Unreal by Future Crew
Why Hacker News recommends it
Cited as a landmark demoscene piece that astonished people with what a PC could do.
What it is
The first-place PC demo at Assembly 1992, Unreal by Future Crew, showing real-time effects such as palette-based wormholes.
Recommended by 0 HN commenters across 0 different months, 2020 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Cites SyneRyder · 2020-01 · on “Demoscene, the secret behind Finnish game industry”
The Future Crew demo before Second Reality was actually called Unreal [0], hence that track name Unreal II. The Unreal video game soundtrack was also from demoscene musicians. The one I remember most was "Mechanism Eight" [1] from Unreal Tournament, written by Andrew Sega, aka Necros in the demoscene. He's also got a couple of great non-demoscene solo albums as The Alpha Conspiracy, worth looking up on Spotify. [0] [this video] [1] [LINK]
Cites kragen · 2020-02 · on “Aggressively Stupid: The Story Behind After Dark (2007)”
Part of the difficulty is that technical feasibility of the software is no longer as much of a limitation. Half the things in XScreenSaver or Future Crew's Unreal [this video] were things it was really surprising to see on the screen of a computer in 1993, especially one that wasn't a $50000 SGI. But now pretty much anything you can see, you can record an HD video of, and your $100 hand computer is fast enough to play it back in real time. So there's no longer the wonder factor of "how is this even possible? Am I dreaming?". Except sometimes there is. Like with Deep Dream. Or GPT-2. Or the Looking Glass light field display. Or GauGAN. Or a lot of math things. Or topology optimization. Or Wikipedi
Cites boomlinde · 2024-02 · on “How video games use lookup tables”
Yes, you could for example achieve the tunnel effect described above with a 16x16 or 32x8 texture using a 256-entry palette. Unreal by Future Crew has an effect that comes to mind that is probably implemented exactly like that (on VGA mode 0x13), just more of a wormhole than a tunnel: [this video]