I was asked to join the ROMA.EXE organizing team around November 2025.


At the time, there was little more than a landing page that looked something like this and also the general idea of what the party was supposed to become.

Also, it seemed that a never overwelmed LRNZ was already creating the party's visual identity, while the organizers were looking for someone to build the actual website (apparently that landing page wasn't meant to be the final version).

Overall, it all felt like something very far away. But in the end, I said yes because it sounded fun. I figured I could bring my usual ironic perspective to the table. Besides that, what else are you going to do during the coldest months of the year, other than staying home and idling on Discord?

Around mid-December, LRNZ delivered the complete visual identity package. Little did we know (or perhaps we did) that we'd be staring at those images for many months to come - including on giant 6-by-3 billboards (spoiler: meters, not pixels).

We started studying other demoparties. The bar had clearly been raised compared to my memories of TiG and Trip, the Italian parties of the late '90s. Nowadays every party seemed to have multi-camera streaming, a sophisticated party system to satisfy even the pickiest sofa scener, and much more.

Not that we were particularly worried. After all, we were a whopping 5 people organizing the party.
A few days after LRNZ's delivery, the website was online, thanks to Astaroth, who basically built it overnight, while FRK handled all the hosting infrastructure. The website even featured a countdown timer, although it would only become really intimidating several months later.

Now all we had to do was fill the party hall with people, and avoid ending up with zero productions.
Looking at other events, we found parties comparable to ours in terms of size and duration, such as Rsync and Mountainbytes. The difference was that those weren't first editions. So I gradually convinced myself that having 30 to 40 participants would already be realistic. 50 would have been a huge success.
After all, Italy hadn't had a demoparty in 19 years.

At the beginning of 2026, we started developing the three invitation intros: C64, Amiga, and PC. Soon after, we also started producing physical promotional material: iridescent stickers, Roberta's toroids, and various other goodies.
Then came Revision, which, together with X, would become the main place to promote our event.

Personally, I spent a good portion of Revision rewriting our 64k intro so it would actually fit into 64 kilobytes, eventually submitting it 15 hours after the deadline (thanks again, Chaos).
If you watch the Revision timelapse from this point onward, you can actually see me coding non-stop in order to finish the 64k and do justice to the rest of the organizing team.


Overall, Revision turned out to be a fantastic amplifier for the party. Mainly because we annoyed pretty much every scener we could find.

By May we had already passed my well known mental threshold of 50 tickets sold, but I still couldn't quite believe it. I finally started believing it towards the end of May, when ticket sales suddenly stopped looking like a straight line and turned into an exponential curve.


What surprised - and honestly moved - me the most was seeing so many people buying Supporter tickets (€100). That's an incredible gesture, and it's exactly why our supporters have a dedicated section on our website.

Along the way, local communities such as Spazio Chirale and Roma Gamedev joined forces with us. The demoscene can sometimes be a rather closed and self-referential circle, so collaborating with neighboring communities can only be healthy. It's a bit like finally leaving the house and going for a walk.

And then, completely unprepared as ever, the party day arrived. Turning the party into a real event after months of existing only virtually takes an incredible amount of energy. In fact, I'm only now catching up on enough sleep to be able to sleep less and actually do something else.

But it was a mesmerizing experience.
We had releases ranging from the (not so) obvious PC, C64 and Amiga, to something more exotic like the Atari Lynx or the MSX. I barely had time to look away from my PC, especially during the final moments, when entries kept arriving non-stop. Yet every time I looked up, I saw a hall packed with hundreds of people. I was still convinced we'd end up with about 50 participants - 60 at the absolute most - but by Saturday I had to admit I had been spectacularly wrong. From the stage, I even asked whether the people who had bought tickets from Canada and the United States were actually there.
They answered.


If there will be another edition of ROMA.EXE, there are countless things I'd do differently. Like adding those extra 16 pixels to the graphics competition rules. Or actually plugging in that microphone for the ambient audio. Or organizing it next to Pellicu$'s house, on a weekend when Pellicu$ is actually available.

I'd like to believe that, with this party, we managed to restart something in Italy. Maybe we helped wake up a scene that had been asleep for years, excluding the sporadic comeback of some groups and individuals. Maybe. Then again, that brings us back to the eternal question: will there still be a demoscene twenty years from now? What I do know is that I saw plenty of oldschool sceners who still have something to say, and plenty of younger people who may soon learn how to say it.

posted by friol at 6/29/2026 09:27:00 PM - under: demoscene, Italy, organizing, party - comments? here (0)

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