The Melon Birthday Party was supposed to be one of the more successful parties of 1993. Everything looked quite promising and that's what we expected it to be... At least the first couple of hours after arriving. The great Melon Party... NOT! From the 19th to the 21st of October, Melon Dezign DK was supposed to arrange a big party in Roskilde, outside Copenhagen. The organizers (mainly Seen & Bannasoft) were counting on approximately 800 visitors and a good party with a lot of nice releases. So did not happen. During the evening of the 19th, the situation actually turned out to become a quite different one. Only about 150 persons had shown up at Herreslev Gymnasium, that were at least 700 less than expected. We didn't hear any specific amounts, but apparently this did not lead to a huge loss for the arrangers, but it became the biggest catastrophy-party in the history of the Danish demoscene. No change for entrance money! The invitation intro stated that the entrance fee was 111,- Dkr. and nothing else. I don't think people were thinking they would actually pull this through, but they did. People paying 120,- or 150,- did not get anything back, and some were a bit pissed because of this. (And who dares starting a quarrel with Ozzy / 2000 A.D? Neither Wolfman nor I at least...-Cs.) "This was more like Hurricane! We didn't release anything here, except a 14kb intro done in 2 minutes!" (A quite ugly cartoon picture and a chip tune.-Cs) - <a href="https://amiga.millway.dk/scener/722">Pixie</a> / <a href="https://amiga.millway.dk/group/parasite">PST</a> "Everybody has to leave this building at 18:00 tomorrow!" Melon had rented the gymnasium on a time-regulated basis (about 250,- DKr an hour), so in order to save money, everybody were actually thrown out one day too early! All the prize money for the competitions were also withdrawn. It really didn't help much that the contributions were shown on the "big screen", which was actually nothing but a lousy 24" color-TV! This was especially sad for Scope/BLC who had made an excellent 22k-intro together with Subject/BLC (music). Scope had worked for weeks with his intro and eventhough they won the competition and got 15 pizzas (leftover from the cafeteria!), this couldn't make up their dissapointment of not winning the promised 1st prize on 3333,- (!) DKr. One thing which also upset Blue Fox/Balance and a lot more, including ourselves, was the way Bannasoft/Melon handled the music competition. The organizers had not picked out any finalists for the music competion, neither sorted executables from Protracker-modules. It created a real mess, and he only played most of the tunes for approx. 20-40 seconds!! This was quite scandalous, in my opinion. There were no party releases except from the graphics and music in the competitions. A lot of guys reacted negative to the fact that Melon had actually hired neo-nazistic skinheads with baseball-bats to keep the full control at all times. They were walking around, eating chocolate and chips from everybody without asking and behaved very arrogant. And when two of our friends asked gently if they could turn down the music being played very loudly, they were only met with with a very fierce attitude from the guards, which actually scared them quite a bit. "It was the lowest and absolutely worst party in the history! No people, no competitions, no screens, no nothing! And the neo-nazistic guards made the party even worse." - <a href="https://amiga.millway.dk/scener/613">Pearl</a> / <a href="https://amiga.millway.dk/group/parasite">Parasite</a> So why didn't people show up? There are various theories about this. Scope thinks one of the reasons could be that the party was arranged in the middle of the week, and not in the weekend. All the Danes had a fall-vacation this week, but foreigners did not. Bailey / BLC from Germany actually told me that he would have gone to the party if it had been in a weekend. So this could be one of the main reasons. But I don't know if the organizers knew that there was being held a giant conference for game-freaks (some prefer calling them "lamers") in Roskilde at the exact same time. I think Melon lost quite a lot of entrance money because of this. Besides, The Party III is just around the corner, most people are saving up time and money in order to go to this party instead. Afterall, this will be a much bigger party and it's almost a guarranteed success. So, Seen & Bannasoft - tough luck on you guys! Let's not paint it all black! To tell the truth, I (Cs.) was actually having a great time at this party. Balance was represented with 9 members, "The party was the worst I've ever been to, but still it was nice to meet my friends in the scene..." - <a href="https://amiga.millway.dk/scener/561">Chorus</a> / <a href="https://amiga.millway.dk/group/majic-12">Majic 12</a> and we had a great time together. Even though drinking was allowed at the party, there was no bar, but Lemon. did a great thing by handing out free beers to everyone (Almost everyone... -48 bottles!) with a "The Party 3"-sign on! Way to go guys! "It wasn't a success. A pitty that people didn't show up. It could've been a great party. One thing which I didn't like, by the way, was that there was no bar available on the gymnasium!" - <a href="https://amiga.millway.dk/scener/594">Jones</a> / <a href="https://amiga.millway.dk/group/rednex">Rednex</a> One who shouldn't have drunk the last beers, was Pearl/Parasite. While sleeping it off, somebody painted him all over. Take a look at this! TDK showed off with a concert! TDK/Melon, their English musician, held a concert during the second day. It lasted for something like an hour, and it was pretty good! His music is more like Jean Michel Jarre or Bjørn A. Lynne's and doesn't suit 100% for a concert - I would've preferred it being played on the CD at home, but anyway. The night before, TDK and Blue Fox/BLC had a little "Jam Session" together in one of the classrooms, Blue Fox on drums (he really knows how to hit those!) and TDK on synth. They seemed to have a great time and it was nice listening to them. Anyway, TDK played a couple of wellknown numbers such as the one from Melon's Tetris-intro from THE PARTY 2. This concert was definatly one of the most positive things at this party. The Competitions - Or the lack of them? Since the organizers decided to only hold two of the promised competitions (The intro- and the graphics competiton), The musicians felt left out. Chorus of Majic 12 began to collect signatures from the different musicians who wanted to compete. It worked, and the organizers promised a music-competition (without prizes though). So let them start! Since the organizers had called off the big screen, the competitions were all shown on a 22 inches TV. A lot of musicians objected to this, since they didn't feel like having their modules played on a lousy TV-set. Motion of Balance saved the day and got hold of a sound-caple (His own) which was about 10 metres. Next, and next, and next... Bannasoft of Melon Dezign obviously don't like other peoples music (And other people probably don't like his). Each module, except for the Melon-birthday song, in the competition was played for a maximum of 30 seconds, something that made the competitors rather pissed, and who can blame then? Not me... The 22k-intro competition only had 3 entries and one of them even got disqualified because of a read/write-error This was Gunnars Farvebio's and they thereby reached their goal: The bottom. The AGA-intro by Scope/BLC was miles ahead from it's competitors and Scope could easily cash in the 15 pizzas which the 1st prize had been cut down to. On the following picture you can see the two more or less happy winners. Results... Since we didn't care much about the results, we only got hold of the name of the winners, here they are: 22k intro-competition: 1. Balance Music-competition: 1. (Various) / Frugtboden Graphic-competition: 1. LPN / Depth Well, congrats guys... That's it from this party-report. We think it came as a shock for everybody, that the party was such a failure. We can only hope that this will be the last we see of this kind of parties. NOTE: You might have noticed us repeating ourselfes, but since the first part of the article was written by Cesium and the second part by Wolfman, we didn't have the time in the end to begin to almost rewrite the whole damn article, but hey! At least you can't say you missed anything!
"This was more like Hurricane! We didn't release anything here, except a 14kb intro done in 2 minutes!" (A quite ugly cartoon picture and a chip tune.-Cs) - <a href="https://amiga.millway.dk/scener/722">Pixie</a> / <a href="https://amiga.millway.dk/group/parasite">PST</a>
"It was the lowest and absolutely worst party in the history! No people, no competitions, no screens, no nothing! And the neo-nazistic guards made the party even worse." - <a href="https://amiga.millway.dk/scener/613">Pearl</a> / <a href="https://amiga.millway.dk/group/parasite">Parasite</a>
"The party was the worst I've ever been to, but still it was nice to meet my friends in the scene..." - <a href="https://amiga.millway.dk/scener/561">Chorus</a> / <a href="https://amiga.millway.dk/group/majic-12">Majic 12</a>
"It wasn't a success. A pitty that people didn't show up. It could've been a great party. One thing which I didn't like, by the way, was that there was no bar available on the gymnasium!" - <a href="https://amiga.millway.dk/scener/594">Jones</a> / <a href="https://amiga.millway.dk/group/rednex">Rednex</a>