open source licence in the sense the OSI defines and is not presented as one: their stated intent is that people can learn from it and tinker with it, in the spirit of the scene, without it walking off into a product. Whatever one thinks of that choice of licence, the gesture underneath it belongs to the same instinct as the greetings. They spent eleven years on a tool and then handed it over so somebody else could see how it was done.
What survives
Eleven years on, the intro is still in the top hundred of a list that spans four decades and tens of thousands of entries, and the number has been going the right way rather than the wrong one.
The party it won is over. The engine it was built with has been retired and given away. The Rift it was ported to is a museum piece. What is still there, four minutes long and 64 kilobytes wide, is a group of three people saying thank you to their competitors by building them somewhere to live.