Cryptoburners

Cryptoburners was founded in 1988 by the Norwegian C64 groups Scandomatic Crackers and TWCA. Among the founding members were Heatseeker, Windwalker, Trixal, Time Traveller and Blackstar. In the article “Cryptoburners - The Full Story”, published in the second issue of Fourth Dimension, they claim that Crimetime was the first official CRB release, presented at the Razor, Cartel, and Abnormal Party in October. This puzzles me, since Wiz had already released his first CRB intro prior to that. His intro was featured on Demo Disk V, released by Steel Pulse on July 25th, 1988?!

From April 7th to 10th, 1990, Cryptoburners organized a copyparty together with IT and Visual Arts in Drammen, Norway. Unfortunately, on the very first day, the party was raided by the Norwegian police, who shut it down. That did not stop Cryptoburners from arranging other parties, though. Just a couple of months after the disastrous event in Drammen, they organized another major party in Bergen, Norway. At the end of June 1991, they co-organized the Amega Party with Dexion, Fairlight, and Violence in Porsgrunn, Norway.

Norwegian musician Øystein Eide, known at the time as Superted, was briefly a member in the early days. He contributed to Megademo 1 but was kicked shortly afterwards due to “lame activities”. He would later become one of the most professionally successful individuals to emerge from the Amiga scene, going on to work for major game companies. However, Eide was not the only Cryptoburner involved in game development. Tec (aka Vishnu) and Heatseeker (aka. Olorin) were among the founders of Funcom in Oslo.

After releasing the sixth issue of Fourth Dimension in May 1991, the group entered a very inactive period, largely because several leading members were doing their military service. Towards the end of 1992, activity began to pick up again. A group of French members joined, and sometime during the spring of 1993, they were also joined by a German division. Together, the Norwegians, Germans, and French made 1993 and 1994 quite productive years for Cryptoburners.

Sources:
- Various productions by Cryptoburners
- Numerous Amiga diskmagazines
- Amiga Scenery by Glenn Lunder