In 1996, Opiate was to compete at NAiD '96, North america's only real demo party of the whole year. This is the time line of jmX's (me) and Tyr's trip to Montreal for a weekend experience we would never forget. This is the story of our journey from Austin, TX to Montreal, Canada. About 70% of these pictures were taken by Tyr and I, and the other 30% by Higher Being.
May 1996
Here you see me working on the 3d engine that was used in "PILL" - our naid demo. The tools I used were Tasm 3.1 and Turbo Pascal 7.0. Over 50% of the 3D Engine ended up being in asm...go figure :). The demo totaled about 10,000 lines of code (99% by jmX) + midas sound system. The complete project time was about 3-4 weeks.....creativness being what slowed me down.
May 30th, 1996 - 7am
Here you see tyr(left) and jmX (right) standing at our airport terminal in the Austin Municipal Airport. Both of our girlfriends drove us there, and we said our last good-byes for the weekend. It was a very exiting time for tyr and I, this being the first major trip we haver ever taken without the presence of adults. The exitement of it all wiped out any fear we may have had. We were ready to go.
May 30th, 1996 - 12pm
We arrived in Chicago safe and sound. We had about an hour stop over here and that gave us time to peek at the Chicago skyline seen here. This was the first time I had ever been in a city this large and the Chicago airport was HUGE. The grandness of our voyage started to set in. We got back onto a plane, and started off for Montreal, Canada.
May 30th, 1996 - 3pm
WE MADE IT! Finally after a tasty lunch on the plane, we arrived in Montreal, Canada. We were quickly surprised by the abundant use of French here. It seemed like we were in a completely different part of the world. After walking around and asking the locals about the bus system, we took a bus to the subway, which took us almost directly to our Hostel. This would be our temporary home for the 24 hours before the party.
May 30th, 1996 - 5pm
After checking into the hostel and putting away our bags, we ventured into downtown Montreal which was only about a block away from the Hostel (awesome location). The stores here were unbelievable, they were so different from what we were used to in Austin, Texas. Strip/Peek show places were generously sprinkled on every corner and next to every arcade. Currency exchange locations were in equal numbers. We basically wasted away the rest of the day that we had by first eating a MC-PIZZA at McDonalds, and then going to see Mission Impossible. We had a lot of fun, but during the whole day, the events of the upcomming weekend kept us exited.
May 31th, 1996 - 2pm
After a morning of more exploration of Montreal, including a tour of the HUGE 4 story mall with every store you could possibly imagine, we went to the Hard Rock cafe for a little taste of good ole american food. We also had our first LEGAL beer of our lives there(since the drinking age at home is 21). Uh..and oh yeah...thats my car. :)
May 31th, 1996 - 5pm
Once 5pm rolled around, we QUICKLY started to head to the college at which NAID was held. Here is what we saw when we arrived after about a 30 minute trek from the Hostel. We saw NAID posters plastered all over the bus stop on the corner, and I quickly took the opportunity to take one as a little souvinier before they were all gone.
May 31th, 1996 - 11pm
Once the party got started and everybody got settled into their rooms, we went hunting for Lethal (Ryan Harris) whom we had never met in person and had never seen a picture of. We asked around, and finnally Kiwidog/Hornet told us he was racing around the college on a cart. It wasn't long after that when we found him. He turned out to be as cool as he was online.
June 1st, 1996 - 5am
Tyr and I got all of our stuff moved in with Terraformer and 3Some. Mrdata, Brazil, Kiwidog, and Perisoft were also in there. Of all the rooms in the college, I think that most of the time, ours was probably the craziest-most-packed room of them all. I spent lots of time talking with Kiwidog who is a very intelligent and witty dude. He is probably who I remember the most of (after Lethal of course :). This is a picture of Mrdata(at the computer), Perisoft(quickly memorizing code?), and Lethal(ominously overlooking beavis and butthead at the computer)
June 1st, 1996 - 8am
We got around to meeting some people in the scene. I ran across Trixter / Hornet, whom I am proud to have met. He was a normal guy like me, and it was kinda neat that me and him were the only two who had written our demos in pascal/asm. He tried to help me a bit with a bug I had in my demo, but we both couldn't figure it out.
June 1st, 1996 - 12pm
Well, me also being a member of KOSMIC FREE MUSIC FOUNDATION, decided to try to find some of the crew. I was eager to meet the musicians whom had provided me with hours and hours of great music. I was disapointed when maelcum never showed up, maybe I'll meet him face to face someday. (right mael? :) Anyways...here is a picture of some of the kosmic crew. Here is the order from left to right: Draggy, Mental Floss, Khyron, and Mellow-D.
June 1st, 1996 - 2pm
In the middle of the day, things started to lag a bit, so I decided to wander around the college and check out the facilities. The pool was huge and warm, and the showers were hot. I kept wandering around until I saw this, the #trax banner. It was in the main room at naid. Being a semi-frequent #traxer i decided to go ahead and sign it(see the "jmX" middle about 3/4ths of the way up). I left this image full size so you could still read some of the names.
June 1st, 1996 - 5pm
Throughout the whole weekend, competitions were taking place at regular intervals. Here you see Lethal and Kiwidog enjoying one of the competitions. The compos took place in a large open area sprinkled with chairs facing a stage. The lighting was like that of a dance club, and the food was less than 15 seconds away :).
June 1st, 1996 - 6pm
One of the more interesting compos was the "throwing" compos. Here you see throwing fields were the keyboard throwing compo took place. Notice the keyboard in the center - you will see him later in this report. :)
June 1st, 1996 - 8pm
As the demo deadline quickly approached, I tried to find somebody that would let me use their computer. After Lethal asking and asking, one person finally said Yes. This is Darkwolf, he was kind enough to let me finish up "Pill" on his computer. A few sections of the release version of pill were programmed COMPLETELY on his machine. Probably about 5% of the demo was done in the 12 hours before naid. Thanks Darkwolf. Luckily by popular demand, the demo deadline was pushed to midnight from 9pm, so I had a few more hours to work.... which turned out not to be enough.
June 1st, 1996 - 11:45pm
Well, about 15 minutes before the deadline Pill was at a presentable stage. There were 2 major bugs still, but both bugs would require a lot of time and some resources that we didn't have at naid. "It all should have been done before we left" is what I kept saying to myself, but I am just too lazy to listen to myself. The demo ran on darkwolfs machine - but the svga sections were trash. On kiwidogs machine, the svga worked fine, but midas crashed the program half way through. Both machines had 1 meg gravis', and svga vesa 1.2 cards, but different results were occuring. All I could do was hope it would run on Mr. Khan's computer. Here is our entry form just seconds before I grabbed it to take it to the entry tables.
June 2nd, 1996 - 2:45am
Ok, now that all the work was finished, it was time to have fun and meet more people. I spent some time talking with Trixter who had some nice comments about PILL, I think he was being polite, but It was still nice to hear somebody like him complement me. I was happy. Somehow, we all got into a game of "Hacky-Keyboard". This was the keyboard from the keyboard throwing compo, and we just decided to kick it around a bit. Thats perisoft there about to kick the keyboard over to Tyr (behind baldy). Lethal and Mrdata are also in the game and I stepped out for a second to take this picture.
June 2nd, 1996 - 5:00am
After the Hacky-Keyboard game, I decided to check out the onsite Internet hookups they had. Many of the computers were mac's, but either way, IRC works just fine and dandy. I continued to talk to FYSX (pictured here) and was discussing his demo plans for the future. Him and Seks sounded like they had a fair amount of talent, but who knows how good they can BS. :) During this time, Mental Floss was also doing a little DJ'ing. He played music for about an hour, while Lakee was one of the few people to dance in front of the stage.
June 2nd, 1996 - 6:00am
After IRC got old (I know, hard to imagine), I decided to take a peek at the networked gaming computers next to the internet computers. It looked like they had duke nukem 3d on all the machines. I wasn't too interested in playing, but I sat down for a few minutes anyway. I was starting to get a little tired, and called it a night.
June 2nd, 1996 - 7:00am
Tyr and I went back to the room to catch some sleep before the demo compo. When we got there, we found everybody to be asleep, except for Lord Blanka of Terraformer. We sat and talked with him for a while while we watched him play some wierd racing game on his computer. Blanka would later join Opiate's forces about a week or two after naid.
June 2nd, 1996 - 8:00am
I finally got some sleep in. Here you see Lethal on the left, and me on the right. Lethal was nice enough to share some of his sleeping bag with me, the only problem was that jazm had puked on it a few hours before. :) At this point in time, I really didn't care.
June 2nd, 1996 - 3:00pm
Ok, the time was finally here. THE DEMO COMPO! The cafeteria was packed. People had started gathering and hour or two ahead of time - which was good due to the great free-for-all compo that preceeded the demo compo. There were some great animations and some awesome deluxe paint cartoon series animations. A magic show also took place. But then they dimmed the lights. They turned on the screen. And started showing the demos. It was a time I would never forget. I remember looking at all the directory names, just waiting to see which one was to be run next, in anticipation of hornets demo (which i had seen on the 31st), craws demo (which I had seen the intro of), and DBC's demo (which was anticipated by all). Of course most of all, I wanted to see PILL. I didn't care so much if it won, but I new it would get applause and that those would be for me...I also wanted to hear and see it on these facilities.
It never happened.
Explicit came and went, Infinity came and went, countless others were shown, but no Pill. After Mr.Khan annouced the start of the voting, I jumped up to ask "where the hell was pill?" along with another group (the surrounders?) who's demo was not shown. I was told that PILL hung about half way through on the machine......THE GUS-MIDAS PROBLEM! :(. I was so severly disappointed, and a few people were pleading with Mr.Khan to show it later anyways....but that never happened. Tyr and I decided that our trip was over, we knew the order of the demos, DCB, Craw, Hornet. We said our goodbyes, and left. We both had a great time, and we made countless friends throughout the weekend. It was definitly an experience I would do over and over again.
I just wish I had been better prepared.
June 2nd, 1996 - 8:00pm
After we got back into downtown montreal, we quickly grabbed some of the best pizza and beer we had ever had. We talked about the disqualification and came to the conclusion that the whole point of making demos and going to the parties is for fun. We asked ourselves...did we have fun? And neither of us had to answer. It was the most memorable thing that I had done in some time, we had done something on our own now....the trip was a success. We decided that next year we would only try harder to make a more compatible demo, with better effects- never seen before effects, something that would shake america's demo scene alive.
June 2nd, 1996 - 11:00pm
The rest of the trip was pretty much uneventfull. We decided to get to sleep early so we wouldn't miss our plane the next morning. We both couldn't wait to get home and see our girlfriends and family.
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