The best, classic Amiga demos.

The Amiga demos were the guiding light. As the name suggests they were demonstrations of what the Amiga could do, but ultimately they were a demonstration of what the coders, graphic artists and musicians could do.

From these demos they could technically advertise their "skills". Some were really "out there" in the way of technology and expertise. You may look down some of the clips and wonder what it is all about, however, these Amiga demos were done on 3.5 inch floppy disk (total memory 880k) so some used compacking software and some used more than one disk. On these disks they crammed in advanced code, clever graphics and music that only used 4 channels with samples.

Some people state that the C64 came up with great music, it did, no-one can deny that, but in my opinion the Amiga came along it just made it more...accessible. More people came on and demo groups were popping up all over the place.

They also entered competitions (64k into, best demo, best music etc) at the various parties that were about (like Assembly). These parties are still going, and the PC still has a following...but it mainly came from the Amiga.

The best of these demo groups were Anarchy/ Lemon/ Melon, Kefrens, Phenomena, Sanity, Cryptoburners, Fairlight, Red Sector, Silents, and Scoopex.

The Amiga demos made these groups stars in their own right, and deservidly so. So what happened to them? Well most went into the game industry. Most of Core design was made up from Anarchy. Silents went onto become Pinball gurus with Illusions, Dreams and Fantasies.

So what are the best Amiga Demos? Well here is a good list of them with footage as well.

Kefrens Dane

Kefrens Desert Dream

Awesome, I just love the music from Laxity. It just syncs so well with the screen (Laxity is also the coder).

And part 2.

Kefrens Guardian Dragon

I love this demo, the music is really cool. Very complicated structurally if you have a look at it in a tracker.

Razor 1911- Voyage

Phenomena- Enigma

An awesome demo that was one of the early ones, but it acted quite professionally, with advanced/ professional music (for the time) which was so different.

Mad Elks- Technological Death

Insane, but so much fun, and it keeps you entertained for the clocks 4.40 mins.

Red Sector Inc- Cebit 90

A really old, but so much gold- one of the classic Amiga demos. Goes on for ages. Red Sector then made a "make your own demo program" which was great fun and your production turned out similar to this.

LSD- Jesus On E's

Ermm...at the time...pure brilliance. This is one of the first demos to link the music and the graphics together forming a total 27min music video. The problem was disk space so the graphics were usually 2 colours and 4 frames long anims. Also the music used the same samples so the same effects came up. Repetative after a while. There are about 12 mod songs spliced together. YouTube footage is slightly blurred in places.

SpacebAlls- 9 Fingers

This was Spaceballs's attempt at a more mature Jesus On E's demo. Better graphics but softer music. The music is called TestLast and is made by Travolta. They made a second demo with better graphics called State Of The Art.

Sanity- Arte.

Sanity- Interference.

There are some other cool Sanity Amiga demos. There was the trilogy of demos, the best one being Terminal Fuckup. There was also Jesterday (a music disk) and world of Commodore.

Virtual Dreams & Fairlight- FullMoon

This demo got huge praise when released. Keep listening to it as it goes from the slow start to a cool middle (where the music can get repetative). If you notice the start of the demo...pre-cursor to Doom? The main music was done by HeatBeat who went onto do the ElfMania music...bit of trivia :)

TBL (the black lotus)- Tint

Melon- How To Skin A Cat

Anarchy- In The Kitchen

Advanced for its time, this was a great demo. The music comes from a chap called 4-Mat (Matthew Simmons), who "invented the chip tunes".

Anarchy- 3d Demo 2

More Amiga demos to follow soon. Keep an eye out on the RSS feed and the blog. To check it out for more info on Amiga demos.

You can also check out my Squidoo page on Amiga demos, musician interviews, places where you can get the music and best demo groups here.

Want to see more demos? What are your favs?: