Interview with Slammer

Published in: Upstream #10
Interviewed by: Wolfman of Balance
Date: 20. February 1995
 
Interview
Being a real veteran with many years on the scene, Slammer is a coder with many bigger releases behind him.
In his own opinion the best known releases are demos like Quackbusted (1991), In the Kitchen (Hurricane Party, 1992), How 2 Skin a Cat (TCC'93) and Emptyhead (TP 1993).

But his own favorite demo is perhaps less known.
- I guess my personal favourite must be "Ting man aldrig maa goere" (Things You May Never Do! -ed.) It was a demo? Dentro? Megademo? I dunno but it was extremely strange and incredibly fun to code.
This less known demo, which have become a legend for the older sceners in Denmark, is something quite remarkable.
- It was made right before The Party 1 and for those who could understand a bit of it, we clearly just made experiments with everything, Slammer explains.

Quitting the scene?
"Quackbusted 2" was released at the same party where a fresh Eurochart stated that Slammer had left the scene and stopped making demos, but he has another view on this.
- We (Rednex) left the scene because we thought the scene sucked. But it will not stop us from making more demos, he states.
Slammer did not show anything for The Party 4, but has plan for releasing DiscoLeif 4 for Static Bytes, so people should be looking out for this old legendary (And absolutely crazed) musicdisk.
It doesn't quite seem that Slammer has quit the scene even though he says so himself.

A group-jumper?
Slammer have shocked many by leaving top-groups like Anarchy and Melon while they were at the top.
He left Anarchy with Solnova because of the simple fact that Seen asked them to join Melon. According to Slammer them quiting Anarchy was caused by Trix' dictatoric way of running the group. So after 10 months in Anarchy they teamed up with Melon.
- Only to find out that Seen was Trix's twin, only worse, Slammer states.
Otherwise Slammer has great respect for the things Seen has done for the scene.
- But having him as a "leader" was not exactly our cup of tea, he explains.

Rednex - Before and now
Sometimes interview-victims can answer in a way, so even the most capable writer must give up. Slammer explains about his group-relations...
- Rednex is a small group consisting of two even smaller groups (being Matilde (which Solnova, Xience and I formed after leaving Melon) and The Funky Buddhas (which HitHansen formed sometime after HE left Melon in summer '92 together with his friends MoonBoot, MoonCar, MoonJohn, Kannibal and some more, and later on he stole Static Bytes' best coder, Jones, who joined STB shortly after Rednex fell apart)) that decided to rebuild their good ol' group. Usually we are about 3 members (HitHansen, Jones (members of The Funky Buddhas) and me (note that Solnova and Xience are not members of Rednex but they ARE members of Matilde)). On a sunny afternoon we are 4 (including Dr. Pornosol who is not a member of any subgroup but he's very inactive).

I hope this made some things perfectly clear...

The old Rednex which died in the early months of 1992 is according to Slammer not much different from the Rednex today. Only one thing makes the new differ from the old.
- We miss our no. 1 gfx artist and source of inspiration, namely Airwalk (the king of perspective logos).

Coding - A hard business!
Coding today is not an easy thing. The coding business is hard and most demos must be considered to be a lot of work, but Slammer doesn't consider democoding that hard.
- None of the demos I have done have been "hard" to code. I enjoyed making them, but the most frustrating ones must be Quackbusted and Digital Aggravation - you can tell by the name.
Especially the infamous HD-virus hit us in the eye in the making of Digital Aggravation so we first thought it was impossible to copy (in the middle of The Party 1!!).

With as much as FIVE trackmoes since The Party 1, Slammer has got a massive amount of releases behind him, but how is it possible to obtain motivation, and activity in general, for so long?
- I see demos as a designer-drug. If you've tried it once, you want to do it again. I just think it's hard to stop. And if you remember to move with the times and keep evolving it will never become trivial.

Being mentally locked to a chair can seen somewhat bizarre to outsiders. Which none-coders hasn't wondered what odd motivation that lies behind hours of intense coding in front of a high-radiative screen? Slammer can give a clear answer an his own behalf.
- Because it gives me some kind of freak satisfaction. The joy of creating something. You are the master of what you have created and it will only live until you delete it.

Times change. And the definition of a good democoder is much different from today til just 1 or 2 years back
- A good demo coder is a guy who knows how to mix his great looking routines (old or new) in a new fashion and make the demo follow the style of music, Slammer explains.

A different style
In a review of Slammer's latest demo "Quackbusted 2", it was stated that this sequel to the old classic was nihilistic. Slammer finds it great that someone saw what it was all about instead of just stating that it SUCKS or is COOL. But despite his happyness, Slammer is also a bit annoyed.
- It annoys me because we wanted to make a demo that nobody would understand, he says.

Slammer is not alone responsable for the nihilistic style in "Quackbusted 2". Hithansen who recently won the music-competition at The Party 4 also plays a part in the special style, and according to Slammer they are a happy union.
- We wanted to make something really odd and ugly, so HitHansen came up with that Hendrix-inspired song which is not what you'd expect in a demo and the routines doesn't really match it all the way. Many of the routines are downright UGLY, but that's the way we wanted it, he says.

Basically the style of Slammer could be descriped as being "sick" in one way or another. In addition one could claim that Slammer and Rednex were sick, but is the explanation a little different?
- We make the things we want to at the time. Times change and so do we so you never know what you can expect the next time...

According to Slammer is seems that demos today has to last 8 minuttes or more and take up a whopping 4 megabytes of HD-space. But there are exceptions.
- Fortunately on the Amiga we still allow odd and queer demos like the Movement/Melon stuff...

The Matilde-cult
From a quiet life as being an innocent coco-milk, Matilde's life has taken drastic turns and have been used for many weird experiments in Slammer's demos. Just what IS behind the Matilde-cult?
- Oh, this is really old. Back in jan '92 we were going to hold a party together with STB and Kefrens. And we should make the invitation thing... So HitHansen and I sat down, made some stuff and came up with something which the demoscene would later recognize as "In the Kitchen" but at the time we called it "Quackbusted II - Matilted". We were all thrilled by this cool idea. Unfortunately I joined Anarchy and brought the whole thing with me and it changed radically into the usual Anarchy mishmash-blue-background-stuff. So when Solnova and I left Melon, Solnova said "let's make a group with no name but a sign! Let this sign be Matilde, and the world will be amazed..." NOT!

4 words...
We put Slammer in a cross-fire of words to react to. How much does the 4 following words mean to him and how they inflict his daily life.

The scene:
- Quite a lot. Some of my best, best buddy-chummy-friends are sceners.

Contacts:
- I have next to zero contacts, so...

Group:
- I'd like to believe that the group  doesn't affect us but it's the other  way around.

Demoparties:
- Parties doesn't affect my DAILY  life...

Slammer's top 5 coders:
1. Tron: For breaking the Sanity-style
2. Tai-Pan: Heroes never die, they just fade away!
3. Saviour: For being very modest and down-to-earth (infact like all of Complex SF)
4. Asterix: One guy who really knows he's doing.
5. ICronite: For being a math-wiz who always invented his own algorithms
Chaos / Sanity probably the most respected coder in the scene, a guy always ready with a provocating statement, what does Slammer think about HIM? - Let's make one thing clear... Chaos has a "king"-status in the scene and insulting royal persons is against the law so I won't say anything.... The scene and real work Demo-coding can not usually be compared to the work of "real" programmers, but according to Slammer leassons can be learned when coding demos. - I think this depends on how your style of coding is. It is possible to code demos in a professional way with sharing routines, multitasking, lots of structures, modules, or even objects for those OOP-maniacs out there. I think you learn a lot about "real" programming from coding demos. In Upstream #9 you could read about Slammer's participation in a theatreplay in which he was hired to make effects running on a big screen in the background. A very different project for him. - Yes it was different. You could use all the memory you wanted, the diskspace you wanted and the CPU you wanted. And it was certainly a lesson that "normal" people didn't like the kind of stuff we liked... especially colours! Can the scene be looked upon as a kind of education? A topic which have been discussed again and again. Slammer definitely believes that scene-experience can be used in the real socity. - In fact many things in the scene is exactly as in real life. You have underdogs, yes-men, celebrities, the works. Through my scenelife I have drawn lots of parallels to the real society. When you work your way up through the scene you try all the roles and this is infact very useful in dayly life. The future Much can be said about the future, but it is hard to predict. As everyone else Slammer has his own hopes when it comes to earn a living. - I HOPE I'm working for some kind of electronics company, coding systems for TV-sets, stereos etc. That's my dream, he says. The future lies far ahead, yet so close. Slammer doesn't expect that the scene will be ripped away definitively. - What is there to say? I hope at that time that I'll still be seeing the friends I made in the scene and I think that the kids will hear some stories from time to time (fishingtrip etc...) CONTRAST Chaos/Sanity: How To Skin A Cat: How to hide good coding behind the name "Melon". In the Kitchen: Ideas stolen from United Lamers Quackbusted: no effects in it. Emptyhead: nice demo Mr. Hyde/Andromeda: Don't know him - spoke to him once, and all I know about him is that he hate sports. He didn't want to play soccer at the Gathering! I have seen some of his coding and I like it alot. But it's a long time since I saw anything from him now.