Plastic is a group that holds a special place on the Polish demoscene. In the early 2000s, it became famous for a series of spectacular demos intended for PCs that eventually attracted the attention of Sony, which was seeking creators who could create experimental productions for the new PlayStation 3 console. Thus began Plastic’s collaboration with the Sony studio in Santa Monica, which resulted in the Linger in Shadows demo and then the games Datura and Bound (which was released for PS4), for which one of Plastic’s most important contributors, Michał ‘Bonzaj’ Staniszewski, received Polityka’s first Passport award in the digital culture category.
An interesting example of the limitations that demoscene creators impose on themselves is the fact that although demos were intended for PCs, they weren’t created with modern equipment in mind, but rather for machines that had dominated gamers’ desks 18 years earlier.
Of course, demos have also been created for the most popular computer in Poland in the 1980s. The 8-bit Atari still has a huge number of fans, and they stay connected with each other through the Atarionline.pl website. Mona is a program based on an algorithm that projects successive strokes of a virtual brush on to a screen—they seem random at first, but eventually they form a variation on Leonardo da Vinci’s most famous painting. All it takes is 74 lines of code, occupying a total of about 256 bytes.
Although there are still great demos being made, the Polish demoscene is much smaller nowadays. It consists mainly of experienced creators who are still excellent at what they do and haven’t given up their former hobby for other matters that are more serious, but not always interesting. The average age at demoparties is older—there’s a lack of younger people to whom the veterans can pass the torch. Game creation, from which it’s sometimes possible to make money, usually turns out to be more tempting than creating demos, which are unprofitable by definition. However, demosceners are very noticeable—they stimulate a growing community of enthusiasts of old computers, popularise knowledge about digital culture, and co-create such unusual places as the UBU Lab in Kraków, where researchers, artists, and veterans of the demoscene meet.
The writer Bruce Bethke invented the term ‘cyberpunk’ in 1980, inspired by a rather unpleasant experience. He was selling computers for a living at the time. One day, three teenagers walked into the shop. When Bethke turned his back for a moment, the teenagers swarmed around a computer on display and began typing on the keyboard. After they left, Bethke realised, firstly, that he didn’t understand the program they had written, and secondly, that the program he had been showing customers no longer existed. He felt angry at first, but then he started thinking about his vision of the young rebels of the future, whose attribute wouldn’t be combat boots or mohawks but fingers on computer keyboards. Cyberpunks. His short story titled Cyberpunk, published in 1983, was the first use of this word which is now enjoying a dizzying career.