Sillyventure 2025 WE releases round up

Two weeks have past since SV WE 2025 and the last releases should find it's way to the public soon, as the organizers usually leave about two weeks of extra time for final polishing.

Looking back to the compo night, I found a few things very remarkable, which I would like to point out here, as a highly subjectively selection and interpretation, of course.

Hmm, what's this?

Feel free to add your thoughts or discuss in the comments, it would be interesting to what how you think about the releases of all those contributors.

So let's have a look at the releases ...

ATARI VCS 2600

While I am personally not a fan of the machine as a game system itself, the demo releases seemed always very impressive, starting with that first wave of releases (remember Wamma back then?) up to this day. At SV we had four demos in total, which is amazing for this category.

Dentfice's demo "Wesh gros, ca boume?" - even if you are not into demos, this is a an entertaining show.

Both Dentrifice's winning entry and the second place by Agenda/New Generation were truly astonishing. Seems the limitations really bring also new ways of creativity to the screen. I didn't expect so much variation and complexity and foremost, pumping sound! The sounds left a big impression to me, particularly on the PA at the party place. Great job on those!

Agenda/NGs demo has a great tech vibe. When that square lines started rotating the crowed was applauding (not sure why, but there are certainly technical reasons). For me the Zoltar-X's music was outstanding in this demo

Beside being the compo easily winning the award for the most complicated demo names, I consider it as remarkable, that the old Amiga/PC group Rebels approached the Atari 2600 platform with their Outtasynk contribution, ranking 3rd. The fourth demo by Flush did show some rather simple scrolling pattern nicely put into coherence with the amount of beeping sounds you are hearing.

Atari XL/XE

With no doubt Atari XL/XE is the party princess, everyone at SV seems to love it and it got treated very nicely this year.

We got a couple of nice small size intros, such as Szeryf's interesting to watch "Within Cells Interlinked" (see the introduction picture of this article) or Gorgh's brilliant "Pie Chart Memories 128b".

While some said they were reminded to Outrun, I thought this looks very much like Test drive 1. Just that van coming from the opposite direction was missing, Gorgh, please fix this! (just kidding)

The 16 KB intro category was less crowded this year which is a bit of a pity. Personally, I really like this category, as it has an interesting size, enough to squeeze in a little demo and you never know what comes out of a release. 

ROger accepted the challenge and released a great little intro again. Just 2 years ago he released an absolutely awesome 16 KB one-effect intro called "Galaxy" which was also used for the Czech Flop disk magazine. With his new release "Earth" we get another intro of this kind. Great stuff!

ROger's new intro "Earth" putting the atari-centric world view on display

Pps and Buddy released another uplifting 16 KB intro called "We Like to Party". If you are into dancing bananas, dance tracks and nicely waving layers on screen, this is definitive for you.

Pps and Buddy Partying in 16 KB

Traditionally, Poland has a number of amazing graphic artists, which lead to very impressive Atari 8-Bit graphic competitions during the past years. This edition was not as stuffed, but there was a clear highlight with Ripek's masterpiece "Critical Focus Point".

Incredible, what Ripek did there! This ranked 1st place of course.

On Atari XL/XE we also got some unique categories, such as the ATASCII compo. Here we had really strong entries. Amazing what can be done with the ATASCII charset and two colors!

"Pair" by Adam, 1st place, just awesome

Vibe by Mr. Wolf, 2nd place

My personal favorite due to the interesting shades: The Mighty 4 by Ollanius, 3rd place

But let's get to the most important category for the average SV visitor. The Atari XL/XE demo compo! Four full blasting demos have been released, each of a quite different kind, so that the voting and ranking does not really say much about the production it self. It was a bit like each demo is a class of it's own.

Always creative MEC released a demo named "unseen" with an awesome concept. After some humoristic demoscene culture references the whole demo is a long scroll process from top to bottom, where all effects scroll in step by step. Of course this stream of effects is more of the MEC creativity kind , so you never know what to expect. Definitive a highlight, great to follow, thrilling and a very good idea. The effects themselves looked a bit lowres partly, so I sometimes didn't really get what I was seeing, but that's maybe even intentional.

MEC scrolling hard (4th place)

"Zener Drive" by Altair is an impressive technoid demo throwing around crazy line vectors in a highly synchronized glitch and design composition, yet unseen on Atari XL/XE. The demo uses 1 MB RAM, probably necessary to stream line and polygon data, and turned out to be a conversion from an Amiga demo. It made a big impression. Rumors say that the demo's coder KK is working on a version which os going to run on a 320 KB RAM machine. Anyway, this is another great demo showcasing what different kind of stuff can be put on display on the little Atari.

Zener Drive - I'd say a completely new style of a demo on Atari XL/XE (3rd place)

The 3rd demo released at the party works on a stock 130 XE (128 KB of RAM) and runs under the name "U-uuu" by Oof Heads. Although having been involved, I think one can say this is a slick and compact demo with impressive tech. The bit more humouristic approach on things, was conceptually developed by the Polish artist Odyn1ec.

Oof Heads doing their thing their uuu-wn way (2nd place)

Then we got a real surprise. The old group Slight, known for some impressive demos like "Overmind" from the 90s had their reappearance. It's always special to see old groups and people return to where they started. I was pretty thrilled of particularly X-Ray being around again, as he has always been a guarantor for skillfully crafted, vibrant Pokey music.

Their demo "ReRZoGeD" is a homage to the Atari 8-Bit scene, with elegant and foremost very smooth effects, clean design and beautiful graphics and colour combinations.

Colorful bugs in "ReRZoGeD" by Slight (1st place)

Generally the demo has a very tender and graceful flow, with a bit of oldschool flavour framed by yet another wonderful piece of music by X-Ray, providing a mediaeval touch.

Speaking of wonderful music. Slight's renowned musician X-Ray also made a massive comeback in the Atari Pokey chipmusic compo, winning 1st, 2nd and 3rd place in the music compo, quite a statement. The songs came along with a pretty music visualizer and are indeed a delight, highly recommended to check.

"Demon's bath" - 200Hz sound design, crazy breaks and fades in full action, this was my favourite of X-Rays's entries, but all three of them are top.

Well, with all those releases on Atari XL/XE and four demos released, each an own of its kind, and all of them pieces that one easily wants to watch again, the compo outcome for this platform was simply fantastic.

Atari ST/E and Falcon

For the 16/32 bit league we had a few surprises.

In the Atari ST graphics compo, Vasyl, who is more known from his work on Amiga won with a picture only using 8 colors (if I remember correctly). Amazing how much atmosphere one can create with such a little amount colors. 

"Ready For The Byte Fight" by Vasyl - very impressive. Kill Bill comes to mind, luckily the compos didn't get out of hand.

Quest For Lynx by .misha. (including worksteps) - Without being a graphician myself, I instantly fell in love with this one - the creative and funny motive, Atari references, the classic orange-blue colors summarizing the cold of the night and the warmth of the fire, the reflection on the sword, the detailed trees and the general, adventurous atmosphere in that deep, mysterious forest - just wow!

Atom asks: "Who Stole My Atari?" - Certainly some random Amiga guy.

There were more good entries. I particularly liked the entry "Rush" by Nytrik/Hemoroids, who has surprised us before this year with his absolutely amazing "Fire" picture at the Sommarhack party in Summer.

Nytrik's "Rush"

In terms of Atari ST music, we had a French chipmusic delegation at Sillyventure which also dominated the YM-music compo. Jess/Overlanders won the compo with a skillfull, progressive and explosive composition. His DJ set fiancé AD entered with a powerful dancetrack, while Dma-Sc contributed a shuffled, dreamy piece. Doclands/Overlanders entered three different tracks, with both reminiscence of his well-known work in the oldschool era but also new approaches making use of Arkos3 tracker. Garvalf contributed another maxYMiser track and finally YQN and yours truely entered a first collaborative effort, which leads us to a frog ratio of 6:11 for this compo!

Also Atari Pokey lord Miker made a nice comeback on the YM and hyperactive Filipp entered a nice jazzy song, which I think turned out to be a bit underrated. Biggest surprise in this compo for me was a solid entry by Norwegian scener Archmage, who is rather known for his top notch pixel graphics on Amiga and especially C64. This was a "plastofantic" surprise for me. With the background of knowing C64/Amiga people being mostly put off by the YM-sound, I am always happy seeing these kind of contributions and wonder how that came into place.

On the code front, we got a number of small size intros. In the Bytro-categories we luckily had superogue/Marquee design striking back with "gorski" - a dot landscape in 128 bytes, being the only entry. the still somewhat mysterious group atariBDSM released a 256 Byte intro for Atari Falcon, showing some impressive bumpmapper.

But, at least in my opinion, one of the most impressive and surprising releases from the whole party was a 4K-intro: 4K Overdrive by Retro HQ.

Wow, that is a lot of stuff in 4KB! Gotta love the spacial illusion, the design and more rarely seen, the deformation of a bouncing ball.

There was another good ST 4 KB intro, coded by Acid team, coincidentally also involving balls, but the final seems not to be released yet.

Effect had a comeback with a 96 KB intro (the single entry in this category). "FrankenSTOS" was coded by Vlad over a long time span and features a number of nice STOS effects. He even managed to bring a fire-routine to the life with STOS, also by implementing bit of assembly here and there, with the help of Tom for some smart interfacing. Jade jumped in to help with the graphics, and thus, upgraded the look, so that we got a nicely polished and very likeable ST production by the Effect team here.

Vlad's 96kb intro - the term "FrankenSTOS" refers to the assembly interface implemented

Regarding ST demos, there were only two entries: 

MPS entering with a bit of a side blow demo "No STS, No Graphics" towards STS, who obviously did not do the graphics as planned. Maybe he was too busy writing articles for Atariscne.org in his editor role. Who knows ;-)

Then Paradox stepped in and released a new demo "We're Not". Well, new in terms of finishing and releasing it after all. The demo was in the works since years, but as life plays, the project was on hold for longer periods. Luckily, crew members could be reactivated and the fun of doing Atari things together was floating again.

A bit differently from the past focus on STE demos of Paradox, this demo is running on an 1 MB Atari STF.

Regarding games, Boicanu and Hospes presented their latest snapshot of their game "Rogül" at the party.

Rogül - I was told some party visitors got hold of the current game version and as it seemed to be pretty fun to play they couldn't stop and finished it straight away during the party.

The Falcon demo compo with Dune's milestone release "Taedium Vitae" was a clear highlight, at least in terms of 16/32 bit releases, as reported before.

"Taedium Vitae" by Dune

Thanks so much for this demo, it means a lot and made me feel witnessing something really special when it was shown, similar to the presentation of Sonolumineszenz at Sillyconvention 1997.

There was another rather surprising entry in the Falcon compo by yet unknown Mik Javalonde, as CiH pointed out in his party report.

Bottom line

Of course there were many other releases. The wild compo had about a dozen of entries. Unfortunately I wasn't present at the party place, when this and some other events took place and I also don't mean to give a complete picture here. Feel free to add your views in the comments and of course to watch the releases yourself on the party stream or properly download and investigate all the releases via demozoo.

All in all, this edition of SV brought a very nice mix of contributions. A bit thin in some areas while others excelled. After having spoken with a number of other visitors, I think it is legit to say everyone at the party was really enjoying the event and the well-balanced and professionally organized show. In that sense, thanks to the SV team for offering the platform and to all contributors to create us such a good time all together. See you next time, hopefully!

🔗 SV WE 2025 on Demozoo