Demo of the Past

Demo of past artwork and mini games.

March 16, 2010

2 Min Read

Wow, the stuff you can find when cleaning! This is the cover art for Neuron’s first demo CD created in 1997. CD burners were very expensive and rare then. I had to go to a friend of a friend’s, Tad Hutchinson who is now our audio guy, to get the thing burnt for $40 bucks. What a price gouger! He was the only person that had a burner! I am sure I have got that back in beer by now :D Anyhow, this CD did a couple things, gave us some experience, headaches, and practice :) That is about it. Oh, and finally a blog entry for retro day.

Demo CD art

We had several mini games on the CD. One of them was a 2D parallax scroller we called Digaroo. Digaroo was a digital assault kangaroo. This is a sketch of the parallax layout for it.

Digaroo

Digaroo used an analog joystick for input. You remember the ones you had to calibrate by moving the stick to all extremes and pressing the button before playing. If you did this wrong your game play was jacked!

Anyhow to show the user how to move the joystick we thought it was cool to show a cactus instead. We bent the cactus around with the stick :) Nice.

Cactus

Also on the CD was a full 3D game engine with dynamic lighting (even before Doom!) If I would have spent more time making a real game instead of the demo I might have been the first. Sigh. Hind sight huh? There was also some artwork showing our art capabilities of the time. They were okay at best.