My way to Assembly 1994

Now that I have access to a scanner I was able to scan the few photographs I mase during my summer 94 holiday. Too bad I am always too lazy to make some photos. After every trip I come home realizing I made just 10 pictures, although there was enough stuff to fill complete books...
Hook and me arrived three days before the party began on tuesday to have a look at helsinki. We stayed at a youth hostel located in the olympic stadium and saw that the town could easily be concered by foot. All important places in helsinki can easily be reached by foot, even if they have a good tram system set up (but tram is expensive).

On Wednesday after breakfast in the youth hostel we made our way to the party place. As the hockey hall is only about 200m away from the youth hostel it was not that long way. Some people were gathering around building up many things needed for a successful party like tables, wires, sound and video equipment. On this photo you can see the PCs which were set up for the DooM. To the left with the yellow shirt hook is sitting next to Abyss/Future Crew/Asm Organizing. The tiny person in the center of the screen with the white shirt is Moku/Asm Organizing one of the very important and totally elite main organizers of the event.
Later that day we went to the town again and wondered ourselves about the amount of fast food consumed by the finnish people. As we soon realized it is there is hardly any alternative to burgers for visitors of Helsinki, if you have no good hotel with dinner.

The day until Friday passed quickly and although we got up quite early there was a huge row before the counters and we had to wait about 2h to get a ticket and a vote disk. As we had no electronical equipment - just our bags with clothes and some food - we put our stuff to some german speaking guys of the group the Coexistance. At this corner of the hall more german groups gathered, namely Legend Design, Iguana and Keen Like Frogs.
All three groups were heavily coding on their demos and you could see much progress. Although the demo of Legend Design seemed to be complete there were bugs in the 3D city scene at the beginning of the demo. I remember that the scene was shaded in golden colors, but they changes it to blue gouraud shading later. The Coexistance was coding on all parts of their demos. I remember main coder Boris replying to someones questions wether he had made a backup of the demo sources: "Warum denn ein backup machen, ist doch ohne viel spannender." (why make backups, it's more fun without.)
Half an hour later we all heard Boris screaming around the place, because his harddisk failed and all sources were lost. The whole crew was in total panic and tried to recode the demo from sources they found on other's harddisks. What luck that our intro was finished at home and we just had to hand in the competition disks.

This picture shows the view during day towards the middle of the ice hockey hall. You can see the big screen hanging from the ceiling. They had installed 3 of these screens. Above the screens a simple text display which is installed permanently was located which the organizers used to display information and comments during the competition. This was quite cool, since the organizers could provide comments during the competition without interrupting the graphics on the main screen.
Inside the white boxes at the bottom were some companies showing and selling hard and software and the organizers had their technical equipment set up there too. I guess I took this picture before leaving the party place on sunday, since there are many tables not occupied. But could be just after arriving too, I do not remember.

During the party hook and me left the place on saturday and went to the city to buy something for eating and drinking. After shopping we had a rest in a small park. As we only slept for about 5 hours we were already quite tired on saturday...
Perhaps you noted that hook is wearing a harddisk. As we thought it would be cool to have some kind of cool things we asked pascal to give us two disks of his broken hdd. Old sceeners just laughed about this lameness, but we kept those disks during the whole party.

A big topic at parties is always sleeping. While the sceener normally does not want to sleep much, because he can miss some event the body insists on some hours of unconsciousness. Some people are perfectly prepared for this and provide their own bed and are able to sleep while the sun is shining and their friends are playing behind them.

While others do not have such comfort and fall asleep without noticing it ! I guess they have some aking backs when they wake up again. If you look carefully you can notice 8 persons sleeping in this picture. And none if them has a comfortable position I assume. Hook and me thought we were a bit smarter and went outside to sleep. As summers in Finnland are warm to hot it was no problem and we found a quite and grassy place and slept for some hours. But with hook's anti-luck he layed himself into an antstreet and as those little working manics began their work with sunrise hook was soon covered all over with ants. Of course he woke up immidiatly and was not willing to continue sleeping. So we had a nice shower at 6am which was a good time, since only two other people were showering this early in the morning. Then we went to town to buy some food and took the above foto in the park.

At Saturday evening hook and me decided to join some juries for the competitions. Hook to the graphics jury, while I stayed with the multichannel guys. I met Edge, Lizardking another finnish musician and a composer from USA in the jury and we listened to 199 songs. This lasted for about 6 hours and since then I know that music competitions will never be fair, because you are not able to rate a song properly after hearing about 50 or so. When I had finished with preselecting the C64 demo compeition was running and I had already missed a lot of others.
To our big surprise our intro was not shown in the 64K competition. I guess because we had no GUS support, but that is only a guess. We were disappointed since I think our intro could have scored among the top five, but I should not be. All competitions were heavily delayed. The pc demos were shown last and they decided to show all demos, because they did not manage to preselect them. After 4 hours of demo competition they had not finished and it was 5am and the sun was rising. They now decided to skip demos if the appeared of low quality. This was a very bad decision, since some good demos which had not that good start were not shown completely.

After competitions and vote couting was over the party was closed and the audience should leave the hall until 12pm. As our flights back to hamburg were already at 3pm we soon left the hall and to our surprise the complete surrounding of the hall was closed for traffic. At the same weekend as the party the european athletics championships were held in the nearby olympic stadium and on sunday the marathon was happing on a round course around the stadium. So we (and all other sceeners) had to walk with our bags about 2000m until the streets were open again. We immiediatly called for a taxi and arrived close to 3pm at the airport.
After sitting down at the plane hook and me immiediatly fall asleep. I only woke up when the stewardess called for eating, and I was not able to wake up hook for the lunch. The last two pictures show me at Hamburg airport again picking up my bags. If you meet me once at a party you will notice that I still use these two bags today (they are my personal party bags).