The history of the Paranoids


Back in the Spring 1990 Dr.Doom thought it would be a good idea to form a group and to start making demos to show all the amiga-people you could also do good-looking graphics on PC too. After a while he found our main coder, Brainstorm, who started doing Paranoids's first demo, "No Lamers Allowed". Back then there were very little demos around, and the demo was a great success, as it was the first one to use a large sinus scroller, a simple plotter, and soundblaster music at the same time.

After the first release we had a long period, during which we didn't release anything, although we made some code, but none of them proved to be good-enough to be released. The only thing we released during that time was the fast-made partyintro with plain simple scroller and some digitized pictures. Then after almost 2 years of inactivity, we released our second demo, "Wasted Time", which had a deceiving text writer (people actually believed the machine crashed, and booted, and that we fixed some bugs on the code when it was shown in the Assembly'93 party *laugh*), and a nice filled and shaded vector landscape.

Then we started preparing for the Assembly'94 party. But people had lots of other things to do. About a month before the party, we started working in the weekends for the production, but still we had pretty little time. Thus, we only released a 4kb intro,4K OR LESS which used some things from the Wasted time, in addition to some beziers and stuff. Just took 2 weekends to optimize the 100kb C code to fit into 4kb.

Since the 4kb intro showed you could do well in 4kb intro's, we decided to concentrate on the 4kb competition in Assembly'95. The SPEED was a real success, its five different effects, including DOOM effect and voxel landscape, and it being one of the three (out of the ones shown on the big screen) 4kb intro's not showing a torus, ensured the vote to sixth in the competition.

Then in Scenario'95, we released our next great success demo: ASCII. Despite being coded only in two days, it included nice text mode vector graphics (ironically: A torus!), text mode interference, and a dual plane text mode rotate zoomer. Of course some people don't appreciate text mode demos (even though no-one noticed it's text mode when shown in the party), we have received a lot of appreciation for it being somewhat original approach.

During the time we got a lot of new contacts and members, some of which we kicked out because they did nothing for us. Today we are working on some projects, which will be released "sometimes in the future", and we don't want to advertise them further before they are ready for release.

For Scenario'97, we released a small demo: OLDD. It was built on some existing routines, some new graphics/music and a couple of new effects.


esap@cs.tut.fi
Last modified: Tue Oct 21 09:14:26 1997