Assembly 1996
and the Finish Summer Love 
By mOP with help from Magic

Few scene events come near to the total approval of the scene mass. Sceners like to criticise negatively, whenever something goes wrong.

A few crucial things went wrong with The Assembly 1995. Sceners said that it had become a commercial trade fair, they criticised heavily and some even swore that they would never return to another Assembly.

With such a dreaded scenario, the inevitable had to happen, and in the beginning of May, news was officially confirmed that The Assembly 1996 had been...

Cancelled

Whilst a big part of the scene was already preparing for a Finish summer vacation, The Assembly organisers announced that Asm 1996 had been cancelled! Many thought that the organising crew wanted to pack up and run away to some exotic island, with all the competition prizes, which unfortunately remained still unpaid. But reality brought us more sour facts. Due to the many extraneus damages incurred to the Helsinki fair centre during last year's Assembly, the appointed insurance company refused to make any refund, leaving the organisers to swim in a neck-deep pool of debts.

Even though their whole financial budget burst into million pieces, main organiser Pehu does not give the blame to the various acts of unseen vandalism, that they had to face during The Assembly 1995. 
"I don't think that sceners are vandals, because the people who break property are not really in the scene. I understand the need to drink and I think that we have shown that the organization is quite jovial in this way". And as other organiser Moku explains, their troubles did not only start because of all the broken assets; 
"One sponsor declined to keep up his promises, one month before the party, so we lost a good USD 15,000 because of his bravery. This, coupled with the fact that we kept low prices for entrance tickets, didn't help us in any way"

Back In Shape

In a midst of suing threats and the general reluctance from the scene, the brave organisers managed to rise back on their feet, and even turn the whole situation, upside down - now their financial troubles were miraculously solved, and The Assembly 1996 could be held for good! 
"Financial help came from many sources. The fact that we could negotiate a deal about payments with the Helsinki fair centre has helped us a lot", says Pehu. When asked about the identity of their main corporate backup, Pehu wishes to keep anonymous until their current deal comes to an end, and the Asm bank account get fat again! 
"However", Pehu continues, 
"it will be very clear who this very supporting sponsor is, for all those who visit The Assembly 1996"

Against the popular tradition of all previous years, The Assembly 1996 will be held two weeks later, to be more exact on the 16 August, to last 3 whole days and end on Sunday, the 18th. The reason for these "unusual" dates is mainly because the fair centre had already been booked for another event. 
"But The Assembly 1997 will be held in early August again", assures us Moku.

Even though the good news that The Assembly did not bite the dust should enlighten most sceners' mood, organisers Moku and Pehu still have to face those demanding VIS, who have been waiting for their promised prizes since one year now!


"A few winners have made threats to sue us. Of course they are allowed to act for their interests. The situation has never been easy for us either, as we gave ourselves to make the best party ever and now the glory has been stained because of the 1995 incident. For us, it means years of non-paid work for nothing. However, in general, most people have been very supportive", reveals Pehu. Fortunately enough, no demo group or individual took the trouble to sue the organisers for real; 
"Sue or no sue, it wouldn't have made any difference to any of us, since no one would probably have got any money! We have lost enough of our own money on this party, not to mention that Moku, Abyss and me, have spent more than 100 hours each to fix everything, just for the sake of our integrity. So if anyone had sued us, I would have been quite offended personally", seriously affirms Pehu.

Who Make The Assembly?

Sceners continue to say that parties are organised just for fast fame and money; but such affirmations are sometimes ridiculous. As with The Party, not many people outside Finland could remember the name of the main organisers of The Assembly. ROM dared to ask it, to the interested parties themselves, and found out that the head organizing team consists of 3 main persons; Pekka Aakko, also known as Pehu, takes care of the general party organizing and main security; Markus MOKU Kantonen, looks after the general organizing, sponsorships and main competitions, whilst Abyss (Jussi Laakkonen) is in charge of the graphical presentations and also organizes the various competitions. 
"However, there are over 20 other people working under us", says Pehu. A list of all these co-organisers will be provided at the information booth this year. 
"We had in mind to publish such a list, also last year, but I didn't have enough time to write it up", says Pehu.

Moku himself was a visitor of the first Assembly, way back in 1992, where Meegosh of Movement was leading the way. As from 1993, several main organizers, including Moku and Pehu, took the lead. Even though Meegosh nowadays has his own software company to take care of (other employees including Gore and Henchman of Future Crew PC, Xenit of Aggression, Turtle and X-ray of Accession and Reward of Complex), he is still a bit involved in the organisation of today's Assembly!

The Hall

The Helsinki Fair Centre will provide the roofing for The Assembly, also this year round, mainly because the party place is the biggest hall complex in Finland. The usual 24 hour food service, security personnel, professional electricians, luggage preservation service and cleaning personnel, will be available for everyone's needs. Pizza Hut and a Finnish McDonalds clone will also open during the whole happening. Plenty of toilets and some showers, are also at the free disposal of the party audience.

The main hall is equipped with a powerful sound system - in fact, so powerful that the main system supports stereo output at 10,000 Watts of pure sound power. The big screen in the main hall is over 8 meters wide and supports resolutions up to 640 by 480. The main party area is composed of two halls, separated by a heavy and opaque curtain setup. The main area is 4500 square meters big and provides enough space for 1500 computers. 
"And the hall has also some 1800 seats", adds Moku. Neither of the 2 halls have windows, so the video screens promise to look absolutely fabulous during the competitions. This precaution has been taken after seeing the lightening trouble experienced at The Party 5, we are told.

This year round, the sleeping hall is situated on the first floor. Even though the new reserved area is as big as the one from last year, we are being told that the sound proofing might not be as good.


"The upper hall is being remounted during August, so we have to use the lower E1 hall. I don't think that there will be any big problems, since there is some sound proofing to keep the noise to a bare minimum", says Pehu. Moku smiles and comments that, 
"Even though it might not be absolutely silent, I believe that there will be a reasonably amount of quietness. However the good thing is that we won't be have any raves in this hall!"

Vandalism?

It occurred during all Assembles to a minor extent, but caused very big bills at last year's edition: it's vandalism - the thirst to destroy under the influences of alcohol. The organisers know that this tendency is in the blood of a "few" Finns, and most probably these "few" Finns will be present at The Assembly! "We will install cameras but we can't survey the whole area", says Pehu, when he tries to explain to us how they'll manage to avoid another blow of ferocious vandalism, also this time round. 
"We have come up with a new rule that all the broken assets that the insurance won't be covering will have to be deducted from the prizes"

From the prizes? ROM already smells a certain amount of pessimism from the contest participants here! 
"We were forced to make this rule, because people will see things in a better light, and we hope to catch any offenders more easily. However, we won't be taking all the damages from the prize money, so sceners don't have to be afraid of that", says Pehu. One welcome change though, is that the organisers have obviously changed their insurance company!

However, the problem is still there: deducting the expenses caused by vandals from the competition prizes, is not very right for the contestants. If equipment will get destroyed, winners will ask themselves, why they have to pay for the barbaric acts of others. But Pehu assures us that to certain levels, this will prevent any wrong doings, because when people know that they will be affecting themselves with their irresponsible actions, then they'll most probably stay put! 
"This rule has been inserted in other parties as well, and I hope that sceners would report anyone who breaks things" Moku believes in the true scene spirit: that is, vandalism will be kept to a minimum, as now it's not being done against the fair centre or the organizers but against fellow sceners.

So this year round, we'll probably not be seeing any brave acts of chair stacking over poor sleeping fellows: one chair might get accidentally broken, and chairs do cost a lot!

Competitions

The forte of every party has mostly, always been the various competitions. This year, the organisers are promising nothing less than USD 4100 as first prize for the winning Amiga demo. 
"I don't think that we are promising too much", says Pehu, when asked if they would really be giving out that amount in prizes. "We have cut down on other prizes too. We know that the amount of prize money isn't all what sceners want, but since The Assembly is at the moment one of the most well known parties, I believe that we have to offer decent prizes as well"

Moku tells us that the total prize money is about USD 40,000 this year; 
"In fact, at The Assembly 1995, most prizes were much higher"

Just like last year, a jury composed of known scene personalities will select the best 15 entries from each competition. Different personalities will make up the PC and Amiga juries. The party audience will then be able to give their opinion on the best five entries in all competitions. The classical voting method will be used: voting disks. Moku says that the main reason for choosing a voting disk based system, and not a terminal approach as with The Gathering 1996, is mainly because of security reasons. 
"The cost for such extra security is not that high", he smiles.

Unsurprisingly, the machine to be used for all Amiga contests is a 68030, A1200 with 2Mb of chip memory and 4Mb of fast memory, clocked at 50 MHz. This is considered as a common machine by today's scene standards; even though it is a known fact that Finish coders prefer fast processors and blinding speeds, the organisers won't be surprising us with some A4000 equipment like they did in a past edition!

CD-ROM

Party CD-ROMs have become a new kind of scene trend for the bigger events since some years now. However, sometimes the scene wonders, for what kind of audience, such productions are aimed; surely not for sceners, who have a tendency of wanting all party releases, even before the competition deadlines... if that could be possible, that is!

In fact Pehu confirms our fears; 
"The 1995 CD-ROM came out very late even though we managed to complete it by early October. I don't have the exact sales figures from the German ROMware, but the number is in few hundreds. Personally, we have sold about 200 copies, and are preparing to send royalties as soon as the sums are big enough - There is no reason to transfer a few FIM. The reason why the CD-Rom was late was mainly because of some internal problems our publishing house had. Hence all their productions were delayed, including ours. That delay has mainly been the cause of no good sales" On the other hand, organiser MOKU thinks that on the whole, not more that 400 pieces were sold on a world wide basis, meaning that no debts will be paid from this income. All those competition winners who have been promised CDs will get them as soon as the organisers will receive them from ROMware - up to now, they only have 10 promotional CDs, in their hands.

INTERNET, THE NEW TREND AT PARTIES

Internet, is integrating into our scene at the speed of light; Even scene parties can't can't avoid it any more, so an event like The Assembly, surely can't stay behind. The Gathering and The Symposium, which were partly held during the same Easter days, both had an Internet Cafe set-up, so sceners could experience live contact with each other and to the rest of the IRC scene. Pehu explains that the Internet connection at The Assembly 1996 will be arranged by ATM. 
"The connection will be a good one, and live TV broadcasts from the party will be sent to the world via a TELE Medianet connection", he continues. Just like many organisers, Pehu believes that Internet is an obligatory thing at today's parties, since many sceners are used to "live" in it. Moku adds that Internet has some peculiar advantages, in the way that newest demo versions can be easily transferred fro and to coders and the idea of coding the last parts of a demo in between two or more coders, residing in different countries, cannot be excluded. 
"We are also going to introduce a net radio working on PC machines", he adds.

Commercial World

According to many Finish voices, the old Assembly spirit had died with the 1995 edition. Last year, we were presented with a kind of trade fair show, where corporate men in suits were to be seen everywhere and local game players took the place of the VIS. However Pehu does not agree. 
"I don't see any bigger commercialism than in any other parties. We have sponsors, as others" Pehu shouts in our ears that until today, NO ONE has forwarded one single valid reason, WHY the party feeling was going down. 
"I am hoping that someone would present one, since I am very curious, what it could be. We have the biggest prizes and the biggest party, and of course there are some people who are jealous and whom don't like such an idea" According to Pehu, it's other party organisers that tend to invent things in the heads of others! 
"At The Assembly 1995, various people came up to me, telling that the party was too commercial, but when I asked them WHY, no one did have anything to say, so that's why I don't believe that sceners don't really mean what they say"

Pehu continues that he has personally found out that other parties even have more sponsors than his own, 
"yet we are the only ones that are accused of being commercial". Pehu thinks that the scene still has to learn about the main rules and way of making parties. 
"This is pretty much like rock culture in its early days: no band wanted to have a company to sponsor their tour, but today, bands make fantastic shows - surely they wouldn't have been possible without sponsors. We are not intending to turn scene events into shows, but with the sponsor money we can have good prizes, lower ticket prizes and new programs at the party place" Pehu comes to the conclusion that as an organiser, he has to act upon the preferences of the majority of the scene, and not on what a few orthodox Finnish sceners have to say in a loud voice on the Internet! 
"We have asked all the leading groups in and outside Finland, about our ideas before we announced any. We received a lot of positive comments, so I do consider that it is a very small minority that is claiming that this party has turned into a trade show or a commercial entity in its purest way"

Maybe, one reason why the core Finish scene is seeing The Assembly as a threat to their integrity, could be because the organisers are advertising this event in local computer magazines. But Moku thinks that this is a great way to contact the scene masses, who do not have access to the internet and bbs worlds. 
"The Assembly is just the breeding pit of new scene people in Finland, for those who want to keep the scene alive", he concludes.


TIME TABLE

Friday, 16 August 1996

10:00 ASSEMBLY doors open
19:00 C64 competition deadline
21:00 C64 competition
23:00 Deadline for all competitions

Saturday, 17 August 1996

13:00 4 channel competition
14:00 Graphics competition
14:30 32 channel competition
15:30 Raytrace competition
16:00 PC 4kb intro
17:00 AMIGA 64kb intro
18:30 PC 64kb INTRO

Sunday, 18 August 1996

09:00 AMIGA DEMO competition
11:30 Animation competition
12:30 PC DEMO competition
15:00 Vote counting
16:00 Announcement of winners and
      prize giving ceremony
17:00 Prize giving ceremony ends
20:00 Doors close - ASSEMBLY 96
      is over


CONTACT DETAILS

Voice: +358-0-777 3741
  WWW: www.assembly.org/assembly96
Email: assembly@assembly.org
  IRC: #asm96
 mail: ASSEMBLY 1996
       Lakkisepantie 13
       00620 Helsinki
       FINLAND