Rebuilding the Italian demoscene

[Rebuilding the Italian Demoscene........]
(at least in HTML)

I was idling on IRC... I mean on Discord last night, and we started talking about the Italian demoscene with an old friend and scener (Pellicu$/Japotek). We listed the productions of Japotek at the old demoparties (despite the years, our memory was not that bad), and we came to a party called "The Italian Gathering", back in 1998.

At that party, Japotek won the democompo with "Dual Soul" (beautiful demo, go watch it), and another Italian group, d0d (Day Zero Deflection) came second with a demo called "0trunk". I wanted to see that demo again, and quickly went to pouet, but immediately discovered that that demo was missing. Same thing on demozoo. A Google search returned no results.
Seemed that that demo belonged to the nefarious category of the "lost" demos.

So I wrote on Facebook to an old member of d0d, to see if someone still had that executable. Very quickly, a couple of people responded and shared the missing .zip, which I immediately uploaded on pouet. But then, the discussion continued on Facebook, and some people expressed the desire to have an "archive" of all the Italian productions.

A frame from "Dual Soul"

In the past, people made entire websites dedicated to the Italian scene, with archives and lists of various types. But you know, those websites disappear as fast as they were born.
Also, on pouet there are a couple of lists, "Scene .it" and "Italian Productions", but they are far from being complete (let's say we are at less than 10% for each one). But I didn't want to do another list or another website (remember this comic).
I thought a more forward-looking tactic would be better.

So, I decided that my approach on building an Italian demoscene archive would be based on those principles:

- Rely on trustable websites. Don't buy another domain or start from scratch; there are scene.org, demozoo and pouet, just base the work on those foundations
- Make the list reproducible with the appropriate tools

I also started asking myself: what is an "Italian" production? I mean, groups can be composed of people from different countries. When do you consider a group (an so its productions) as "Italian"? I began coding a Python script that would start from the Pouet data dumps (the one with groups, in particular) and check on demozoo the nationality of its members (pouet doesn't have that info, unfortunately).

Just a couple of hours (I hope the demozoo admins didn't see my script scraping their site) and I had a nice Google Sheet with around 13029 groups, their member count and how many members were flagged as "Italian" on demozoo. After that, I excluded the groups that have less than 30% of their members coming from Italy. 30% seems like a nice tradeoff, and gives a list of 74 groups. Wow, all the 74 Italian groups in history!

Or better, after a cross-check with this page, we are at 93 groups.

Some more search with the fellows on Discord, and we hit 97 groups. Some *more* search, and we are at 101 (mainly a lot of Amiga history started to surface at this point). After a more depthly search, we are at 103 groups. Oh, I just added *myself* and we are at 104. I meant 106. 107 if we consider also groups like Charlie Brown Records, that released mainly music but also a musicdisk (Note: the final-final list is made of 133 groups/sceners - I think).

Never imagined I would post a spreadsheet here

7 of those groups are not present on demozoo. A bunch of more groups are not present on pouet. How many productions are we missing, how many demos in the nefarious "lost" category? I don't want to know. I'm just reporting the missing info we need to be *100% complete* at the end of this article, just in case someone with an old hard disk or a "phantom link" comes up and finds that material.

So, a little more of automatic HTML generation and fighting with CSS later, and this is the final result. The entire thing should be rebuildable, as I'm dropping the source of the tools used to generate the final page on github. demozoo.org is the "master" and you just need a list of demozoo URLs to generate the page.

The missing or "lost" groups:

• Ecstasy Brothers
• Fortezza Delle Scienze (it was a half-serious group, at least it's on demozoo now)
• Glamour
• Kids out of standard (they produced only a small <512b intro that's already on demozoo)
• Neural Activity
• Nightstar
• Swap

So, is this the complete list of all the Italian groups/sceners/productions? I don't think so. As I go deep down there, I find solo productions by Italian people, groups that are so forgotten that even the Internet doesn't remember them.

I will try to reconstruct this, but, I fear, just to find something more hidden.