Yes, finally it have been held. For the ones who was not there we have made a gigant partyreport with a lot of info about the party, but also some crazy stuff... Anyway, if you weren't there: SHAME ON YOU!!! Transportation / Travel As last year a bus driving from Ålborg had been arranged. Well, actually it was several busses which was driving all the time. Generally it was quite easy to get to the party-place, both with train, car, bus and everything... The halls The party-place consisted of 3 halls: Hall 1 which was the mainhall which contained the big screen for the competitions, the 24 hour shop and most of the Amiga's. Hall 2 was the the hall for the C-64's and the PC's, but also some Amiga groups had found their way to hall 2 because of lack of space in hall 1. Hall 3 was the sleeping room. Ofcourse there was also the information place and the cafeteria, let's take a closer look at it later. The surroundings of the party place was quite good. The city Aars is small, but there was several shops where you could buy food and whatever you needed... Uncomfortable sleep The sleeping hall was not very good for ones beauty sleep. First of all it was very cold in there and I got myself a nice little cold. The floor was just concrete and therefore not the most comfortable place to sleep, but that didn't seem to keep people away, coz the sleeping room got rather overcrowded and since one wasn't allowed to sleep in hall 1 or 2, the organizers cancelled the lazerdisc room and used it for sleepingroom instead. The toilets When over 2000 people have to share so few toilets, it's almost bound to cause some problems, but this year it wasn't too bad. The cleaning personal must have worked rather quickly I guess. The waiting time wasn't that bad this time either (Ooooh, interesting topic or WHAT?!). To eat or not to eat... The cafeteria was not opened 24 hours a day, as promised, but the little shop in the mainhall made this up. It contained every thing you needed such as coke, candy and many other things. The service in the cafeteria was quite odd. Well, if you wanted a burger you had to take one yourself and put it in a microwave oven to warm it up. The service personal was very kind and helpfull, but that's out of the point here.... A positive thing was the prices which was quite cheap after Danish norms (that's still expensive, but...)... Each morning you could have a good breakfeast, for quite a cheap price as well, but I guess most people lived from pure junkfood and coca-cola those days (and the party-shop only had Pepsi and some other low-life-lemonades.). Waiting to get in... The first thing that must have struck the party-visitors was the enormous queues at the entrance. I know several people who stood in the cold for 2 hours and waited to get registrated. I came late the day before and all who came at that time had to stay in hall 2 till the next morning. Then everybody was taken thrue the entrance was set to wait in the hall in huge queues and we were the lucky ones. Many had to stand for a long time in the bitting December cold and wait to get in. I don't think one can blame this to the organizers. They couldn't help that so many people came at the same time. Okay, the registration was slow, but quite effective I'd say, the organizers had anything under control.. Hello Mr. Fireman... I suppose the fire-department is pretty good friends with Trix/ANARCHY and the rest of the organizers. Last year the fire-department from Aalborg had to move out to answer a false alarm cause someone had played with the fire-alarm. This time the volunteer fire corps of Aars was waken 4 o'clock in the night to answer the alarm set off by the smoke equipment that Kyd/Balle used for their concert. As far as I know, the organizers did not have to pay anything this time either. This time there were also fire-men to inspect that all was safe. The chief of the fire-corps was a complete idiot! Under the music-competition he kept talking in the microphone to make people move their cars from the entrance... in DANISH! This guy had not yet realized that only 38 percent of the people present were Danes, so the rest didn't understand him (Not even Norwegians or Swedes since his Jutish accent was hard to understand even for Danes! ;-) Bottoms UP! The organizers were quite strict with people who wanted to drink alchoholic drinks. They were simply set outside. If the organizers caught them again they would be out for the rest of the party. People who tried to bring booze to the place was either set outside or had their booze taken and then could get it after the party. I heard that a guy who didn't wanna let his 200 Dkr. whisky go, had it smashed (the whisky) when the organizers got tired of him complaining. They simply throwed it to the ground, tough luck... Anyway, if you wanted to drink you could go to one of the pubs which Aars luckily had. I wasn't there myself, but I heard it was a good load of fun. As far as I know there were no problems with fight between "Aarses" and the party-dudes... Better TV-transmitter?! As far as I could see the transmitting of the different TV-channels wasn't any better than the last party. The quality was quite lousy and the pictures looked ugly in the gfx-comp. I don't think that the more powerfull transmitter helped. The reason was simply that the interference from the over 1000 computers was too big, bad luck.... The voting-system The voting-system was very clever and never used before. When you were registrated, you got a disk with a list of the different events each day and the voting-program itself. Before each demo/tune/picture/intro, a number appeared. So each demo etc. had a number and if you liked the demo you should then type in the number of it on either number 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5. When the last competition (the demo-comp) had been held you should deliver the disk to the information. Then the disk was loaded a little by an Amiga and after having read a hell of a lot of disks the result could be given. This method was very fast and effective and I hope this system will be used on future parties as well.. Cheating? Since the voting-system was made as it was, it was not possible to cheat unless you stole another guys disk. The music-competition The music competition was quite cool. 34 tunes out of about 256 had been selected. It was quite obvious though that the jury in some casses had judged by the name of the artist and not even listned to the tune. Some of the "big" artists tunes really sucked, but generally the tunes was of a VERY high standard. The soundsystem was also great so one had no problems hearing the tunes, nice work guys! The only minus was the dear chief of the fire-department who was shouting in the microphone to make people move their cars from the entrance, he was a j-e-r-k.... The graphics-competition Also the graphics-competition was of a high quality. Although the graphics was hard to see properly on the TV-channels one had a good view on the the big main-screen. I can't remember how many pictures competed, but from what I saw all the pictures was of a very high quality! The intro-competition Not much to say here. Almost all the introes was very cool. I was amazed of how much they had used the poor 40k of space they had. Well done!!!! The demo-competition Well, the demo that won the first price here certainly deserved it, but rest of the competition was quite a change from last years star-collection. Said in short terms: It was quite disappointing! First of all: The amount of demos was very low and the amount of cool demos was even lower. ANARCHY had promissed almost 6 trackmoes they competed with one filedemo (3D-Demo II), which was quite okay. SILENTS had promissed 4 productions, they came with NON! I got very surprised when they told people they could begin to vote, to start with I thought it was a joke, but it certainly wasn't. The reason for the low amount of demos competing was that people didn't make it to the deadline. Well, one can not blame the organizers for this, it was just bad luck... From lamers to elite All kinds of people was present and a big amount of lamers as well, but I think that it was hard to tell who was what. There were simply so many. Some even say that there were too many. Most of the old legends were there. Even CRYPTOBURNERS showed up, but some other guys like PHENOMENA was only presented by one member or so (correct me if I'm wrong guys!). Girls girls giiiiirls!!!!!!! Juuuuhuuu, there were actually a little amount of girls present. It was not many, but everyone surely paied intention when they walked around. I'm not sure which girls had relation to the scene (besides being someones girlfriend), but I know that some DID have. Maybe a party will be totally female-dominated in the future (In the FAR out future my friend, the FAR future!-ed.), we have the right to hope don't we..... In general... Hmmm, generally the kinds of people was quite mixed. All kind of people showed up...Small kids on no more than 6 year and that kind of stuff. Many said that there were too many. I don't know, maybe they were right. It got quite warm in the mainhall and the sleeping-hall was VERY full at night (that didn't warm it up though!). If this should ever be held again, I would recommend the organizers to use a bigger place than Messecentret in Aars. It's big, but not THAT big... Conclusion... Well, I don't think that I could deny that THE PARTY 1992 really was THE PARTY. Even though the demo competition was a bit disappointing, I must say that it was all so perfect organized. I do not think that anyone else could have done it better than this. Even though the party claims to be the final of it's kind IT HAS TO BE DONE AGAIN!!!! It would be silly of the organizers not to repeat the succes. Maybe somewhere else (in Copenhagen for example!!!) to avoid the problems with space. Anyway one can only say that it was generally GREAT! Who could do the same? If Trix and his co-organizers really should decide not to do it again, who would then be able to organize it all as good?! Well, there is some possibilities which we could trust. CRUSADERS and DEADLINE will maybe make THE GATHERING '93 a great succes and I surely hope they will since I intend to go there myself. Another good offer would be the ASSEMBLY '93 which was also very good organized as far as I can see from the different party-reports I read. Maybe the PHENOMENA-SILENTS party in the summer of 1993 will be an even greater succes, who knows. I have been told that a place with room for 6000 people have been selected to hold the party in. This is just rumours, but if the rumours are true I sure look forward to it. Well, only one thing is for sure, as I said: IT HAS TO BE DONE AGAIN!!!