Inteview with Dr. Outtasight
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Interview w i t h Dr.Outtasight o f Crusaders MD: This time I am proud to interview one of the best organizers and one of the most known people in the Amiga-scene called Dr.Outtasight of CRUSADERS! He was one of the organizers of the stunning THE GATHERING`92-party in Norway a few weeks ago, and he was also one of the editors of the great * CRUSADERS EUROCHARTS * (remember the great Gallery there with all the funny pics!). But with this interview we want to know more about the big party and about your thoughts in this time. Please discribe at first your overall appearance, your age and so on... DO: My apperance is no laughing matter, I assure you. But if you really want to know, I'm about 190cm tall and I have long darkish kinda hair. I smoke quite a lot, and I drink huge amounts of coke. At present I am 25 years old, and I have been dealing with computers since I was 9. I've had my Amiga for 5 years. For almost as long as I have had my Amiga, I have been the Sysop at our WHQ board called Home Sweet Home. I can't say I take the scene quite as serious as I did back in the good old days. Well, I have never really taken the scene to serious, but nowadays I feel I'm a bit to old to give it my full attention. MD: Please give us a few detailed informations about the legendary CRUSADERS. We know that they are now existing for ages but when was the date of founding, who is the leader, who is the oldest member (in scene), organisation and try to list a few stunning releases, please. DO: Oh. I never liked that question. The reason is first of all that we have never had a leader. Not one single person anyway. Second, that it's a bit hard to say exactly when the Crusaders was founded, because it just sorta happened over a period of time. But I think we decided to use the name Crusaders around the beginning of 1987. Our oldest member is Fleshbrain. I guess he must be about 29 by now. When it comes to stunning releases, I`d say that's up to the person watching it, but my favourites must be Bacteria, Freekd Out and Audio X. All music disks. I would say that the music disks were what has gotten us our fame and no fortune. MD: Please talk a little bit about your activities in the scene! We know that you have done the great Gallery but was/is this really all? DO: At the moment I'm not doing anything else than operating my board. Our group is a bit short on people right now since most of them are doing their millitary service at the same time. But I have been doing lot of nice things in my time. I did the Gallery for a period, I started writing scroll texts which later transformed into the Ken stories. I've tried my luck with doing some music, but that didn't work out at all. For a short period I was the editor of the Eurocharts when El Cubo was utterly sick with the thought of handling it. These days I'm doing my bit with the party. It's actually over now, but the work isn't finished yet. I must say that I did not organize The Gathering 1992 by myself. That would have been impossible. There were about 4 persons from Crusaders and Deadline involved in the arranging. MD: What are you thinking about the reborn Eurocharts? A few month ago a little intro (Myspys) by EQUINOX was spread and they published that they will continue the CRUSADERS Eurocharts! Are they allowed to do this or is this just pure bullshit? If yes, why have you chosen EQUINOX? Have they paid for the rights/code? DO: You are very lucky. I can now reveal some well-kept (I hope) secrets as an exclusive for you. As far as I know El Cubo will leave the scene in a short time, and that leaves me to decide what to do with the Eurochart. A couple of days ago I gave Static Bytes permission to use the name Eurocharts with some conditions. We have not decided which groups/persons are to be involved in the Eurocharts yet, but to my knowledge, Equinox alone have not received permission from us. I would like to remind them that the name Eurocharts is in fact protected by international copyright laws and any violations will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. A lot of people have asked me wheter I'm going to continue the Ken stories now that the Crusaders are involved in the Eurocharts, and I will. I do not know yet when the first release will come, but when I clear things up with Playboy/Static Bytes it shouldn't be long. Please excuse me if I got your name wrong. I have high on coffeine at the party and could see straight. MD: What is your opinion about the scene? We know that you are more or less one of the `oldies` (sorry) so please list a few of the changes from 1988 to the year of 1992. Do you think that the scene was better in past or do you like the present? DO: Woo. 1988... Let's see. At that time the modem was limited to those with a lot of cash of very wealthy parents, so most swapping was done by snail mail. Like always demos couldn't get any better (but they always do). I guess the groups didn't put that much effort into being 'the best'. Back then buying demos/intros from other groups was unheard of, and paying software developers to get an early version of a new release was the ultimate sin. Come to think of it, life was better in the good old days. But then again things haven't changed that much. In my opinion there are too much illegal activites going on in the scene. If each illegal activity was limited to a small number of persons, I guess things would be better, but when everyone does it, there's bound to be some poor sucker who have to pay for someone elses mistakes. MD: What is your relationship to the other members of Crusaders? We know that most members quit the scene but are they still good friends of yours? DO: El Cubo and Dr. Awesome are close friends of mine. I know most other members good too, but I've known El Cubo and Dr. Awesome for quite some time and I meet them quite often. MD: Hard question... Do you own still all releases like sound-disks and charts from your group? Do you have collected them or not, hehe? DO: I think we have managed to collect almost everything. At the moment I'm packing everything and posting it on our board so that everyone can relive some good memories. MD: How many dudes are working under the CRUSADERS-label now? Perhaps you could give us a complete memberlist but it`s not very important (...) DO: Well, that's a bit difficult. Like I said most of them are not active at the moment due to their millitary service, but I'll try to give you some names of the ones that are left. El Cubo is still with us, but he's going to be a father very soon, so I guess we can exclude him. Then there's Lazerbrain running our Elite board called Purple Haze, Swapperboy doing what he does best namely swapping, Switchblade and Dr. Claw are our only coders at the moment, Intec and Bustman doing graphics and Fleshbrain and Nightshade doing the music. When things cool down a bit we'll do some serious reorganizing and streamline our group. We're always on the lookout for new coders. All that is required is that you're a helluva coder and that you have our sence of humour. MD: Will we see perhaps more releases from CRUSADERS in the near future (the two intros after months of silence) or are the legendary CRS dead forever? DO: I wouldn't say that we're dead. We sleep a lot. We'll come back. That`s what I can promise. You'll just have to wait and see. MD: Now to your country... Norway! Tell us something about your hometown, about the weather and such crap, please. And of course about the damned good parties there! DO: My home town would be a place called Lillestrom, but since there's another place called Strommen so close by let's just call the whole thing Skedsmo. Skedsmo is the name of the county or whatever. The name Sked comes from the word Skeid, which is an old sport the vikings used to do around here. It has something to do with dragging something behind a horse. Anyway, some would call it the suburb to Oslo, the capital of Norway, but it isn't. It's a kind of a farm/tech area. There are a few farms around here, but then again there are a lot of institutes and research facilities here too. Norway's second atomic reactor is close (Zap!) and there's a small millitary air strip. Right now it has stopped raining and the sun is coming through my window and reflecting in my monitor so I can see for shit. MD: Yes, but back to your big party which was done in cooperation with DEADLINE. Please tell us a little bit about the problems of good organisation (finding a party- place with enough equipment etc.) and about the feelings before and during the party (perhaps nervous?). Please try to write lots of things about it, because I think that this could be quite interesting for our readers and perhaps newcomer in kind of organisation... How many guys have arranged the whole party, were there misunderstandings with the guests etc. or was everything ok? DO: Ok. I'll try. About a year ago some guys from Deadline told me about their party plans. We have always had a close cooperation with Deadline so it was only natural that we joined in. Strangly enough just about everything was very smoothly in the planning phase. It all started six days before the party was to start. When there's only six days left everyone gets cold feet and rush around trying to put the thing together as fast as possible. The problem is that the rest of Norway like to do nothing in their easter holiday, so we didn't get much support from the companies that we were to rent the equipment from. Imagine trying to collect over 700 tables from schools, kindergardens and table rent-outs in 9 hours when you don't even have a truck to move them in. But we pulled it off. We rent a car 07:00 in the morning and I drove back and forth between the places picking up the 700 tables with the help of 4 others. We had to store the tables in a school two days before the party opened, so around 16:00 we had 300 tables on our truck and were just about to move them from the truck and into the school. Lazerbrain suggested that we should drive the truck out on a football field close by so that we didn't have to carry them that far. At this point the truck was weighing around 6 tons. The result was that the truck sank down into the field and it was not possible to move at all. We finally got it out using a much larger truck to pull it out with. Then again everything went well until the day we opened. We were supposed to open at noon, but by 09:00 there were so many people outside that we just had to let them in. Unfortunately we hadn't time to test our registration systems well enough so early, so it naturally broke down when there was about 3 busloads of people standing in line. We managed to partially fix that too, and again everything went smooth. Then came saturday. D-Day. DoomsDay. Before saying anything else, I must tell you that the following is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth (so help me God!). The day before we had a small disk throwing competition which resulted in some damaged keyboards and that a glass of coke fell on top of our video projector. It's difficult to find a new video projector on such a short notice, but we got hold of a color LCD overhead display. Unfortunately it only managed a VGA picture, which has slightly less lines than a PAL picture. We tried to run some of the competing graphics entries on it at first, but already then people started complaining that the bottom part of the picture was missing. All this rumbling about trying to get the overhead to do the PAL mode took a lot of time and people got very impatient. I can certainly understand that! Anyway, when it was time to view the demos, we got hold of a 38 inch monitor and placed that in front of the stage so that at least a few people could see the whole picture. We also had a PC demo competition and as if we didn't have enough problems with the Amiga competitions, the PC demo required a special sound card. We had a sound card like that which we had tested about a billion times before, but when it was time to view the demo it wouldn't work. Of course it worked perfectly the next day. What was left of the party did in my opinion go rather well, and we're planning The Gathering 1993 at this very moment. Everyone watch out for a 16 page invitation around the end of this year. I would like to apologize to everyone who in some way got mistreated either by their pictures not being shown the right way, their modules played too short or their demos stopped at the incorrect moment. It was our first party ever, and we have learned much from our many mistakes. I hope you had a good time anyway. Flip to next article! MD: And why you have arranged this party? To earn money, for fun or for glory and victory? DO: At the beginning we did actually think we would be able to earn some money with it, but as expences rose and the date aproached, we knew that we weren't going to get rich on it. We didn't actually earn anything. But I had a lot of fun, and when we do it again it will be for the fun of it. MD: Back to the two party-invitations. Why do you have released them in such a `quality` (a few friends of mine said that the famous CRUSADERS could do it better and didn`t like them very much) and also the second invitation-intro was more or less only a little program with a few very fast picture-routines and a few lines of text... Was this really `good enough` for CRUSADERS, they asked? Please tell me your opinion about it. DO: The first intro was done by Deadline and it was only supposed to be an information intro. Just telling everyone that we were planning a party. The next one was done by The Crusaders, and that was only a 'reminder' to the first one. We only wanted people to know that there was a party, and where they could get an invitation. We spread the information by the use of the printed invitiation instead of using intros like other groups. And I think it worked well. We had a total of 1100+ people at the party. MD: What is your opinion about all the other charts in the scene, which were arranged after the first issues of the Eurocharts were already on the market? Only bloody thieves and idea-rippers? DO: Not at all. Anyone is free to make their own charts, of course. But I would like to see some new ideas too, not just the Eurocharts all over again. So as long as they choose another name than Eurochart for their productions, I don't care. MD: Do you think that the releasing of special charts has changed the style of the scene and if yes, in which way? DO: Well, yes maybe a bit. I guess it's more or less a question of status. If your production is so good that it is voted as one of the ten best in a chart where the voters are not in any way related to the persons releasing the production or the group making the chart, like the Eurochart, it simply has to be a good production. MD: Do you have anything against PD-Companies or did you make bad experiences with them? (There was every time a copyright-notice at the beginning of the charts). DO: After releasing the fourth issue of the Eurocharts it simply was such a huge amount of work counting the votes, coding the presentation and making the lists that we wanted something in return for it. We knew then that the Eurocharts were one of the best selling products in most PD libraries, and it seemed only fair that we would get a share of the money. The money we got was then divided up between the persons working with the charts depending on the amount of work they had done. MD: Why you have included a Gallery into the charts and who got the idea? DO: As far as I remember it was Dr. Awesome's idea. He was in fact the inventor of the Eurochart back in those days. The reason we included it was to make the Eurochart more popular so that more people would read it and so that we would get more voters. MD: Please tell us why the `Best packdisks`-cathegory was took out of the charts for a while and who thought that packdisks are/were not very interesting? DO: Most cathegories were taken in and out on request from the readers. If one cathegory dissappeared it was because the readers wanted it. MD: How many guys voted (overall) all in all for the fourteen issues? A few thousands? And how many letters were overall every day in the Eurocharts-Postbox? DO: That's a very hard question. We once thought of saving all voting forms and digitizing a picture with the Eurochart team bathing in them, but most of them were thrown away when we moved. I guess the average amount was somewhere around 400 votes, so that would make a total of around 5600 votes. Most people of course voted in several issues. MD: Do you know a few interesting stories for us about special letters you or El Cubo got? I mean perhaps a few voters had send pictures of their naked-mothers or were there no funny surprises? DO: There were so many great letters that it's impossible to begin describing them. We planned a Hot Sister competition once, as some might recall, and we got some very good pictures for that one. But the best part of it was all the different voting forms we got. People seemed to vote on just about anything. We got toilet paper, shirts, socks, physics exam papers and pieces of paper from all kinds of things from telephone books to Amiga Hardware Reference Manuals. MD: There were often rumours that the Eurocharts were faked and sponsored by several groups! We from McDisk know that this are the biggest lies but please give us your opinion about the mentioned fact... DO: As long as the Eurochart has exsisted no member who was involved in the project was in any way doing anything to 'fix' votes, faking lists or anything to bring out a false impression of the data collected from the votes. For each issue we usually got a certain amount of obviously fake votes, but these were thrown away. We even went as far as to verify the existance of certain people that had sent us some very suspiscious looking votes21. MD: Last but not least a few keywords for you and your pleasure... What are your first thoughts to the following words: Bjorn Lynne: Ok, but he'll probably never speak to me again after this. As long as I have known Bjorn he has been one of the driving forces behind the Crusaders. I don't mean that he could have done it alone, but in the company of other persons with completely different views a team would be unbeatable. He has always been very stubborn, and he usually gets very angry if he didn't get what he wanted. And some times that could get a bit irritating, but fortunately he got a very nice girlfriend some time ago, and now he's mister nice guy himself. Unknown Prophet. 20 BC: Hoho. Well, I didn't want to say that it was me, but now I guess I have. I confess. It was me. I didn't know wheter people would think the poem was stupid or not, so I didn't sign it with my name. PD-Companies: Bunch of lazy people making money on other people's hard work. Pretending not to make a single penny on it, and still have money enough for a full page four color advertisment in a big computer magazine every month. The reborn Eurocharts: At first I would rather seen it die, but since I really felt like Playboy of Static Bytes was the right person for the job I guess it deserves to live. Computer = Business: Not true if you're playing around with your Amiga and aren't extremly good at what you do. It's much easier to make a buck using a PC or some more boring computer like that. The Amiga isn't that big in the industrial world, at least not here in Norway. So I kinda combine the two. When at work I work with PC's, and when I get home I work with PC's and the Amiga. On the other hand, if you're as good a graphician / animator as Tobias Richter f.ex, you can easily make a buck using the Amiga, and then it's so much more fun. 2nd worldwar: Before my time, believe it or not, but I constantly get stories about it from my parents. To me, and I guess most of my generation, it's nothing more than a terrible thing that happened long ago. Also, it's one of the two wars that have not been the result of religious disagreements. Religion is the root to all evil. Tobias Richter: Very lucky and very brilliant bastard who managed to make a living on what he likes best, namely creating wonderful animations and pictures using the Amiga. Greenpeace: Pathetic people running around blocking chimneys, chemical waste dump sites and preventing the destruction of the planet, which is good, but I think it's unpreventable. In order for the animal Homo Sapiens to develop into a more perfect organism we have to make some mistakes. You can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs. Bustman: Bigmouthed graphician from a wet city called Bergen. Brainstorm: Rather cool bunch of Swizz dudes who messed up our living room and brought us loads of the Swizz national product: horrible chocolate. Diskmags: A diskette full of text I seldom have time to read. However I plan to do more DiskMag reading in the future. I promise. It's kinda hard to read a lot of text when it's on a monitor. If you have to do something else, you have to search for half and hour to find where you left off. But that's not a good excuse, is it? MD: What are you thinking about giving us your favourites? We know that no member of Crusaders was allowed to vote in the own charts so do it now... Best... Arcade games: Elite, Project X, Dawg Fight(PC) Strategy games: Civilization Coders: Sweinstein. Did Twintris some years ago. Music-disks: Bacteria, Audio X Amiga graphics: Rico Holmes "BeanBag" Pack-Disks: ANC utility disks Megademos: My favourites at the moment are "Wayfarer" and "D.O.S" Amiga music: "Kilimazaro" and "Graveyard Extended version" Fleshbrain/CRS MD: Yes, finally you have reached the end of this hard questions! You are now able to greet your best friends and there is also some space for a few messages! Use your chance pal, hehe... DO: It will only mean that I forget someone, but I could send some fab hellos to the following people: Martyn James Brown/Team 17 (Sorry you couldn't play football with us) My girlfriend(s) (No no, it's only you babe!) Everyone who sent me stickers (Send me some more, please!) Everyone whos comments I fucked up in The Gallery All Ken fans (I'm writing chapter 9 at the moment!) ..and just about everyone in the whole world, except some certain people from certain groups that really makes me sick. MD: Well, with this part I want to end the interview.. Thanks to Dr.Outtasight of CRUSADERS from the whole McDisk Team for answering this stuff... Bye, and hope to see you somewhere in time. This interview was done by mail. Arranged by CoNtRoL oF aLcAtRaZ!