Gaming industry trivia thread


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Thought I'd share some interesting trivia I've come across on the web, concerning the connection between the gaming industry and the demoscene. Some are quite surprising (but not unknown)...

Digital Illusions, the guys behind BF1942 and Motorhead and a long row of the worlds' premier pinball sims, are actually made up mostly of members of the international demo group The Silents (TSL). Their group handle can be found in almost every Digital Illusions game ever published. The owners of DICE are (were?) Axl and Animal of The Silents. According to Axl most original members of Digital Illusions were also members of The Silents.

Starbreeze, the group behind FastTracker II, the most widely used tracker in the demoscene, have now become a commercial company developing games.

Jogeir Liljedahl, one of the best known demo musicians in the world, quit his job at Funcom, where he had done a lot of music for various platforms. He won't tell why, but he mentions "some faces at work", which presumably indicates that his coworkers weren't comfortable with his previous affiliation with several shady demo groups such as Fairlight and Razor. He runs his own "group" called Noiseless, and has done work for The Silents as well as Denmark's most famous demo group, Spaceballs.

Jens-Christian Huus, wellknown musician for Danish developer ITE, is a member of Danish demo group Vibrants.

Jonne Valtonen, musician on the Gameboy game Project S-11, is also known as Purple Motion of the Finnish demo group Future Crew.

Skaven, also a known musician for Future Crew, is also the musician for Finnish game developers and previous demo group Remedy Entertainment, of Max Payne fame.

Tero Kostermaa, musician for demo group Trauma, is responsible for the music in Remedy's "demoscene" parts of Futuremark's famous 3DMark, versions 99 and 2000.

Jeroen Tel, Thomas Mogensen and Thomas E. Petersen are the Dutch demo group Maniacs of Noise. Their handles are, respectively, WAVE, DRAX and Laxity. The list of games and demos they've done music for is quite extensive. Some aren't listed on their company page, such as Tel's music for Dutch demo group Blackmail.

That's it. It's clear, if you go to scene.org, that the gaming industry doesn't want to all this talent to pass them by. Several big names including Team 17 and others, regularly recruit from the scene and put their job opportunities on notice at scene.org.

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  • 6 months later...

Reviving this thread with some new information:

Remedy Entertainment is none other than Future Crew, legendary Finnish demo group. Thus, it is not suprising to find Skaven/FC among the regulars in Remedy's productions. There are also a lot of crossovers going on in the Finnish game developer scene. Both Skaven and Jonne Valtonen have also done a lot of work for Housemarque (or the separate groups of which it consists). It is also safe to assume that Remedy Entertainment got its name from one of the biggest annual scene conferences in Scandinavia, which goes by the name of Remedy.

It would seem that Swedish game developer Paradox Entertainment has some connection to the demo scene as well, as they use the demoscene-esque handle [PDX]. No relation to the shady British scene group, though (thankfully).

Digital Illusions' old scene group The Silents now seems to be based in Germany, though members come from all over Europe. When Digital Illusions were founded, The Silents were based in Denmark.

Habitat North, upcoming developers of an XBox game called SOLO, are in fact the Swedish demo scene group C-Lous, with group founder Claw as their CEO. C-Lous are still active in the scene. Former C-Lous member TMX now works at Digital Illusions.

Blue Byte, makers of Albion, are likely to have some crossover with demo group Albion Crew. The demo group are considerably older than the game, and both Albion Crew and Blue Byte are german groups. Coincidence, I think not.

Looking for more information, will post here when found.

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