interview de Statix/psychic links.

PCFUN: Can you tell us the story of the group in some words?
STATIX: I met s-cubed (the other coder) at school, and we watched the early FC 
demos, and thought "we can do this!" so we started planning ACT1, our first 
demo. It was harder than we thought!

At this time, skywalker (the musician) had founded a one-man group called
psychic link, and done a tiny 4k intro; s-cubed and I joined, so now we
had a name and a musician. We coded act1 in a few months and released it
at the time of asm 94. It didn't spread far coz we had no net access,
but it was a start (it's still my favourite of our demos!)

About a month before asm95, we started to do another demo: juice.
This was really mostly done in the 2 days before the compo
in a big hurry! at the partyplace we could talk to almost no-one,
since we were unknown and people just ignored us like we were
lamers (except symptom, who were cool!).

we were only hoping
for a place in the top 15, but when sandman/valhalla told us of a rumour that
we were 2nd, we couldn't believe it.... but it was true. That was the best
moment. Since then, we have been quite busy with school, but I gradually
worked on headache, as a one man production. I released it this march.
When I went to wired, I found it much better because everyone had seen
juice. But still we had had no luck in finding an artist for the group,
- we needed one coz none of us can can draw!

In between the demo releases, I did a lot of background-coding, and wrote
two versions of my tracker for the music. These are publicly available.
(disorder tracker, dtrk200a.zip is latest).
Finally just before headache was released, o'neill, previously in gollum
and s!p joined us. His graphics will be in the next production.

oh that was a bit long! I'll make it shorter now, I promise!

PCFUN: :-) no problem! What is each member doing in life? (students, etc...) ?
STATIX: s-cubed is now in his second year at university; the other 3 are still
at school. o'neill, the finnish member has another year of school. sywalker
and I (statix) finish school this august and hope to join s-cubed at
university afterwards. we are all fairly normal people, (er...I think!) and
so there is never enough time for demo making; it is really a rainy-weekend
activity... that's why we never release hundreds of productions! also, since
we are all students, we never have money! it's expensive to travel from
england, so we can't go to many partys. that makes it hard to get into
the scene....

during the summer holidays I (statix) work at bullfrog. Last summer it
taught me a lot about coding, juice would not be possible without that
experience. I think the scene really underestimates games coders.

PCFUN: why did you enter the demo scene?
STATIX: we didn't really know about a scene, we just wanted to try doing what
we had seen on ST (early demos like carebears, the lost boys) and future crew.
Only after we released act1 did we realise how big the scene was, and how
hard it was to be in it if you did not go to finnish parties and win prizes.
That's why we entered juice.... and finally we are recognized on the scene!

PCFUN: About what are you the proudest?
STATIX: I am proudest of juice, because it was such a rush but still came off 
really well. We have a slightly "un-fashionable" style which you either like or
you don't; we were lucky that the audience liked juice a lot; act1 is however
my favourite demo and if we had entered it at asm94, it could have done well.
We were young, I was only 15 when I did act1 - so for me it is the best
memory.

PCFUN: What are your projects?
STATIX: well I've just finished headache, which was purely for fun (not 
party-winning, as more and more demos seem for; this annoys me! see next 
question...) and we are working on a big demo for summer 96, I don't know which
party we will go to, but it should be really big this one! I say no more...
also, I will release version 3 of my tracker, if I ever finish it.

PCFUN: How do you see the future of the demo scene?
STATIX: the demo scene went through a phase where everyone was trying to win
parties, and few demos were released in between. I think this is bad, but
it's coming out of it now... also the parties got more and more commercial,
which is also bad for the free spirit of it all. But do I see a circle here?
it seems that a small party will be organised in the summer in the place
where the original assemblys were held.... so perhaps it is starting all
over again, but with future crew replaced by ... ??...
To start with we found the scene hard to break in to, but once you have
made some good productions it's a really good group of people and easy
to make good friends... that's perhaps the best thing and why I don't
think demos will die. I also think the quality of demos has improved
greatly recently, particularly in the respect of looking good to non-demo
people (a good time for C:!!) for example, caero makes great use of
vectors in a designed way, wheras 6 months ago it would have been an
object show.
Finally, there are few new effects/code around, so it's really great when
you see new ones. I want to say, I think transgression 2 by MFX is a great
example of how alive the scene is, and how it is possible to do new
effects. I love that intro! so if the coders are reading this... congrats!


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Si vous voulez contacter Statix, son email est  statix@sv.span.com