Happy Hardcore - 2006-04-23 02:56:14

I was seriously starving for a demoparty. Strangely, no one else in 0x80, except for Luke, had the same problem. So, we just packed our bags and drove all the way (less than an hour from where we come from) to Bingen. Just like that. To Breakpoint 2006. Hell, I had been dying every Easter weekend in the past years, constantly refreshing the breakpoint website, idling in the #breakpoint channel, just wanting to be there. And now we just stood in front of the Rundsporthalle, looking at the "outside area" (you know, where the "real" party is), me thinking "I had imagined the bonfire to be bigger."

We had not prepared any release due to lack of time. So we hoped for surprise compos to be able to smuggle our nicks in the official result list. But sadly, those were not to come. However, I hoped to meet some Nintendo DS people who I could persuade to try the tracker I've written for it. And this was what I was very surprised about: Not only were there a lot of sceners with DSes (among them were melwyn and pandur and lots of others whose names I don't know), but they already knew my program. Now that was cool! I was like: "You know this tracker for the Nintendo DS?", and they were like:"Yeah, it's cool!" and then i was like "Well, I made it" and they were like "ORLY? WTF! Here's some free beers." and we were like "*Gulp gulp*" and I was like "Dude I'm so wasted, I can't drink another one, really!" and they were like: "Here's another one." It was funny. Also, I got to realize the next day that I can code pretty well, even when still drunk and seriously hung over. I fixed a load of bugs and implemented many many new features. I really don't know how I managed to do that in such a short time with such a variety of distractions, like the annoying loud breakpoint jingle, several happy hardcore tunes from the loudspeakers of other sceners and these loud compos that kept coming.

What I loved about the party was the big selection of interesting seminars. I visited nearly every one of them. ryg's and chaos's seminars were pretty interesting, although I personally didn't learn too much in them, because I already knew most of what they takled about. I was very excited about paniq's seminar, because I love his music (it was one of the reasons for me to buy better loudspeakers), but never saw him in person before. It turned out he's a nice guy too. He introduced some of the tools for audio production under Linux. That was rather interesting, as I use Linux primarily and I have some music making ambitions, although I always end up in writing audio software instead :-) The seminar by shiva about the parallels of medical imaging and demos was not very well visited unfortunately, but quite interesting for me as a computer science student with a minor in medicine. A highlight, and one that I didn't expect, was skebbel's seminar about happy hardcore for coders. He really gave a complete explanation how to make a happy hardcore piece, starting from zero music knowledge, but assuming some basic democoding knowledge. For example, he explained that transposition of chords was like dealing with normals when writing a vertex shader. Of course this seminar should not be taken seriously (at least I hope no one does, because I hate happy hardcore), but it was great fun and we were basically laughing all the time. He even gave out handouts after the talk that summed up the main points (like the names of the notes and their position on the piano :-).

I really enjoyed the live acts. Listening to demo music that is played by real instruments is funny. And Welle:Erdball really rocked! I stood just next to the speaker and their SID tunes shook all my organs. And they even played "Super 8"! Then, there were the scene.org awards. The show was just amazing with the stunning visuals and the nice nomination clips. I don't know where they found a guy with a voice that sounds exactly like this background voice that you hear in nearly all American movie trailers. What I didn't like about them was that the people on the stage (except for chaos) were all very clueless about what to say. It could have been better, with more suspense and even more oscar-like. But on the other hand we're just some people sitting on their PCs and coding, making music, pixeling, whatever, so who can expect us to be great in holding speeches in front of huge audiences?

I was a bit disappointed by the (PC) demos though. Except for Traction (I just <3 them!) and Conspiracy, no group was really creative and innovative. It's a little like with computer games: They tend to have better and better graphics, but the genres and the gameplay stay the same. And then there's Nintendo, who really do innovative stuff. But that's another story. I just wished more groups would be like Nintendo. Anyways, the amiga demos were just amazing! I don't know of the capabilities of this platform, but I was very amazed by the excellently polished releases. Sadly, there was no DS demo yet, but I met some people who said their groups were working on some productions. And at least the shitfaced clowns rocked the GBA once again.

I was kind of missing the nice family atmosphere that I was used to from Evoke and I was a little pissed by people who just came to the party to leech warez FTPs and/or play computer games, but I guess that's the price of being the biggest scener-only demoparty in the world. Anyway, Breakpoint was an awesome party that quite met my expectations. I was happy to meet so many nice people (and get some free drinks :-) enjoyed seminars, compos and concerts and slept in a really unnatural position (Sitting on my chair with my head on the table. I'm glad I brought my towel).

So, a big thanks to the organizers and greetings to all the people I met. Hope to stay in contact!

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