Space Intro (Front End Demo)

Hot on the heels of last months blog about Monolith, comes an even older demo from 2001, again produced by 'FunkScientist Productions' and is called 'Space Intro' according to my archives, although on CSDb it seems to be uploaded as 'Front End Demo', the file name on the disk image.

If I remember correctly, around 1999 MTR1975 had asked on the old Lemon64 discussion board if someone was interested in pixelling some graphics for a game/demo and as I was getting into C64 again over the previous couple of years, I jumped at the chance.

After initial contact by email (and breaks of a few months between emails), I gathered that MTR wanted to make a game, possibly in the style of 'Asteroids'.  I ended up pixelling the spinning ship and a few other sprites (explosion, power-up, etc) and a couple of simple space backgrounds to get things going.  The idea seemed to die a death, until MTR surface again with this intro to the game (hence 'Space Intro').  The game was never made.

The intro can be downloaded from CSDb here.  However, this seems to be a slightly 'modified' version by the uploader with the disk name changed to 'G-Force'.  I'm not sure where the uploader got this demo since I'm not sure it was actually ever released as such.  The version on CSDb was only uploaded in 2013.

However, my original disk image called 'INTRO.D64' containing the demo with the name 'Front End Demo' with original disk name "CSS  CSS  CSS  CSS", along with the ship sprite, the unused space background image and an unused FunkScientist Productions logo in bitmap form (red and grey) can be downloaded directly here...

Monolith

I've been meaning to add this for a while, since it's release predates this blog and I thought that the 10th anniversary of the release might be a good time!

Back in 2004, I was a member of a C64 group called 'FunkScientist Productions' with MTR1975.  Monolith was the third (and final) release of this group.

This one-file demo had a gestation period of at least a year as far as I remember, with date stamps on some of my archived pre-release builds dating to August 2003.  Work was held up on the 'Fletch' game to work on this demo and unfortunately the game was never resumed.

From memory, the sprites were pixelled in Spr-Eddi V1.3, the mountains and logo in Advanced Art Studio and the charset font in Ultrafont.

The demo can be downloaded from CSDb here...

However, a direct download here will also bag you around 30 odd pre-release builds showing the demo from it's very early stages, the graphics in their original formats and the source code.  The pre-release builds are quite interesting to run because they feature early versions of MTR1975's excellent tune that accompanied the demo.