The mission and history of The Xperience

As we're are quite often asked about the development history of our releases, here's a short summary of The Xperience's history:

1987-1991

Many Acorn-enthusiasts regret that there's no real demo for Acorn computers.

1991-1993

Some demo crews - especially from France, Switzerland, Benelux, Norway and Germany - write dozens of technically oriented demos. Groups like Armaxess, Arc Angels, Brothers in ARM, Bytepool Productions and XYMOX Project are able to produce nice code - but their productions lack of true demo spirit. Until now, there's no demo; there are just code compilations.

1993, Oct

The Xperience is founded in northern Germany by former members of BPP, XYMOX Project and Titanium Design. Founding members are Cry (music), Twin (art), Lunatic (code) and Skandor (code). Four different freaks - one single scope: "The Archimedes needs a best demo - and it will be made by us."

Nov

The Xperience designs Paralyzed, a very ambitious demo. Obviously, it's too ambitious: A few weeks later, the coding section agrees that Paralyzed is impossible to implement on the Acorn hardware at that time. The project is being cancelled, the team is dispaired.

1994, Apr

The Xperience designs Xcentric, a demo which will considerably shake the Acorn demo scene.

Aug

95% of Xcentric is finished now. The Xperience hopes to release the demo on Acorn World in October...

Sep

The Xperience's coders upgrade to RiscPC. They have to learn that only very few parts of Xcentric accept the new hardware platform. Due to close hardware programming, certain parts have to be completely re-programmed. In particular, special RiscPC versions have to be created.

1995, Jan

Spice joins as a coder. His application intro offers one of the most beautiful effects ever: gouraud-shaded fishes move under a semi-transparent water surface. Due to sloppy water-displaying-code, this intro needs 8 MB RAM to run correctly. As this still exceeds the Xperience hardware requirements, the intro hasn't been released yet...

Jan

Blu - a 64K intro - is being designed.

Mar

The Xperience participates in the German Video Art Award in Berlin. Their contribution consists of a raytraced version of their early project Paralyzed. Two Amiga 1200 computers and a SGI station are used to produce a very demo-like video. Despite neat design and cool music, this production only reaches 12th place (out of 17 Music Video contributions). The moral is: Music videos have to be like MTV music videos, not like demos; actors and stories rule, raytraced objects suck!

Apr

Finally, Xcentric is being released. There are several ARM2 world records: 12288 3D dots, 5888 shaded dotball dots, 416x176 rotzoom (2x2), 3 fullscreen parallax layers, fullscreen scum plasma. But does anybody out there want to see ARM2 demos in 1995?

Apr

On Fried Bits 3 coding convention, The Xperience releases Blu, the first Acorn 64K intro and the first RiscPC demö at all. As always, there are some world records: 288x228 rotzoom (1x1), 131072 3D dots, 320x240 rotating keftale (2x2), fullscreen fire, infinite voxelspace, 3D tunnel flight (1x1), fullscreen true-colour plasma.

May

Due to loads of unreleased songs, The Xperience decides to design Phonology, the first Xperience music compilation.

Sep

50% of Phonology is finished. The Xperience starts designing Ecce, a real RiscPC demö.

Oct

Xperience Media Arts is founded as a department for more "serious" projects.

Dec

99% of Phonology is finished. The Xperience still doesn't release this music demo, as there seem to be some misfeatures in Acorn's 16 bit-sound support software. Many demo routines look quite ugly when they are intended to run at full frame rate (as almost all routines in The Xperience's demös do). The release is therefore still delayed. No solution has been found yet.

1996, Apr

Rage!, a short RiscPC demö, is being designed. In only three days, most of the coding, music, and graphics had been done. Due to the lack of sound synchronisation and missing video data, it isn't possible to release Rage! at the Symposium Easter Party.

May

Zeeron joins as a Fasttracker II and MIDI musician. Zeeron is the first Xperience member on PC and the first Xperience member from Scandinavia.

June

The Internet Xperience is online now.

December, 1st

A solution to the 16 bit sound-trouble has been found, and Phonology finally gets released! Unfortunately, another bug occurs with a specific version of the SoundDMA-module, that lets Phonology crash! Upgrading to v1.48 of this module solves this problem.

1997, Jan

As the traditional Easter demo-party is near, The Xperience starts designing a new demo-project, codenamed Emden. It is meant to become The Xperience's contribution for the SILIconvention and the replacement for Ecce.

Mar

It is Easter, and era, which turns out to be Emden's release name, participates at the SILIconvention-Acorn-demo competition - and wins.

May

The Xperience release their new WWW-Design. era gets released, too.