Focusing on "copying" seems like missing the forest for the trees. There's the copyright angle, but copyright laws are unnatural obstacles designed to give the original author some control over what happens after publishing. They're not fundamental, we made the laws.
What is fundamental is this: every artist starts out by copying the works of others. It's how you learn.
And in that framing, once you publish your derived work, there is only one question that arises - if you don't credit the original author but sign your own name, you're fundamentally misleading your audience. Your audience implicitly assumes you made the thing. Maybe you made 95% of it, but if you don't give due credit, it looks bad once your audience discovers that.
On more than one occasion my perception of an artist has shifted once I discovered the "brilliant work" they created was actually a remake of somebody else's brilliant work. It's a feeling of being misled. It's never a feeling of "wow, this guy is a total hack and has no ability of their own".
They wouldn't copy each other for copyright infringement as much as it was a mark of respect. They carried each other's arts as an evolution and respect towards each other rather than copying; all bringing a small twist on what was before.
> On more than one occasion my perception of an artist has shifted once I discovered the "brilliant work" they created was actually a remake of somebody else's brilliant work. It's a feeling of being misled.
The spirit of the famous - cited in the TFA as well - quote "great artists steal" is exactly that. If you don't know that the inspiration came from somewhere and believe that what an artist did was created in a vacuum, you will certainly think much higher of said artist.
This sounds so insane to me. If I own land and grow a tree on it, the tree and its fruits are private property forever (mine until I die, then inherited by my children, then their children, or sold, transferred, etc ad nauseam). At no point does the tree become "public", that would be utter nonsense. It is property. Why should my ideas then be anything different? They come from my head. I own myself, including my head, thus I should own the fruits of my head like I own the fruits of my tree and they should remain property forever. The fact that copyright expires is one of the great tragedies of modern life, though at least I can take solace in knowing I own my ideas until I die.
Copyright law exists exactly because it is universally accepted that ideas are not property: Copying an idea or expression of it does not deprive you of your ideas.
The entire notion of "intellectual property" is the creation of an artificial monopoly rooted in very distinct and separate goals from physical property that requires separate laws if you want to restrict copying or exploitation, because property law explicitly does not cover them.
Most copyright laws are also justified implicitly or directly in the legal texts allowing them as creating an incentive for the advancement of the arts and sciences - a temporary monopoly right granted by the state as a deviation from perceived "natural right" - on the belief that granting that right creates more benefits for the public than not having them, by encouraging the creation of more works.
And no copyright law protects your ideas. They protect the specific expression of them. Patents - which do protect ideas - are by design far more restricted and limited exactly because they are far more invasive in depriving the public of use of the very idea for the duration.
Did you spend your entire life in isolation from the rest of human society? Because if not, then you have been influenced throughout your life in a multitude of subtle and not-so-subtle ways by the works of others. In what way, then, are the fruits of your head entirely yours? We're all standing on the shoulders of giants.
Unlike the tree, nobody can take your idea away from you. You retain possession of your idea even if somebody copies it. It sounds insane to me to think you should get permanent control over other people's communication just because you had the idea before them.
Perhaps, but that is your tree, if someone takes a cutting from your tree and grows it into their own tree you shouldn't own that tree, your tree is still there.
Eventually you get to the point where someone asks why the tree is theirs and they say it's because someone in history planted it, they were a relative, so it is mine now. It is hard to assert a moral justification for long term hereditary ownership without inviting investigations on how it was those ancestors came to have the resources that caused the ownership to begin.
Such a weird take. What are the similarities between your fantasies and land that to you make the philosophical convictions involved in private property laws applicable to those fantasies? Why isn't it good enough for you to fantasise about land and a tree, and why doesn't the answer to this undermine your reasoning?
Personally I'm not convinced by the arguments for private property, which makes your comparison even weirder than you likely intended.
> Theft from the outside world, however, is often taken lightly - especially when it comes to graphics.
One should not forget where the demoscene is coming from: crackers. The whole point of "intros" was to show off the skills of whoever cracked a piece of software. So obviously, the views demoscene held on intellectual property are not mainstream, if we can say it like that.
The shift to a more creative and law abiding art scene, led by adults and not rebellious teenagers is more recent development.
I think very initially it was indeed so, crackers were the ones doing the intros. But very quickly the efforts got split, most of the time, the person doing the intro was a different person, the person doing the music was another person and finally another person was the one doing the actual crack. I don't think it took very long for this split to be the norm, even though very early I'm sure there was individuals doing all three pieces alone.
Yes, of course, I'm wasn't trying to claim the music/graphics was stolen by the cracker, or vice-versa, just that "show off the skills of whoever cracked a piece of software" isn't really accurately representing how the team's composition was, since they were different people.
Was required back in the early 2000s already, but that’s not really what the article is about. It’s talking about derived work created by recreating another artist’s existing work in a different medium. Being able to provide WIP material is only evidence that the technical labor is yours, not that the artistic concept is original.
As it happens I'm just on a train to Airbnb with large group of demoscene and fractal art friends, full week ahead of the Revision[0] demoparty! Hells yeah
My top pick for pixel art would be anything by Made of demogroup Bomb, don't have a good link to hand sorry and need to change trains etc. Also check this amazing pixel art book: https://www.themastersofpixelart.com/
I made the images in Deluxe Paint when I was 16-18 years old. It was a lovely surprise to be contacted two decades later by the author who wanted to print them in this beautiful book among many far more talented artists.
Let's not forget that most of these pictures were made by teenagers, doing the best they could (and hoping others didn't know about Boris Vallejo). The demoscene was very young back then. Copying is generally considered pretty lame in the demoscene these days.
Making something appear digitally that only exists in the far-away analog world still gets 'em.
If it's indistinguishable from the real thing but made without any of the traditional tools, it's remarkable, even if you think it's lame in any way at all.
Exactly. 12-16 was predominantly on the producer side.
The hidden deciding factor nevertheless was time. And that affected the whole production cycle: coding, graphics, music, crunching, copying, spreading (postal services!).
We had way more snow back then and we enjoyed working on something for hours till the wee hours.
18 was a deciding factor because after that military service killed quite a few scener careers.
Have a look at all the pr0n stuff pixel graphics that were cherished by the young studs as well as all the scroll texts as well as early disk magazines or pictures of programmers in computer magazines, with lots of profanity and simply stating age competition: 14 years old scolding 13 years old…
A lazy copy has of course always been lame, but it also depends on when in the 90s, and the platform.
There were plenty of images that amazed me back then even though I was perfectly aware of the source material. It depends on the platform, and the amount of effort going into recreating it. Reinterpreting an image for a C64 or Amiga with a restricted palette is a skill in itself. Copying it for a platform, or in a style / resolution / bitmap depth, where you might as well use a scanner, not so much (and so, of course, the accusations became more and more frequent, often warranted).
Copying it and trying to pass something off as original is of course also very different from acknowledging the original and letting the conversion stand on its own as what it is.
At least they know who to cite, even if they don't. I like to have a diffusion model generate an image of my desired subject in whatever media I choose then look at it as make something close but not quite the same. I'm copying tons of people I don't even know. But I am also just practicing and don't try to pass it off as my own creation.
I grew up in the era of the Amiga and got into computing in some part due to demoes like Technological Death and Unreal. Not sure if 10 years is too new to be considered 'retro', but "Intrinsic Gravity" by Still is my favourite demo ever. It's lots of different scenes that transition beautifully from one to another: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZxPhDC-r3w
> Farting around with Amigas in 2026 means actively choosing to make things harder for the sake of making things harder. Making that choice and still outsourcing the bulk of the craft and creative process is like claiming to be a passionate hobby cook while serving professionally catered dinners and pretending they're your own concoctions.
People wanting to explore the use of generative AI for vintage computers is happening not just for graphics but for code too.
I think in the case of code though, it's still interesting because I don't believe there's been any success yet. I hear of people having success with Claude in contemporary settings but it seems to fare less well when working for older computing platforms. There's a reason for that of course and it's worth exploring.
However, it will cease to be interesting as soon as the first person manages to create something substantial. At the point, the scene should probably shun it for the reasons stated in the quote.
There's definitely been success in using generative AI for vintage Computers. Just the other day I got it to produce a bootable floppy for my Amiga 1200. It loads the network driver, uses BOOTP to get an ip address, connects to a server and then downloads code via UDP that it will then execute. I doubt you'll get it doing amazing graphical scenes like you see in the demo scene though.
What I find mind-boggling is the handwave over the rest. "Loads the network driver" - ok, which one? There's no standard network driver, only a specification for writing drivers (SANA-II). Was it a driver for SLIP/PPP over the serial port, or a PCMCIA Ethernet adaptor, or something else? Was it a copy of a driver someone's already written?
Also, it would be madness to try doing this in a bootblock, or insinuating that the bootblock did it. Demo bootblocks take over the hardware and start using their loading routines, eschewing the main AmigaOS, and that's the implication of saying something was done in the bootblock (you have under 1KB of space so the first thing you need is your own loader).
What's much more mundane and normal is a standard bootblock which returns control to AmigaDOS and lets it run the startup-sequence, whereupon you can use normal files, libraries, devices, including a full suite of other people's networking software, including BOOTP (AmiTCP comes with a client) and TFTP (see Olaf Barthel's tftpclient: https://github.com/obarthel/amiga-sana-ii-tftpclient). But it stopped being the "bootblock" that did it as soon as it started AmigaDOS.
I used cursor with a mix of Gemini 3.1 and opus 4.6.
It referenced the Amiga ROM Kernel Reference Manual, appendix C to create a boot block in assembly. It's a raw sector-mapped image, the build process creates a blank adf, which then writes everything at it's fixed offsets and we go back with another tool to patch the bootblock with the right checksum so the kernel accepts it.
I copied that adf to the A1200 so I can then write it to a real floppy.
Man, this really brings one back to discovering https://gfxzone.planet-d.net/ sometime around 1999 (when this was already fading into the past because the scene was dying, PC with 24bit graphics and painting software pushing out DPaint andAmiga palette stuff etc), reading all the old interviews where "No Copy!/?" was a core issue and looking at the galleries.
"Danny leaves the scene" (because it's just a bunch of kids with scanners and he's got a job at Eidos now) never forget!
constraints are what make demo scene art so good imo. when you have 64k to work with every single pixel has to earn its place. compare that to AI image gen where you can produce alot of variations at zero cost and somehow everything ends up looking less intresting. theres something about working within tight limits that forces real creative decisions instead of just iterating until somthing looks ok
Well-balanced, well-written article. It linked to a site called demozoo that used Cloudflare bot detection to block me at least 6 times from my home IP that CF had heretofore permitted, which is damn nice of them considering nothing nefarious ever originated from this address.
So, no way to tell if the illustrations were illustrative.
This is a great examination, and I think reminds me of why I'm not so panicky about AI art -- there was pretty much the same kind of panic around the invention of photography.
It will change, but craft and "look what I did" won't go away.
I like the case of video editing. This is a situation where oftentimes zero percent of the source material is your own creation. Most would still consider this an artform. Shaping the overall meaning of a pile of raw assets is usually way more valuable than any one asset in isolation.
Successfully integrating many disparate parts has always been the big ticket item. Dealing with the rough edges and making different ideas play together nicely is where all the value lives in most businesses.
Not sure I agree with the final takeaway point. At least from a personal standpoint anyway. I used AI images in a couple of Amiga intros, but actively admitted to using them. At the time there wasn't quite the backlash against their use, so now would completely steer clear, but not having access to a graphic artist is reflected in the output I've managed in the recent times (zero).
It's hard to get in the era of ubiquitous 32 bit color depth, but back in the day, part of the show was making merely your hardware output picture very close to the reference in as many colors as possible and good resolution too. This was where Amiga's special video modes could really shine.
Thus, some demos, like the one where Lazur's image came from [0] were just slideshows of very colorful images that were more than likely traced from something.
Nice video from the Ahoy channel on his recreation of a pixel art burger that I think offers a really nice insight into the process for creating images like these
Rotoscoping is specifically tracing over a sequence of images - usually video or film frames - to create a sequence of drawings that can be used in an animation workflow.
Artists and animators (like me!) make some fine distinctions between different ways of studying reality and transferring it onto the canvas.
Using a model is posing a live person and/or some objects and setting up lights and painting from that. Artists have done this for years. I've done this. Rockwell did this.
Using photo reference is taking photographs (yours or others') and working from those. I've done this. Rockwell did this too!
Tracing is placing your reference image beneath or over your canvas, and tracing the contours you see in it. Tracing paper, chroma-key, projectors, camera lucidia, tracing the image onto acetate and taping that to your Amiga's monitor to trace it again in DPaint, dropping ref into one layer in Photoshop and working over it in another one, these are all methods of tracing. I've done them all! Rockwell probably did this now and then, with the caveat that a pro's tracing is a very different beast from a beginner's - it's easy for a beginner to just trace the contours with no thought as to how they come together into a 3d shape, and get a drawing that feels dead and lifeless and subtly wrong. Saying someone's work looks like a tracing is kind of an insult.
Rotoscoping is explicitly a process of tracing/referencing a sequence of images to produce a sequence of images rather than a single image. It is related! But this article is entirely discussing the way demoscene artists would reproduce a static image, so roto does not apply here. Rockwell painted static images; he never did this.
(It's certainly possible that Rockwell could have taken single frames of film and had them printed for reference, but that's still not roto. Roto's explicitly an animation process that results in a series of drawings based on your film/video ref.)
the attribution point is the real crux. the demo scene actually had a strong culture of crediting influences and techniques greets, shoutouts, releasing source code. the copying was open and celebrated. the problem with modern inspired by work isn't the copying itself,it's doing it silently and letting audiences assume full originality
My recollection is that the .MOD tracker music scene was the same. Credit your samples and nobody bats an eye! Be seen as "stealing" a sample, and you're persona non grata. It's really that simple.
This is stated under the first image: All images on this page are clickable and link to non-lossy versions when available.
The aim is to not have large amounts of data be downloaded by default.
To me all the faces look messed but I believe it is mostly because the image seems to be distorted, it is stretched in the vertical direction.
I suspect it was created on hardware with non-square pixels and is just displayed wrongly.
I would contest that choosing not to reveal the use of AI is due to an agreement of the nature of the behaviour. In an ideal world that could maybe be the case, but I think the driving force behind secrecy is harassment.
There are those who use AI as part of their process proudly, but secretly, because they know they will receive abuse.
I really wonder how some people think of themselves as artists while simultaneously attacking another persons choice of self expression.
GenAI tools absolutely suck at pixel art from my experience. They can mimic aspects of the look at the display layer, but they are fundamentally bogus.
Sprite animation in particular is bad unless you build a bespoke engine to spit out sequential PNGs.
A poser will give, but not withstand (and internalize) critique. An artist is too busy producing or suffering to care.
> They can mimic aspects of the look at the display layer, but they are fundamentally bogus.
The same could be said of a lot of retro themed games. They frequently do not adhere to the same requirement such as number of colours per attribute cell. Nevertheless, they are producing a style that they are aiming for.
But I agree that GenAI tends to suck at pixel art. It will be interesting to see how much that changes. More importantly poor quality art is still art, and frequently making poor art is the first step towards making great art. You don't have to like or applaud things you don't feel are very good. It is just not kind or useful to attack the artist.
>A poser will give, but not withstand (and internalize) critique. An artist is too busy producing or suffering to care.
This is my sense as well. The bulk of the aggressive behaviour seems to be coming from people whose identity values that they can produce things others cannot. Those who like just producing things are still just producing things.
I don't think anyone was selling demos commercially or trying to pass off the creative ideas as their own work. With this in mind, we should set aside ideas of plagiarism, copyright, etc. It was a showcase of technical prowess/creativity. People knew what Death Dealer looked like & if they saw it pop up in a demo, they wouldn't think the demogroup was passing it on as their original idea (I would assert this was a given). As such, it was meant to be a reference. People thought they knew the limitation of their computer. They would play Lemmings, or whatever, and think that's as good as the graphics on the Amiga can get. The point of the demo was to blow those conceptions away.
The creative part in a demo wasn't the the art itself, the subject, the composition, etc., no, it was representing something thought impossible. Eventually, kinda like how photography changed painters' relationship with realistic representation, more powerful tech did the same with these types of demos, so the medium moved on.
It would be so awesome to make a cartoon today using original techniques with hand-drawn scenes, multiplane cameras, and most importantly jazz music :)
These people literally gods to me growing up. My parents were poorer than others so we never had any computer better than an acorn electron but the demos my friends with amigas and Atari ST’s showed my blew my mind.
If only the demoscene wasn’t so horrible culturally. It’s absolutely full of old sceners who have “earned” being dicks to people, and unfortunately many newbies who think that the way to be a real scener is to copy that behaviour. The constant flamewars on pouet.net are embarrassing. It is a good reminder that the internet did not used to be a nicer place though
> Pixel artist Lazur's 256 colour rendition (left) of a photo by Krzysztof Kaczorowski (right). A masterful copy showcasing the sharpness, details and vibrancy achievable with pixel techniques.
Well - the edited image looks clearer in the rendition, but also more fake. So unless that was the goal, I prefer the more blurred image, simply because it is more authentic than that digital edit. Many AI images have a similar problem; they look very out of place. I noticed this in some games where AI generated images are used. The images look great but they simply don't fit into the game at hand or they have a style that looks alien. Case in point was mods for the game Baldur's Gate 2 EE, where these images are great but they look very outside-ish. And that's a problem that seems to be hard to get rid of from such generated images, at the least for most of those I saw so far.
That's was a great read and I agree with the author. Though to be honest, I don't particularly like the type of Amiga pixel art in the article. That is, pixel art with relatively high resolution and relatively high color depth. Everything looks too smooth and hyperrealistic in my opinion.
I think things can look much better for pixel art that is either very low resolution (e.g. the small characters and objects in a SNES game, which would usually be just a few pixels wide, so every pixel has to be placed deliberately) or has a very low color depth (a pallette between two to ~16 colors, like the backgrounds in a PC-88 game), or both (like the sprites in a Game Boy game).
An example where higher color depth can ruin the visuals is "Snatcher" by Kojima. The backgrounds for the original PC-88 and MSX versions were relatively detailed (200x100 pixels perhaps), while the color depth was very low (8 colors?), which greatly accentuated the pixel-art look. However, the later re-releases added more and more colors and smooth gradients, which only made it look worse, like a mediocre comic book.
>It's a place of refuge from the constant churn of increased efficiency
Increased efficiency also seems to be part of its appeal. The limitation is you can't increase efficiency by just upgrading computer specs, but instead have to find innovating ways to use the existing resources as efficient as possible to make something great. These kinds of optimization or compression problems seems like something AI would be very helpful for, so I think it is premature to try and ban its usage.
This is quite tone deaf - demoscene stands for creativity and resource constraint, and using ai cancels both in favor of resource intensive cognitive offload
Not knowing the scene and only what I took from the article - it’s precisely this. There is a reverence towards human labour and effort that affords relaxing what are generally accepted social contracts in other areas (e.g. copying). It’s a very interesting social construct where the self-policing is in a very specific are whilst other areas are forgiven.
The demo scene is obsessed with hardware and tooling. Exhaustively knowing how things work and showing practical results as evidence is the main activity at demo parties.
You can crib techniques from other people but unless you also show that you understand them deeply, e.g. by creative adaptions, you'll still be considered a lamer even though your results match those of someone else.
This is one of the reasons why the demo scene still has a lot of physical events, it's part of the socialisation process to be in the same room as other people, putting in your final touches while they observe and produce distractions that in practice validate your abilities and respectable refusal to take shortcuts.
Even brute force from something like autoresearch could be able to find ways to squeeze out extra space by trying different ways to express things and rewrite it.
Focusing on "copying" seems like missing the forest for the trees. There's the copyright angle, but copyright laws are unnatural obstacles designed to give the original author some control over what happens after publishing. They're not fundamental, we made the laws.
What is fundamental is this: every artist starts out by copying the works of others. It's how you learn.
And in that framing, once you publish your derived work, there is only one question that arises - if you don't credit the original author but sign your own name, you're fundamentally misleading your audience. Your audience implicitly assumes you made the thing. Maybe you made 95% of it, but if you don't give due credit, it looks bad once your audience discovers that.
On more than one occasion my perception of an artist has shifted once I discovered the "brilliant work" they created was actually a remake of somebody else's brilliant work. It's a feeling of being misled. It's never a feeling of "wow, this guy is a total hack and has no ability of their own".
[delayed]
Exactly.
They wouldn't copy each other for copyright infringement as much as it was a mark of respect. They carried each other's arts as an evolution and respect towards each other rather than copying; all bringing a small twist on what was before.
> On more than one occasion my perception of an artist has shifted once I discovered the "brilliant work" they created was actually a remake of somebody else's brilliant work. It's a feeling of being misled.
The spirit of the famous - cited in the TFA as well - quote "great artists steal" is exactly that. If you don't know that the inspiration came from somewhere and believe that what an artist did was created in a vacuum, you will certainly think much higher of said artist.
This sounds so insane to me. If I own land and grow a tree on it, the tree and its fruits are private property forever (mine until I die, then inherited by my children, then their children, or sold, transferred, etc ad nauseam). At no point does the tree become "public", that would be utter nonsense. It is property. Why should my ideas then be anything different? They come from my head. I own myself, including my head, thus I should own the fruits of my head like I own the fruits of my tree and they should remain property forever. The fact that copyright expires is one of the great tragedies of modern life, though at least I can take solace in knowing I own my ideas until I die.
Copyright law exists exactly because it is universally accepted that ideas are not property: Copying an idea or expression of it does not deprive you of your ideas.
The entire notion of "intellectual property" is the creation of an artificial monopoly rooted in very distinct and separate goals from physical property that requires separate laws if you want to restrict copying or exploitation, because property law explicitly does not cover them.
Most copyright laws are also justified implicitly or directly in the legal texts allowing them as creating an incentive for the advancement of the arts and sciences - a temporary monopoly right granted by the state as a deviation from perceived "natural right" - on the belief that granting that right creates more benefits for the public than not having them, by encouraging the creation of more works.
And no copyright law protects your ideas. They protect the specific expression of them. Patents - which do protect ideas - are by design far more restricted and limited exactly because they are far more invasive in depriving the public of use of the very idea for the duration.
Did you spend your entire life in isolation from the rest of human society? Because if not, then you have been influenced throughout your life in a multitude of subtle and not-so-subtle ways by the works of others. In what way, then, are the fruits of your head entirely yours? We're all standing on the shoulders of giants.
Unlike the tree, nobody can take your idea away from you. You retain possession of your idea even if somebody copies it. It sounds insane to me to think you should get permanent control over other people's communication just because you had the idea before them.
Perhaps, but that is your tree, if someone takes a cutting from your tree and grows it into their own tree you shouldn't own that tree, your tree is still there.
Eventually you get to the point where someone asks why the tree is theirs and they say it's because someone in history planted it, they were a relative, so it is mine now. It is hard to assert a moral justification for long term hereditary ownership without inviting investigations on how it was those ancestors came to have the resources that caused the ownership to begin.
Such a weird take. What are the similarities between your fantasies and land that to you make the philosophical convictions involved in private property laws applicable to those fantasies? Why isn't it good enough for you to fantasise about land and a tree, and why doesn't the answer to this undermine your reasoning?
Personally I'm not convinced by the arguments for private property, which makes your comparison even weirder than you likely intended.
> Theft from the outside world, however, is often taken lightly - especially when it comes to graphics.
One should not forget where the demoscene is coming from: crackers. The whole point of "intros" was to show off the skills of whoever cracked a piece of software. So obviously, the views demoscene held on intellectual property are not mainstream, if we can say it like that.
The shift to a more creative and law abiding art scene, led by adults and not rebellious teenagers is more recent development.
I think very initially it was indeed so, crackers were the ones doing the intros. But very quickly the efforts got split, most of the time, the person doing the intro was a different person, the person doing the music was another person and finally another person was the one doing the actual crack. I don't think it took very long for this split to be the norm, even though very early I'm sure there was individuals doing all three pieces alone.
They were different people, but they were in the same group and knew exactly what it was being used for.
Yes, of course, I'm wasn't trying to claim the music/graphics was stolen by the cracker, or vice-versa, just that "show off the skills of whoever cracked a piece of software" isn't really accurately representing how the team's composition was, since they were different people.
I don't know about "recent"... demos for their own sake had clearly splintered off of the cracking scene by 1991, 35 years ago.
Demo scene graphics competitions these days tend to include work-in-progress images, as evidence of originality.
The Revision demo party is soon. From the competition rules for "Oldskool Graphics" [0]:
> Include exactly 10 (ten) working stages of your entry. All entries without plausible working stages will be disqualified.
Yikes...
The rules for "Modern Graphics" [1] and "Paintover" similarly also require work stages, but fewer.
[0]: https://2026.revision-party.net/competitions/oldskool/#oldsk...
[1]: https://2026.revision-party.net/competitions/graphics/#moder...
Was required back in the early 2000s already, but that’s not really what the article is about. It’s talking about derived work created by recreating another artist’s existing work in a different medium. Being able to provide WIP material is only evidence that the technical labor is yours, not that the artistic concept is original.
As it happens I'm just on a train to Airbnb with large group of demoscene and fractal art friends, full week ahead of the Revision[0] demoparty! Hells yeah
My top pick for pixel art would be anything by Made of demogroup Bomb, don't have a good link to hand sorry and need to change trains etc. Also check this amazing pixel art book: https://www.themastersofpixelart.com/
[0] https://2026.revision-party.net/
I have two pages in this book (Saffron/TBL).
I made the images in Deluxe Paint when I was 16-18 years old. It was a lovely surprise to be contacted two decades later by the author who wanted to print them in this beautiful book among many far more talented artists.
Here you go! https://amiga.lychesis.net/sceners/Made.html
That whole site (and more) is worth checking out of course. My favorite pixel art image at the moment is this: https://amiga.lychesis.net/sceners/Facet.html#Facet_SamTakin...
Made is still active in the demoscene and creating art for/with (the restrictions of) old platforms.
Check https://m4de.com/?tag=archives
Those books look amazing! *_*
Snatched the collection. Thanks for mentioning it!
Oh man I wish I could have cool friends
Go to Revision and meet some
See if there are any events close to where you live.
https://www.demoparty.net/
https://demozoo.org/parties/
There are also Editions64K books https://www.editions64k.fr . But it's more Amiga scene oriented.
Let's not forget that most of these pictures were made by teenagers, doing the best they could (and hoping others didn't know about Boris Vallejo). The demoscene was very young back then. Copying is generally considered pretty lame in the demoscene these days.
Making something appear digitally that only exists in the far-away analog world still gets 'em.
If it's indistinguishable from the real thing but made without any of the traditional tools, it's remarkable, even if you think it's lame in any way at all.
Exactly. 12-16 was predominantly on the producer side.
The hidden deciding factor nevertheless was time. And that affected the whole production cycle: coding, graphics, music, crunching, copying, spreading (postal services!).
We had way more snow back then and we enjoyed working on something for hours till the wee hours.
18 was a deciding factor because after that military service killed quite a few scener careers.
Have a look at all the pr0n stuff pixel graphics that were cherished by the young studs as well as all the scroll texts as well as early disk magazines or pictures of programmers in computer magazines, with lots of profanity and simply stating age competition: 14 years old scolding 13 years old…
It was considered "pretty lame" in the 90s, yet the best did it. It was just harder to figure it out.
A lazy copy has of course always been lame, but it also depends on when in the 90s, and the platform.
There were plenty of images that amazed me back then even though I was perfectly aware of the source material. It depends on the platform, and the amount of effort going into recreating it. Reinterpreting an image for a C64 or Amiga with a restricted palette is a skill in itself. Copying it for a platform, or in a style / resolution / bitmap depth, where you might as well use a scanner, not so much (and so, of course, the accusations became more and more frequent, often warranted).
Copying it and trying to pass something off as original is of course also very different from acknowledging the original and letting the conversion stand on its own as what it is.
> Copying is generally considered pretty lame in the demoscene these days.
You will still see plenty of e.g. SID covers of existing pop music, without anyone really batting an eyelid.
Fair. Pretty lame tho.
That we can agree on.
At least they know who to cite, even if they don't. I like to have a diffusion model generate an image of my desired subject in whatever media I choose then look at it as make something close but not quite the same. I'm copying tons of people I don't even know. But I am also just practicing and don't try to pass it off as my own creation.
I grew up in the era of the Amiga and got into computing in some part due to demoes like Technological Death and Unreal. Not sure if 10 years is too new to be considered 'retro', but "Intrinsic Gravity" by Still is my favourite demo ever. It's lots of different scenes that transition beautifully from one to another: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZxPhDC-r3w
> Farting around with Amigas in 2026 means actively choosing to make things harder for the sake of making things harder. Making that choice and still outsourcing the bulk of the craft and creative process is like claiming to be a passionate hobby cook while serving professionally catered dinners and pretending they're your own concoctions.
People wanting to explore the use of generative AI for vintage computers is happening not just for graphics but for code too.
I think in the case of code though, it's still interesting because I don't believe there's been any success yet. I hear of people having success with Claude in contemporary settings but it seems to fare less well when working for older computing platforms. There's a reason for that of course and it's worth exploring.
However, it will cease to be interesting as soon as the first person manages to create something substantial. At the point, the scene should probably shun it for the reasons stated in the quote.
There's definitely been success in using generative AI for vintage Computers. Just the other day I got it to produce a bootable floppy for my Amiga 1200. It loads the network driver, uses BOOTP to get an ip address, connects to a server and then downloads code via UDP that it will then execute. I doubt you'll get it doing amazing graphical scenes like you see in the demo scene though.
I really meant in the coding realm, but it's interesting that it created a bootable floppy. That wouldn't be trivial.
Questions: 1) Which AI platform did you use? 2) Did it create a binary image of the floppy disk (an ADF perhaps)? If not, what form did it take?
> That wouldn't be trivial.
INSTALL DF0:
Just type that and your disk is bootable.
What I find mind-boggling is the handwave over the rest. "Loads the network driver" - ok, which one? There's no standard network driver, only a specification for writing drivers (SANA-II). Was it a driver for SLIP/PPP over the serial port, or a PCMCIA Ethernet adaptor, or something else? Was it a copy of a driver someone's already written?
Also, it would be madness to try doing this in a bootblock, or insinuating that the bootblock did it. Demo bootblocks take over the hardware and start using their loading routines, eschewing the main AmigaOS, and that's the implication of saying something was done in the bootblock (you have under 1KB of space so the first thing you need is your own loader).
What's much more mundane and normal is a standard bootblock which returns control to AmigaDOS and lets it run the startup-sequence, whereupon you can use normal files, libraries, devices, including a full suite of other people's networking software, including BOOTP (AmiTCP comes with a client) and TFTP (see Olaf Barthel's tftpclient: https://github.com/obarthel/amiga-sana-ii-tftpclient). But it stopped being the "bootblock" that did it as soon as it started AmigaDOS.
I used cursor with a mix of Gemini 3.1 and opus 4.6.
It referenced the Amiga ROM Kernel Reference Manual, appendix C to create a boot block in assembly. It's a raw sector-mapped image, the build process creates a blank adf, which then writes everything at it's fixed offsets and we go back with another tool to patch the bootblock with the right checksum so the kernel accepts it.
I copied that adf to the A1200 so I can then write it to a real floppy.
Man, this really brings one back to discovering https://gfxzone.planet-d.net/ sometime around 1999 (when this was already fading into the past because the scene was dying, PC with 24bit graphics and painting software pushing out DPaint andAmiga palette stuff etc), reading all the old interviews where "No Copy!/?" was a core issue and looking at the galleries.
"Danny leaves the scene" (because it's just a bunch of kids with scanners and he's got a job at Eidos now) never forget!
This is a lot of fun to check out. Thanks!
The famous spinning head from second reality is directly taken from the book "How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way". Check it out on page 72
constraints are what make demo scene art so good imo. when you have 64k to work with every single pixel has to earn its place. compare that to AI image gen where you can produce alot of variations at zero cost and somehow everything ends up looking less intresting. theres something about working within tight limits that forces real creative decisions instead of just iterating until somthing looks ok
Well-balanced, well-written article. It linked to a site called demozoo that used Cloudflare bot detection to block me at least 6 times from my home IP that CF had heretofore permitted, which is damn nice of them considering nothing nefarious ever originated from this address.
So, no way to tell if the illustrations were illustrative.
This is a great examination, and I think reminds me of why I'm not so panicky about AI art -- there was pretty much the same kind of panic around the invention of photography.
It will change, but craft and "look what I did" won't go away.
I like the case of video editing. This is a situation where oftentimes zero percent of the source material is your own creation. Most would still consider this an artform. Shaping the overall meaning of a pile of raw assets is usually way more valuable than any one asset in isolation.
Successfully integrating many disparate parts has always been the big ticket item. Dealing with the rough edges and making different ideas play together nicely is where all the value lives in most businesses.
Even great artists do it. Some of the most famous movie posters by Drew Struzan are originally photographs:
https://www.reddit.com/r/OldSchoolCool/comments/ejsb22/micha...
The article touches on this. I found the Norman Rockwell quote rather amusing.
Not sure I agree with the final takeaway point. At least from a personal standpoint anyway. I used AI images in a couple of Amiga intros, but actively admitted to using them. At the time there wasn't quite the backlash against their use, so now would completely steer clear, but not having access to a graphic artist is reflected in the output I've managed in the recent times (zero).
It's hard to get in the era of ubiquitous 32 bit color depth, but back in the day, part of the show was making merely your hardware output picture very close to the reference in as many colors as possible and good resolution too. This was where Amiga's special video modes could really shine.
Thus, some demos, like the one where Lazur's image came from [0] were just slideshows of very colorful images that were more than likely traced from something.
[0] https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=3715 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmhffwhGiK0
Nice video from the Ahoy channel on his recreation of a pixel art burger that I think offers a really nice insight into the process for creating images like these
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4EFkspO5p4
Curious not to see the term rotoscoping mentioned. As a lot of what is shown in copying some pictures is effectively that, isn't it?
Rotoscoping is specifically tracing over a sequence of images - usually video or film frames - to create a sequence of drawings that can be used in an animation workflow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotoscoping
Spaceballs’ State Of The Art and 9 Fingers are a couple of Amiga demoscene productions that relied on rotoscoping.
Right, I suppose you would call what Norman Rockwell was doing was tracing?
I still see them as largely related? That not considered the case?
Artists and animators (like me!) make some fine distinctions between different ways of studying reality and transferring it onto the canvas.
Using a model is posing a live person and/or some objects and setting up lights and painting from that. Artists have done this for years. I've done this. Rockwell did this.
Using photo reference is taking photographs (yours or others') and working from those. I've done this. Rockwell did this too!
Tracing is placing your reference image beneath or over your canvas, and tracing the contours you see in it. Tracing paper, chroma-key, projectors, camera lucidia, tracing the image onto acetate and taping that to your Amiga's monitor to trace it again in DPaint, dropping ref into one layer in Photoshop and working over it in another one, these are all methods of tracing. I've done them all! Rockwell probably did this now and then, with the caveat that a pro's tracing is a very different beast from a beginner's - it's easy for a beginner to just trace the contours with no thought as to how they come together into a 3d shape, and get a drawing that feels dead and lifeless and subtly wrong. Saying someone's work looks like a tracing is kind of an insult.
Rotoscoping is explicitly a process of tracing/referencing a sequence of images to produce a sequence of images rather than a single image. It is related! But this article is entirely discussing the way demoscene artists would reproduce a static image, so roto does not apply here. Rockwell painted static images; he never did this.
(It's certainly possible that Rockwell could have taken single frames of film and had them printed for reference, but that's still not roto. Roto's explicitly an animation process that results in a series of drawings based on your film/video ref.)
the attribution point is the real crux. the demo scene actually had a strong culture of crediting influences and techniques greets, shoutouts, releasing source code. the copying was open and celebrated. the problem with modern inspired by work isn't the copying itself,it's doing it silently and letting audiences assume full originality
My recollection is that the .MOD tracker music scene was the same. Credit your samples and nobody bats an eye! Be seen as "stealing" a sample, and you're persona non grata. It's really that simple.
On my device, low res versions of the images are displayed, I had to click them to open the full res versions — which I very highly recommend!
e.g. I zoomed in to view the matchbox texture described in the article, and found it a blur. (Clicking loads the uncompressed PNG.)
Personally, I think for this page, loading full res images inline is warranted. The resulting 3MB page size would be more than justified :)
This is stated under the first image: All images on this page are clickable and link to non-lossy versions when available. The aim is to not have large amounts of data be downloaded by default.
"Good artists copy, great artists steal" (c) Picasso
In the Lazur's 256 colour rendition, it is curious that they got the details in the front very well but messed up the third guys face completely.
To me all the faces look messed but I believe it is mostly because the image seems to be distorted, it is stretched in the vertical direction. I suspect it was created on hardware with non-square pixels and is just displayed wrongly.
I was curious and took a look in an image editor. It indeed fits much better with y axis scaled down 15-20%
If look good if you look at the image in original resolution. Click on it.
I would contest that choosing not to reveal the use of AI is due to an agreement of the nature of the behaviour. In an ideal world that could maybe be the case, but I think the driving force behind secrecy is harassment.
There are those who use AI as part of their process proudly, but secretly, because they know they will receive abuse.
I really wonder how some people think of themselves as artists while simultaneously attacking another persons choice of self expression.
GenAI tools absolutely suck at pixel art from my experience. They can mimic aspects of the look at the display layer, but they are fundamentally bogus.
Sprite animation in particular is bad unless you build a bespoke engine to spit out sequential PNGs.
A poser will give, but not withstand (and internalize) critique. An artist is too busy producing or suffering to care.
> They can mimic aspects of the look at the display layer, but they are fundamentally bogus.
The same could be said of a lot of retro themed games. They frequently do not adhere to the same requirement such as number of colours per attribute cell. Nevertheless, they are producing a style that they are aiming for.
But I agree that GenAI tends to suck at pixel art. It will be interesting to see how much that changes. More importantly poor quality art is still art, and frequently making poor art is the first step towards making great art. You don't have to like or applaud things you don't feel are very good. It is just not kind or useful to attack the artist.
>A poser will give, but not withstand (and internalize) critique. An artist is too busy producing or suffering to care.
This is my sense as well. The bulk of the aggressive behaviour seems to be coming from people whose identity values that they can produce things others cannot. Those who like just producing things are still just producing things.
> I really wonder how some people think of themselves as artists while simultaneously attacking another persons choice of self expression.
Because AI art is not art, and rips off existing artwork in a way that is more than learning from the style and imitating.
Why do you get to proclaim what is and isn't art? It is a topic that has been debated for millennia.
Almost every respected art form today was birthed to cries of "That is not art"
I don't think anyone was selling demos commercially or trying to pass off the creative ideas as their own work. With this in mind, we should set aside ideas of plagiarism, copyright, etc. It was a showcase of technical prowess/creativity. People knew what Death Dealer looked like & if they saw it pop up in a demo, they wouldn't think the demogroup was passing it on as their original idea (I would assert this was a given). As such, it was meant to be a reference. People thought they knew the limitation of their computer. They would play Lemmings, or whatever, and think that's as good as the graphics on the Amiga can get. The point of the demo was to blow those conceptions away.
The creative part in a demo wasn't the the art itself, the subject, the composition, etc., no, it was representing something thought impossible. Eventually, kinda like how photography changed painters' relationship with realistic representation, more powerful tech did the same with these types of demos, so the medium moved on.
It would be so awesome to make a cartoon today using original techniques with hand-drawn scenes, multiplane cameras, and most importantly jazz music :)
These people literally gods to me growing up. My parents were poorer than others so we never had any computer better than an acorn electron but the demos my friends with amigas and Atari ST’s showed my blew my mind.
If only the demoscene wasn’t so horrible culturally. It’s absolutely full of old sceners who have “earned” being dicks to people, and unfortunately many newbies who think that the way to be a real scener is to copy that behaviour. The constant flamewars on pouet.net are embarrassing. It is a good reminder that the internet did not used to be a nicer place though
> Pixel artist Lazur's 256 colour rendition (left) of a photo by Krzysztof Kaczorowski (right). A masterful copy showcasing the sharpness, details and vibrancy achievable with pixel techniques.
Well - the edited image looks clearer in the rendition, but also more fake. So unless that was the goal, I prefer the more blurred image, simply because it is more authentic than that digital edit. Many AI images have a similar problem; they look very out of place. I noticed this in some games where AI generated images are used. The images look great but they simply don't fit into the game at hand or they have a style that looks alien. Case in point was mods for the game Baldur's Gate 2 EE, where these images are great but they look very outside-ish. And that's a problem that seems to be hard to get rid of from such generated images, at the least for most of those I saw so far.
It was done in 1995, and likely not as an edit, but as a hand pixeled replication.
https://demozoo.org/graphics/28620/
That's was a great read and I agree with the author. Though to be honest, I don't particularly like the type of Amiga pixel art in the article. That is, pixel art with relatively high resolution and relatively high color depth. Everything looks too smooth and hyperrealistic in my opinion.
I think things can look much better for pixel art that is either very low resolution (e.g. the small characters and objects in a SNES game, which would usually be just a few pixels wide, so every pixel has to be placed deliberately) or has a very low color depth (a pallette between two to ~16 colors, like the backgrounds in a PC-88 game), or both (like the sprites in a Game Boy game).
An example where higher color depth can ruin the visuals is "Snatcher" by Kojima. The backgrounds for the original PC-88 and MSX versions were relatively detailed (200x100 pixels perhaps), while the color depth was very low (8 colors?), which greatly accentuated the pixel-art look. However, the later re-releases added more and more colors and smooth gradients, which only made it look worse, like a mediocre comic book.
>It's a place of refuge from the constant churn of increased efficiency
Increased efficiency also seems to be part of its appeal. The limitation is you can't increase efficiency by just upgrading computer specs, but instead have to find innovating ways to use the existing resources as efficient as possible to make something great. These kinds of optimization or compression problems seems like something AI would be very helpful for, so I think it is premature to try and ban its usage.
This is quite tone deaf - demoscene stands for creativity and resource constraint, and using ai cancels both in favor of resource intensive cognitive offload
Not knowing the scene and only what I took from the article - it’s precisely this. There is a reverence towards human labour and effort that affords relaxing what are generally accepted social contracts in other areas (e.g. copying). It’s a very interesting social construct where the self-policing is in a very specific are whilst other areas are forgiven.
The demo scene is obsessed with hardware and tooling. Exhaustively knowing how things work and showing practical results as evidence is the main activity at demo parties.
You can crib techniques from other people but unless you also show that you understand them deeply, e.g. by creative adaptions, you'll still be considered a lamer even though your results match those of someone else.
This is one of the reasons why the demo scene still has a lot of physical events, it's part of the socialisation process to be in the same room as other people, putting in your final touches while they observe and produce distractions that in practice validate your abilities and respectable refusal to take shortcuts.
AI would be helpful for finding innovative solutions?
Are you talking about some sort of hypothetical future Super-AGI?
Even brute force from something like autoresearch could be able to find ways to squeeze out extra space by trying different ways to express things and rewrite it.