World's largest demo party stream banned by Twitch, during the event

Petteri Pyyny
6 Apr 2021 11:59

World's largest pure demo party, Revision has been held annually in Germany since 2011. This time around the event was held remotely, due the global COVID-19 pandemic. But during the event, the streaming platform provider Twitch decided to ban the event's stream, without warning.
Twitch has recently expanded to various gaming and demo events, trying to expand its reach beyond game streaming platform. Thus, Revision had chosen Twitch as its streaming provider in order to cater the event, competitions and all things involved to its virtual visitors.

During the Saturday afternoon, however, Twitch hhad decided to block the Revision's stream - without warning and with no reason given why they banned the stream. Revision party relies heavily on volunteers who have poured thousands of hours of work to ensure that the event runs as smoothly as possible. Not to mention all the demo groups that have invested hundreds of hours to their art that was meant to be showcased in Revision competition.

Among the organizers, there's no information on why Twitch decided to ban the stream, but rumors say that some of the demos shown at the competition showed bare male buttocks at some point and that triggered Twitch to ban the stream. However, this hasn't been confirmed by either the organizers or by Twitch.

Luckily, Revision team got help from other legendary grass-roots group, German Chaos Computing Club, a hacker group founded back in 1981. CCC provided a new host for Revision's stream and the event could continue in new streaming address.

What exactly is a demo scene?

Demo scene is an undergound computer sub-culture that creates demos, computer programs that show off the talents of the programmers, graphics designers and musicians involved in the project. Demos aren't videos, but instead, real-time computer software that generates audio-visual effects, stories and effects, typically in a story-line mode. Hundreds of professional game developers have originally learned their skills in demo scene.

Demos and demo scene, as an art form, was added to Finland's national UNESCO list as a form of digital art worth preserving.

In demo parties, demo groups compete against each other by showing their demos to the party visitors. Visitors then get to vote for the best demo.

The winners of Revision 2021 party

After hiccups with Twitch, Revision party was completed successfully. There were several different demo competition categories, as there always are in big demo parties. To mention some of the competition categories, there was obviously the big "general" PC demo category, but also 4K PC intro category where the competition entry had to be squeezed into 4 kB (yup, kilobytes) in its entirety.

Furthermore, as a nod to the legacy, party had two Commodore Amiga competition categories and handful of other categories too. All the competition results can be found here.

Here's the PC demo competition winner: (and note, while you're watching it through YouTube, originally it is a software program, generating all those visuals in real-time)

And here's the this year's winner in Amiga demo category: (note: again, the computer generated all this, in real time, using original Amiga hardware from early 1990s. To be more specific, the computer used was Amiga 1200 with 68060 CPU running at 66 MHz, with 64 MB RAM)

You can download all the demos and intros shown at Revision party from scene.org download servers.

EDIT: Added Amiga specs and added some rumors about possible ban reasons.