intros and effects and oh my
Any computer gamer born before the 90s - well exluding the sad crowd saddled with IBM compatibles - has the following scene seared into their core memories: you get your brand new and totally unknown video game storage medium from a friend, who got it from a friend, who... anyway you're excited, you insert the tape or floppy, make it load, and the first thing that happens is your senses suffer a vicious assault. Maybe there's a vine boom THX-like sound followed by a fullscreen FAIRLIGHT logo in a fancy bitmap painting; maybe there's a short rainbow flicker replaced by a scrolling barely legible text; maybe bubbles rotate in complex patterns while you're assaulted by a loud rendition of One Man And His Droid by the ineffable (if blissfully unaware) Rob Hubbard.
Congratulations, you've encountered a crack intro. Cracktro. The nice (or not so nice) fellow known by his rich and folk handle like "Greg", "Perseus", or maybe "LORD ASSWIPE" is letting you know that he and his pals over at [group_name] have cracked the game's copy protection for your playing pleasure, and may or may not also include a bunch of jabs at competing groups. Or at Rainbow Arts. But merely cracking the game might not be impressive enough (unless it's Dungeon Master - which most groups got wrong anyway) so the more advanced coders included ever more elaborate animations flaunting their prowess in the extremely limited space available on the disk/casette. This means nothing is prerendered and everything is calculated, sometimes even procedurally generated, live in code.
Say hello to the demoscene.
The cracktros died out with the mass migration to Wintel. Hardware, OS and code complexity rose orders of magnitude, making slapping custom elaborate code on top of existing executable a task for the clinically insane, and separate executables were pointless in the age of media boosted viral outbreaks. Some aspects - mostly music - survived in custom installers and keygens (to the point that some insist on calling chiptunes / light tracker songs "keygen music") but it's nothing like what was before.
So anyway late last year when I was working on Project Exploder pre-game stuff like loader, intro, main menu and the related logic I kept thinking on how to do a developer logo and main title screen because you gotta have both obviously. The latter is currently an ad-hoc scrolling starfield animation that's looking more permanent with every passing day save a potential asset redraw - though I'm not discounting whipping a proper artwork with ships and explosions and fancy fonts in some reasonable resolution, like 320x180. But speaking of fonts, around that time I had found a fantastic repository of bitmap demoscene fonts, which got my imagination going. At first I had just planned on a mildly animated card, you know, just fancy lettering and some sparkle, maybe a bitcrushed voice saying "rane software presents", but then... why not a cracktro styling?
Conversely, why a cracktro? At some level it feels like a hollow imitation. The OGs - at least some of them - were about technical mastery. To retain the spirit I'd probably have to do some fancy novel shader tricks or whatever do the cool smart kids do these days, which remains well out of my comfort zone. Should I just ape the aesthetics for nostalgia's sake?
But then again, do these Amiga cracktros look damn cool?
Hell yeah they do.
Having made my very informed decision, I went and coded a proper 16 bit cracktro-styled intro card. There's the powerpacker rainbow decrunch flicker even though powerpacker's dll based unpacking has been dead for decades. There's a rotating logo, there's a starfield and some other particle effects, there's scrolling just barely readable text including greetz and creditz (the z is compulsory), heck I actually went and put in an actual shader in there, the first one I wrote - a modified version of mirror reflection since mirroring was also all the rage in early demoscene (even if some cheated by just having the bitmap itself include its mirrored image).
It was worth it.
