This Friday at 5pm, Philip will be screening a number of award-winning demos from the past decade! Everyone is welcome to hang out and check them out.

What's a demo, you ask? Well, it's basically like a music video, only all the graphics are generated in real-time in code. Demos are often on the vanguard of introducing new graphic effects or techniques on home computers. Even today, some folks specialize on getting old computer hardware to render and display effects that would tax high-end 3D graphics cards. Other demo programmers/artists/musicians ("demosceners") like to challenge themselves by keeping the entire compiled application (music, textures and code) under 64K or even 4 Kilobytes! It's both an aesthetic and technical challenge.

Demos are non-interactive, so they're not games. However, because demosceners are so good at making the computer do things in real-time, many of them go on to work in the digital game industry. LittleBigPlanet, Spore, Max Payne, and Chronicles of Riddick are just a couple of titles that have significant demoscene roots. Philip will go a little more into the history of the demoscene on Friday afternoon.

So come on by this Friday and see what the Demo scene is all about!