Toxic Zombies history--11/1/93 By: Pallbearer [6/20/95--This history is quite old and you can debate whether the "Toxic Zombies" exist at all as a group--demowise--nowadays because of our lack of productions. Everyone is doing their own thing these days-- from me with the FREEDOM and ESCAPE CD's, to Dana (Webfoot) who runs a software company, to Krister (Swellow) who coded a game called TwinBlok, to Pascal who still does coding, to Jason who still composes cool music. We are still out there as individual zombies. Read on for the little history we do have, or did have back in 1993.] So, you want to know "all" about the Toxic Zombies? Well, it all started slightly over a year ago though the exact date remains unknown. After I (Pallbearer) started the internet demo site and showed my roommate some of the amazing productions groups were doing he mentioned we should "do a demo before we graduate." I though "no way" because that would require a lot of time and programming skills--we were lacking in both. My roommate reminded me we just took a C programming course and we could program in C. I laughed and said we do not know anything about graphics, scrolls, or how to do special effects. Worse yet was that we did not even have the any "C" programming help guides besides the book we used in the class. Somehow or another, I gave in and said yes, lets do it. At that point we decided we needed a name. That afternoon/evening we each jotted down some possible group names. We discussed the possibilities and arrived with "Toxic Zombies"--a name I had on my list. Though the arrival of a name is not that significant I do remember how I came up with our name. I decided to go through a zine like "Maximum Rocknroll" and the group name "White Zombie" rang a bell. So I kept the Zombie and though of something I could add to the name to make it more vicious (aka cool). Maybe it was the movie "Toxic Advenger" or perhaps the air quality that day which allowed me to come up with the "Toxic" part of our name. I then added Toxic to Zombie(s) and added the name to a list of other candidates. Toxic Zombies won in the voting/discussion. Joe (aka Slam) got started on the C programming for our first demo. He sort of used DEA's "Lamer" demo (written in Pascal) as motivation--think about it for a second; if DEA could write a demo that good in Pascal then we should be able to do equally as well with C right? So our thinking was a little off mark and Slam's first demo attempts--scrolls/copper bars--ended up being more of a super lamer demo (even worse then "Genocide"). We definitely needed help if we wanted to create a demo before graduating in about seven months. When we started Slam was considered more of a coder when our group started but he ended up contributing art--the first logo--for the UNDEAD demo. I, on the other hand, scratched my head and decided I would undertake the PR/writing tasks for the group. I released our demo to 15 groups through the mail and sent a press release to a few popular computer magazines. "Boardwatch" actually published part of my press release (August 93). "Dr. Dobbs Journal" almost printed an article I wrote for them while I hear "Game Players PC Entertainment" will be printing an article explaining demos (NOV/DEC 93). [***AND they did print the article***] [See boardw.txt for the "Boardwatch" article, ddj.txt for the article I wrote for "Dr. Dobbs Journal" which never got used, and pc_ent.txt for the "Players PC Entertainment" article I had a little to do with.] Thanks to my internet maintainer status I met Pascal (aka WildCoder) after he responded to a demonews file I wrote. Though a bit far away in France WildCoder was such a good Assembly programmer we had to have him on board. He had a demo, which was originally an Amiga demo, that he had re-programmed to work on an IBM. Through many delays this eventually became our first demo/intro some six months later! Yes, UNDEAD was about 6 months in the making and the long ass TEXT scroller is probably the longest scroll text in the PC demo scene--it takes over 30 minutes to fully read! Another member, Dana (Webfoot) mentioned she was interested in doing demos and was forming a group. When I saw some of her art I decided to ask her to join--as we needed an artist--and have her group could join the Toxic Zombie crew. Webfoot, from Chicago, joined and though quite busy working on an advanced degree she was able to do the final graphic logo in the Undead demo and write a little scroll text. Our musicians Adam from Utah (Dr. Hard Ass) and Jason from Indiana (Jaz) mentioned music to me via E-mail. After they expressed interest I asked them to join up since we need some musicians. Jaz, who prefers the ease of creating MIDI tunes, created the MODS which can be heard in our UNDEAD demo. Another of our coders is Krister (Swellow) from Sweden. He sent some pretty decent (and quick) code our way--vector/space--so we decided to bring him on board. Swellow has been involved in making a breakout game which I suspect has been released by now. [UPDATE: It has been two years since then and the game will be out by the time you read this, in fact, it may be on this CD.] Seap (?) for Denmark is our newest member whom WildCoder got to join after seeing his vector source. Seap, an ex-Amiga coder, is already excelling on PC code and should prove to be an asset to the Toxic Zombie crew. [UPDATE: Seap stayed on for awhile then joined Surprise! Productions.] That is all Toxic Zombie members though some new ones may join and older ones (like Slam) will vanish by the time you see this. Like many demo groups a problem that plagues us most is the "work" everyone has to do which leaves little time for demos. One thing is for sure and that is we are all in the group if we want to be and no one has been kicked out--maybe forgotten due to lack of contribution but not kicked out. We tend to take a less serious attitude toward demo coding. During the Summer of '93 Dr. Hard Ass, WildCoder, and I attended Assembly '93. Though we did not contribute anything besides to the mess we had fun meeting people and seeing how competitions unfold. I highly recommend attending to anyone within striking distance. Our travels took us from Paris, France through Belgium, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, to Kerava Finland. The seven day 4000km round-trip journey was quite the adventure. [See asm93rpt.txt for the report I did for Mayhem magazine. Also check out asm93.txt as it contains my journel of the ASSEMBLY 93 journey. There is also a video tape of the journey which Dr. Hard Ass took.] For now though, our adventure must conclude but we will continue to live on via our demos. On that note, be sure to pick up our first demo/intro UNDEAD and the demo disk mag MAYHEM which I worked on. As for future productions you will just have to wait and check the boards where our demos can be found. Spasm-o-Tron (514) 744-5718. Now, if only I could remember the other numbers. Greetings to: Avlanache, BSD, Digital Infinity, Epical, Extreme, Future Crew, Iguana, Imphobia, Public NMI, TSG, VLA, Witan, and all my friends on the internet.