Party Review for The Gathering 1995

found inTypeAuthorYear
downloadR.O.M. 4Diskmagazine
AGA Chipset required
Essence
Andy - Cesium - Diesel8 - ...
a6/95
added 3/97
Results from The Gathering 1995 
Amiga Demo Competition

1. Parallax & CnCd
2. Avalon
3. The Black Lotus
4. Equinox

Once again, Parallax gave the scene another hardware hungary production. This time though, there weren't Stellar around. 
"Deep is a good demo, but it isn't good enough to become a legendary one", says Mac of Stellar. The other contributions were the average demos, the scene has already seen 101 times before. A positive factor in the Avalon contribution are the graphics.

Amiga 64k Intro Competition

1. 64K by Spaceballs
2. Last Finger by Spaceballs
3. Dive by Complex
4. 64K by Birra Brothers
5. 64K by Triumph

Jobbo and Lizard of Spaceballs have come up with a very nice intro, which having no competition at all, won this contest. 
"Nicely used Dweezil's fractal routine", was the comment from Mac of Stellar! In ROM's opinion, Dive deserved the second place, just for it's originality and for the fact that it doesn't need an AGA to work! Triumph's intro requires a maths co-processor to run! Is this a new trend in the scene?

Amiga 4k Intro Competition

1. Spaceballs
2. Hoaxers
3. Contras
3. Dangerous Darkys
4. Rats
5. Progressive Design

LoneStarr has managed to star for the second time, in a Gathering intro competition, this time with 4K of bytes that require an A1200 with fast RAM to work! Typical of Lonestarr! Skurk of Hoaxers managed to fit a smooth scrolling vector road and a plasma effect in the available 4k! The intro from Contras is the only one that included basic music and featured a rotating dot man! Alta of Dangerous Darkys crunched his old transforming glenz vector routine into 4k! Rats presented some boring sine dots, whilst Progressive Design lived up to their name, and came up with the best designed 4K intro ever!

Graphics Competition

1. Bridgeclaw of Gods
2. Nirvana of Cadaver
3. Decker of Andromeda
4. Bianco of Gollum
5. Electrolux of Darkzone

Other quality pictures that didn't make it to the top 5 were the ones from Jaffo of No Limits, Neo of Proxima, Cobra of Eon, Hole of Grotesticle, Boo of Talent and Typhoon of Avalon.

4 Channel Music Competition

1. Syntex of Stone Arts
   "Let It Linger"
1. Superted of Grotesticle & Superia
   "I Want U"
2. Typhoon of Avalon
   "Springar"
3. Tecon of Supreme
   "A 6th Sense"

A total of 58 modules were delivered to the jury, but only 15 were played in the finals. Once again another Gathering music contest turned out to be full of surprises, and this year, the scene saw an ex-equo for the first place. ROM's symbolic reward has to go to Interphace of Andromeda with "PHUNQ ETHEREAL" (7th), Christian & Tim J with "BASS" (6th) and Lizardking of Razor 1911 with "WILD MCARTHUR" (13th), who all came up with good pieces of acoustic binaries. The known Norwegian VIS, Jogier and Vinnie placed themselves 8th and 15th, respectively.


"I was surprised by the quality in the music and graphics competitions. The finalists were generally of a higher quality than I had expected" (Cesium of Session)

---------------------------------------------
After Party Comments 
ROM has managed to catch some party visitors, on their way out, after the party gates had been officially closed. Find out what these sceners had to comment when we mentioned the word, "The Gathering 1995";


"The party seemed quite good. There weren't that many foreigners, but then again, there usually ain't on these Gatherings. I met a lot of friends and had a good time. I think that the ones who complain about this event have too high expectations, and compare it to The Party series. But The Gathering is NOT The Party! The latter is a much more professional event, has more money involved and is more like the centre court of the demo scene." (Cesium of Session)


"The Gathering 1995 was the worst party ever organized. In fact this party was so bad that I won't attend any Gathering by next year. That's simply because the organisers have proved, year after year, to be unable to arrange a party, and the Gathering is in fact getting worse and worse each year. The organisers haven't learnt anything from their former parties." (Zerox of Gods)


"No doubts; this is the worst Gathering ever. Only a small minority of the organizers were service minded. More than often, one only got a totally irrelevant comment, or just an angry look. The Gabber House staff have complained on several occasions about the various conditions which we found unsustainable, but it never lead to anything. Freezer or sleeping hall? Demo party or 5 days of imprisonment? There's been another power failure! Some positive things did happen at this party, but these cannot be credited to the organizers." (Marsh Mellow)


-----------------------------------------------------------
The Gathering 1995 - Another MultiMedia Festival? 
After three consecutive years of organising the Norwegian Eastern Gatherings, Crusaders have decided to skip one year, and leave the withholding of The Gathering 1995, in the hands of Spaceballs, Scoop and Safe Hex International.

Last year's event was rich of good releases, but the organisation left a lot to be desired. Were, the new organising band capable of taking the situation under control, better than Crusaders did in the past?

Trouble Will Kill Me


"From day 1 we experienced a lot of unexpected problems which had to be solved in a very short period of time", says Lizard, one of the main organisers of this year's event. These problems included everything, from equipment to electricians (who forgot to bring their own TOOLS), to getting more tables and chairs in the main hall, setting up the electricity framework, getting spare parts and fixing broken cables.

In the first 5 or 6 hours, there was hardly any power at all, just like in good Gathering tradition, some would dare to say! However, in the next two days, the party audience, only had to sustain about 5 very short power cuts.

Electrified

The organisers hired 5 full time electricians to take care of the possible electrical problems. 
"We thought that nothing could stop us this year, but we were wrong!", told us Lizard. 
"The way some of the persons in CREW TECH were acting and cutting cables, was NOT specified in the agreement between us and the Crusaders' electricians. I personally think that they did more harm than good, by cutting the cables, the way they did", suggests Lizard. But sadly not much could be done to stop them at that point. The most important thing was to try and get a stable power supply. 
"We used about 1 day to clear up the power mess, and after that, we only had a few tables with power problems" According to Lizard this problem was sorted up in the fastest possible way.

Wowbagger: 
"How about a small cable over here, so that we can have some electricity?"

Organiser: 
"You'll have to talk with the tech crew about this!"

Wowbagger: 
"Where's the tech crew then?"

Organiser: 
"Don't ask me where those idiots are! Hey Gunnar, where are those idiots?"

Organiser 2: 
"Don't ask me, I suppose they're sleeping somewhere..."

The whole crew wandered around the main party halls and CUT power cables which weren't grounded at all, even though they were supposed to be! 
"Where were they supposed to be connected? Directly to a monitor? No problem, cut the cable in bits & pieces!", demands Wowbagger.

To Vote or Not To Vote?

At the entrance, all attenders were given a special voting disk. Unfortunately, it had not been tested before it was distributed, and this proved to be quite confusing, since a bug was found at a latter stage. However, everyone was given a newer version just before the competitions were started.

I Had To Go But...

Attendance wasn't the highlight of this party. Around 1000 sceners showed up; only half the number of last year. Almost nobody outside Norway decided to visit this year's event. The general attendance from neighbourhood European countries was quite poor too; No Danes were present, and only about 50 sceners came from Sweden. However, ROM noted 4 French sceners.

Many hungry sceners told us that one of the best things about this year's Gathering was the quality of food, which tasted fine. 
"But of course it was a bit expensive, as always", says Zerox.

Guarding The Prison

CREW GUARDS was the biggest guarding force, the organisers could find. 
"Yet too few guards made part of it. We only had 15 guards in the first night, and that was TERRIBLE, especially when we were supposed to have a guard in the sleeping hall as well. Just imagine how it feels like, to guard a DARK and BORING sleeping hall, for several hours during the night"
 But after all, guards know what their job consists of, and as long as they are paid, they have to fulfil their duties.


"But this was not exactly the most happy thing that they wanted to do, so they just stopped guarding the sleeping hall, and made shift arrangements for taking care of the main hall" Some mad sceners saw it fit to wander around the sleeping hall, and started to pee all over the floor AND even on some of the sleeping party attenders. 
"It wasn't nice to wake up and find parts of your sleeping bag soaked wet with stinking piss", told us an angry looking visitor.

Attention! Attention!

The CREW GUARD eventually consisted of 20 to 25 persons. 
"We made some pretty fair shift arrangements for all of them, however, the main problem was communication. Since there was no radio connection between the various guards, we often had to use the hall speaker to call up guards, and promote unimportant CREW messages to the rest of the party attenders!", says Lizard.


"It's Easter eve and I'm going home in 8 hours. Through the hall speakers, one of the organizers shouts the words, I've been hearing more than a thousand times, in the last 5 days; Attention, Attention! This time the leader of the organizing crew decided that everybody who had brought a computer had to sit in front of it. The ones who didn't have one, were ordered to go up onto the grandstand", told us an irritated Marsh Mellow.

WowBagger of Session can confirm; 
"Exactly! And the ones who wanted to go to the toilet were hunted down and put back to their places."

Crusaders couldn't find any radios, when the organisers arrived in Oslo to pick up the necessary equipment! So a communication problem did arise, and caused a general confusion between the guards and the information desk. 
"On Monday, Crusaders told us that a car with equipment, including the radio transmitters, was on it's way from Oslo to Stavanger". However, this didn't prove to be the case. The organisers tried to contact Crusaders on Tuesday and Wednesday. 
"But on Thursday, I completely gave up", told us Lizard. Eventually, a car did show up on Thursday evening. Crusaders had kept their promise! Upon unloading the car, it turned out that the radio connection equipment was totally missing! 
"Again... We really had some bad luck. Big promises, and no action from people we had to trust, and counted on", told us a sad Lizard.

I'm Very Tired

It's only 1 day before the Gathering gates are opened to the masses. 
"But the sleeping hall had NOT YET been rented, and I had to go down to the Tennis hall at 9:00 AM in the morning to sign the contract with the director", told us Lizard.

Unlike last year, attenders were offered to take a rest in a specially set up sleeping hall, which was quite cold. The temperature wasn't on the organisers' side, and in those 5 days, Stavanger was covered with harsh winter weather.

Lizard had to sign the contract for renting the sleeping hall on the Monday before the opening. 
"The director was black-mailing us and tried to get MORE money for renting us the hall. In the end, we didn't have enough time to get any heaters installed in the hall". Lizard knew that this would have subsequently caused many problems, so he went to look for outlet sockets. 
"But I came up with nothing, since it was too dark to search for anything. So since we had about 1000 other problems to take care of, we didn't bother to make a 100 meter long cable, and stretch it out through the fire doors from the main hall and over to the sleeping hall"

Projections Of The Eye


"At one time, we discovered that the big screen projector hadn't been yet delivered", says Lizard. But when it did finally arrive, the organisers understood that it was the WRONG type of projector. 
"We had to go down to the company from where we had hired it, and set up new terms for renting a new type of projector". This was done in a real hurry, because most of the technicians were on their Eastern holidays. Having got hold of the correct type of projector for both the cinema room and the big screen, the organisers were eager to test it out.


"The management had ensured us that the projector was capable of handling all types of screen resolutions and modes". But this didn't prove to be the case. 
"When we tried it out the first time, it was only able to display VGA, and not ordinary NTSC/PAL modes. We used several hours, trying to get new solutions and boxes to decode the signal to the projector in a different way, so that it would accept 15kHz as well as 31kHz. We used an RGB solution which gave us a temporary PAL/NTSC".

However, upon testing a particular demo which switched from PAL to DBLPAL, someone had to manually switch cables to get the display to work in a proper way. 
"This was NOT a good solution. So we called the company again, and the next day they delivered a new box which supported both 15kHz and 31kHz signals. Then we found out that this projector had a limit, and it could only display a screen of 800 by 600 pixels. But we were promised a 1280 by 1024 pixel display from the company. We called again and but shop was closed, since most of the people were on the mountains trying to get a sun-bath". So the party audience had to withstand an inferior quality screen.

The Scala shower gave it's own share of problems too. 
"The genlock didn't work with an A4040, so we had to try to find another one. Masters AS didn't have one, so we were forced to find one from some party attender". This took time, and when a new one, that seemed to work 99%, was found, the big screen was ready, with only a 20 hour delay.

Delays and More Trouble

Even the presentation of the animation contest wasn't trouble free. After showing a whole bunch of animations, the organisers happily announced, through the speakers, that the competition was over. The Party audience started to go back to their places, and didn't pay too much attention on what was happening on the big screen. But all of a sudden, the animation from Animatraxx appeared on the screen, with a seemingly big bug in the display; their contribution only covered 1/4 of the screen!


"The organisers also had some big problems with showing the contributions in the right way round", says Zerox.


"We started the wild demo and the animation competitions, with only some slight technical problems. The sound technicians had been checking the sound all day long, and the delay was only 10 to 20 hours long!", says Lizard.

Where the HACK...

Because of the presence of hackers (a sad incident which ROM has covered in another report), the rest of the party audience were not allowed to move freely, in and out of the party hall. This proved to be of a massive hindrance to most attenders, who didn't want to spend 5 days of their lives, closed in a hall with 1000 other sceners!

Organiser: 
"Hey, where are you supposed to be going?"

Marsh Mellow: 
"We'd like to go and buy some hamburgers!"

Organiser: 
"No, you are not! You are to go to your computers!"

Marsh Mellow: 
"No, we are about to get some burgers! And there's none beside our computers!"

Organiser: 
"No way, you'll go back to your table and sit down! Now!"

Fortunately, poor attenders like Marsh Mellow only had to wait a couple of hours...

Supposedly, because of these same hackers, all the competitions were shown with a 15 hour delay; thus, the demo competition was shown in the early hours of Saturday, instead of Friday at Eight. Some other competitions were even delayed by 1 whole day.


"The music competition had been delayed for 26 hours, and during the next 8 hours the organizers had to fit in, 4 intro competitions and two demo contests, count all the votes, hand out prizes...", says Marsh Mellow.

Another Music Disaster?

The organisers were so organised that they didn't even have any amplifier on which to listen the competing modules, so they had to borrow one from Marsh Mellow. 
"In return we were allowed to participate in the jury", laughs Marsh Mellow.

Lizard, one of the organisers, played one of his modules and discovered that the sound was quite horrible, so he thought that it would have helped to stick newspapers all over the party walls and put a carpet on the floor! 
"Lizard actually had a golden cable from his Amiga to his stereo rack", continues Marsh Mellow.

A jury had picked out about 15 songs to be played in the final, so the competition could start. But wait a second. Where are the sound technicians? 
"Since they did not sleep for 3 whole days, they had left the party hall to get some rest, and I had to try to figure out how to operate the sound mixer by myself. I used over 1 hour to find out how the damn thing had to be set up. In the end, we had to use 3 microphones with a lame speaker, together with the party machine and the mixer", says Lizard.

The 4 channel music competition went quite smoothly, with the exception of some small problems in the beginning. 
"One of the cables between the mixer and the competition machine had a defect, and we didn't find out what was the cause before the second song had been already played", says Lizard. But after changing the offending cable, all modules were played over again, without any further problems.

After The Compos

About 1 hour after the last demo had been shown, the organisers decided to cut out the power, for the 1000th time. So it was quite hard to copy any releases at the party place itself. However, nothing of special interest was released before the demo competition was over, which is a clear indication, that in these days, groups only have eyes for competition prizes.

One and a half hours after the party was supposed to be officially over, the voting system hadn't even started! 
"We didn't get the results at the party nor saw the prize giving ceremony", sadly told us Zerox. However, all the Amiga products were made available on most Norwegian boards, and on any AmiNet site. The next AmiNet CD ROM will also contain all the party releases.

The Last Days

If many lamented about the sleeping conditions, few know that both Lizard of Spaceballs and Adept of Scoop, two of the main organisers, spent 4 whole days, running around the halls and trying to solve all the problems, without taking any rest. 
"Then we just collapsed, which caused FURTHER delays to the competitions", told us a weary Lizard.

On Saturday Lizard got a terrible news. The party budget had been exceeded, and the tickets that had been sold beard no numbers at all, so it was impossible to determine how many of the attenders had paid the entrance fee. 
"We had to TRUST our Danish financial co-ordinator, and hope that he would be honest with us. We are now doing our best to get the budget down to ZERO" Unfortunately, this so-called "financial co-ordinator" wasn't so trustable, and the organisers have become the victims, of a financial fraud.

The local government has already been appointed as a partner in this case, and hopefully this financial problem will be solved in the best possible way. "
We are trying our best to get the prizes paid out to the rightful owners" Lizard has already paid over 25.000 NOK out of his own savings, to try and balance the incurred losses. 
"I can't use more of my own money to pay the rest of the bills" A lot of paper work has to be done, and hopefully the matter will be solved in no time. 
"I'm not quite satisfied with this situation. However, I won't stop to try and do something about it!", ends Lizard.

Next year, the organisation of The Gathering 1996, will get back into the hands of Crusaders. Whatever that means, many Norwegian sceners have already expressed their opinion; and that ain't anything positive! The Gathering series started life as a very prominent scene event, that could well become the second best choice to all those who wanted to spend their Christmas holidays with their beloved ones, but still looked forward to attend a big scene party during the rest of the year. Crusaders have to organise a successful event by next year, if they want The Gathering series to prosper. ROM knows that co-ordinating a big party like this is no easy task, and wish Crusaders all the best for their future party deeds!