Added: 5 years ago
From: stormblast0891
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  • Doesn't look that impressive today, but I'm pretty sure this blew people's minds 20 years ago.

  • 17 people are people who have no idea whose these people were (are) and what kind of impact they have had.

    WITHOUT THE PEOPLE WHO WROTE THIS DEMO AND ALL THE OTHER EARLY DEMOSCENERS YOU COULD FORGET ABOUT DOOM, QUAKE AND ALL THE OTHER MODERN GRAPHICS!

    Deepest respect for Future Crew, I wish someday they would release the source code. I really want to see the sources for Psi's Moire effect and Wildfire's plasma, which is in my opinion the most beautiful plasma I have ever seen in a demo!

  • @BlackStarEOP I'd brush up on your history before making statements like that.

  • beep boop :)

  • Better than Wii graphics

  • 4:26

    I am modern atomic playboy!

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  • Future Crew worked for Remedy Entertainment. Then when Remedy started FutureMark the Future Crew guys got moved there.

  • Didn't some of the guys who made this go on to work at DICE? Remember hearing that somewhere...

  • This was one of the things that convinced me to buy a Gravis soundcard.

  • Anyone that downs this clearly wasn't even a sentient being in 1993. This was groundbreaking.

  • You need to be so über to write this in assembly, these guys are unbelievable. Loved Scream Tracker too

  • This demo is my childhood!!!

  • Gravis Ultrasound rokced those days with this awesome demo

  • power!

  • Glad someone's putting these up though it'd be nice if they weren't cut. Hard to get the hardware to run some of these. XD

  • How could you cut the ending off... the music is awesome ;/

  • This blew up my monitor for my Pentium 120Mhz!

  • Amazing ! <3

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  • My favorite demo ever!

  • future crew...the only guys who could bring up against amiga at this time..part of my youth! loved their demos

  • 1993. Running on a freaking 486DX2-66 (for me, at least). Stock VGA being tweaked to produce way more than 256 colors (in the plasma cloud scene). Real-time ray-tracing. To us, doing this on the technology of the time was like a PC of today rendering Toy Story 3 in real time.

  • @Ensiferlul Dude, this video is from 1993. Also you're a troll.

  • @asciicharismatic The demo is from 1993,the video is from 2006.

  • @asciicharismatic Yeah, in 1993 games like Halo, Doom, and Half-life were coming out. This is some muddy looking shit that belongs on gameboy advance. It's shameful they were proud enough to put their stupid as l33t names in front of the video.

  • @asciicharismatic AND they called it Second Reality. These little kids would shit their pants if they got a chance to play CoD

  • @Ensiferlul

    Halo came out in 2001

    Half life came out in 1997

    As for doom, this is definitely better quality so don't dis you troll.

  • Damn, this is so epic!

  • @TheInformalstyle Dude, the Future Crew predates the Amiga, they've been writing demos since the Commodore 64.

  • 1:39 I renamed the S3M file of this song to song.mod and replaced the song inside the Core Keygen with it. I think it's better than before.

  • This honesty brought tears to my eyes because of the nostalgia. I was a young hacker in those days, pushing the envelope. We defied the hardware vendor. When they told us something was not possible, we figured out a way to do it anyway. Why? Because we could? I was never part of Future Crew. But they were my idols. They were everything I aspired to be.

    Flash forward to 2011. Where is that excitement now? Where is the frontier? Where's the pioneering spirit? It's gone. Forever. :(

  • this seems like fuck all for todays computers, but i remember seeing this renderd on my computer and i was amazed.

  • It is almost 20 years old demo but still one of the BEST.

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  • remember playing the music on my amiga 3000 (barely pushing it with 8v oices)and going crap.. best mod i heard!

  • this is when the pc got jiggy with it

  • מה זה החרא הזה?

  • And this is how powerful low-level hardware access is.

  • i can't even believe this ran on my pc back then.

  • ahhhh the bbs days. i used to show this off like a mofo. i'd come home tripping my ass off and watch this in the living room with my headphones, hoping not to get caught by my parents (even though it was me who installed the sound card, midnight, 15 year old tripping....not good with the parents).

  • Nowadays, it's impossible to find unbloated software as good as this. IMPOSSIBLE.

    People only care about money, and in the rush to get software out the door as quickly as possible, they write code that drags an i7 980x to it's knees.

    And they're all like "Bloat's not a serious issue" and I'm like "YES IT IS. computers are supposed to get faster, not slower."

  • Was this really on a PC? I remember it on an Amiga 1000, but maybe my memory is fooling me.

  • your memory is fooling you. Second Reality is a PC demo :>

  • Man I remember being blown away by this in highschool in the 90's

  • This the holy bible of the Assembly!

  • This is the pinnacle of computers and coding. today we rely to heavily on computers to do it for us. No one really knows what they are doing they just fill in the blanks and do it. I'll take the good old days of DOS anytime.

  • Another way to scroll

  • Brings back good memories... this was the demo that got me to buy a Gravis Ultrasound.

  • Are you in search of reality...?

    Are you in search of Peace....?

    Watch documentary "The Arrivals"

    ...May peace be upon you....

  • Or just the HD video, and i will rework it with the full soundtrack

  • Can we have the FULL video, with the full soundtrack (18mn30) please ? and HD (720p) ? pleaaassseeeee !!!

  • @colonelabruti u can't because in thouse years noone can even imagine that soon we'll be watching video in resolution above 320x240

    This demo is actually use few non-standart resolution to get better perfomance and look at 1993 video cards.

  • I'm a sad, naive, pathetic newbie born in 1995. Could someone explain to me exactly what this is?

  • @SergeantLuke "Second Reality" was a demo by the demoscene group "Future Crew". Basically, it was a push of art and technology at a time when these graphics were really impressive on the PC. Search "Second Reality" on Wikipedia for details.

    I remember downloading this from a BBS on a modem and being blown away. Tons of visual effects and 3D graphics that were all done in *software*, without any 3D hardware at all. And, of course, the amazing music. To this, this soundtrack just blows my mind.

  • @SergeantLuke Another thing to note is that a lot of demoscene musicians and composers went on to contribute music to games such as the first-person shooter "Unreal" and so on. Four members of Future Crew, from what I've read, co-founded Remedy Entertainment (the folks behind Max Payne and Alan Wake), as well. They are respected coders :-)

  • @SergeantLuke Maximizing entertainment value using a a minimum of resources.

  • i have this on my old dos system with a old sound blaster pro in it :)

  • Anyone here know who Velvet Acid Christ is, and do you hear a similarity between this at 3:45 and "Fun With Drugs" at 1:50?

  • is the original file still available somewhere?

  • @THkaas

    Yeah, Check the wikipedia page, there are links at the bottom.

  • @THkaas look at ftp.scene.org - not sure, but i suspect they have it.

  • The demo to end all demos.

  • This really makes you question the direction games have taken. Games now are all about realism, whereas 17 years ago demos such as this legendary one where about bending your perception of reality.

    Modern games have a million times more potential to bend your perception of reality, but they choose not to. Such a shame.

  • Skaven's music is awesome.

  • I hope the Future Crew guys started their own business (or got great jobs) and have been happy and successful, both personally and professionally.

  • @DanMorin007 I don´t know about all of them but atleast some of them started companies like Futuremark (3DMark) and Remedy Entertainment (Death Rally, Max Payne, Alan Wake). Atleast one member of Future Crew became a millionaire by creating a company called Bitboys which specialized in mobile graphics and he later sold his share of the company to Ati.

  • The last time I saw this I was 16.. I'm 31 now and it's still a very enjoyable experience! I remember wishing I could go to assembly '93.

  • when i say "demo" this is what does come in mind through the many years since i saw it for a first time and even now. this demo become part of our past, the spirit of 90

  • Isn't the guys of FC from Finland, because I'm too :)

    Awesome, just awesome! This is, really, one of the best demos the world has ever seen.

  • 17 years after and it makes me still get cold shovers running down my back :-). awesome is not enough, thank you FC for this unique piece of software!

  • EPIC! Still gives me the wobbles, shivers and actual tears in my eyes..

    to all of you out there with similar sentiments: it was great growing up with you all [^v^]

  • EPIC! Still gives me the wobbles, shivers and actual tears in my eyes.. th

  • ... And then the amiga scene bettered it and computing was saved from the MS-DOS drones.

  • Brings back wonderful memories.

  • I was born in 1988 and as a bit of a tech-head this info interested me when I typed Skaven (a WHF army) into google because I was bored. Well I came across a bloke with the online alias of "skaven",

    needless to say I was enticed to take a peek at his page and I saw a mention of a demo of Second reality. Now coming from my generation With the words "second reality" and "demo" I immediately thought it was some Homebrew DIY RPG. Which I would have downloaded it just to pass the time However what I

  • @SolonOO1 Saw beneath was a list of ideal settings and configurations for a MS-Dos Emulator. Now hearing those words again made me almost giddy. the thought of CD-dot-dot-backslash-this that and the other just flooded back all these memories as a kid with my first pc running windows 95 Playing Descent was my first taste of 3D graphics in a game EVER. and I loved the sensation of it. I was 7 years old then so of course thinking that this was some demo of a game build in the same engine that MADE

  • @SolonOO1 my childhood was something that I jumped at the chance of playing but then something below that intrigued me more. If you cant get Second Reality to run on your computer you can buy it as part of this DVD video. as part of the eyecandy set. or something of the sort. Now that got me thinking. well it can't be a game. Which means it must be a video of sorts which lead me to this video.

    May i just say this is 9 and a half minutes of nostalgic perfection. All i could think about was

  • @SolonOO1 being 7 years old again half way through doing my homework, getting stuck and then as I'm working it out in my head and on paper the Windows 95 screen saver pops up and it's this maze thing. the computer navigating through a maze trying to find the smiley face at the end. every time it'd be different. and every time I'd try to work it out before the computer did. and I'd waste a good half hour mesmerized by the way it looked i knew the quality was bad but I couldn't take my eyes off

  • @SolonOO1 This demo was the same way. I just love it and it blew my mind. Even in this age of 1080p/3D super detailed viewing, gaming and listening. you just cant beat the feeling and the sould that goes into these animations. Thank you Stormblast0891 for uploading and sharing this Video of Epic proportions. If you've been reading my posts from the start you'll know I came here because I was bored. Well thanks to some coincidental naming, some fond memories and a little curiosity. I'm not now! 

  • το ειχα πρωτο δει στο 1993 σε η/υ 486/133 με μνημη 16 mb

    σκληρο δισκο 500mb και λειτουργικο windows 3.1

    Mετα απο 17 χρονια μου θυμισε απιστευτες αναμνησεις απλα τελειοοοοο!!!!!

  • the music is as great as the visuals

    any idea where to get a .mod or a s3m of it?

  • @MrDimwit646

    Yes. The song is 2nd_pm.s3m and can be found at modarchive, which is the first reply for google.

    The beginning and the final moments of this demo isn't part of the song but there you go anyway.

  • I guess I'm too young to appreciate this, as I'm not overly impressed... I only ever used computers as old as the ones I'd imagine this ran on in kindergarten. But then again, I guess if you told someone about 5 years younger than myself that the original Voodoo Graphics was absolutely mind-blowing in its time, they wouldn't see the big deal either.

  • @IAMCANADIAN1998 PC's were pretty bad at the time and PC coding wasn't evolved much. So 3d was fantastic back then :)

  • @IAMCANADIAN1998 This was done on machines with no 3-D acceleration WHATSOEVER, and typical clock speeds of 33MHz. Doing these sorts of graphics in real-time on a PC just wasn't done. It's about the equivalent of, say, a game like Gears of War running on a Playstation 1.

  • These guys will make it to heaven :)

  • I must have watched this dozens of times back in the 90s. Still enjoy it today. Still an amazing show of incredible code work.

  • This inspired my career! And a generation

  • Hard to believe that 3D-Programs uses sometimes dozens of Minutes to render one picture, where here is almost everything done in Reatime with a few MHz.

  • Oh my god I remember running this on my 286 back in 1995 when I was in college. Thanks for posting this!

  • Esto fue lo primero que vi en mi primer pc, y cada vez que lo veía flipaba aún más. Es increible, para los 90 era lo más. Qué bueno!!!

  • I was BORN in 1993 and I still think this shit is fucking awesome. I know about the demoscene of the 90's thanks to trackers.

  • i give personal computers a good 30 years before we can see this

  • @SteveCentra - I do hope that was sarcasm.

  • This was absolutely SOUL DESTROYING when i first saw this.. mum and daddy!!!

  • we are in the future ^^

  • Second reality has great music and design, but code is quite mediocre. at that time, my rotozoom was three time faster than second reality's one, and I don't pretend to be the best i386 coder on earth... by far... c64 version is much more impressive.

  • the mother of all demos! all hail!!

  • old times - i love it...

  • Oh i love to think back those great demo ages ..... every month i waited for the new cd come out in the stores where the demos were on. but THIS demo together with PANIC and Crystal Dreams 2 cant leave my memory...

  • Awesome stuff back in the days. :)

    You can still enjoy with DOSBox thankfully.

  • God this ROCKED in AsciiLib, i hope this feature is available forever

  • God i remember this as life changing shit back in the day. From there I and my cousin started making mod files and fell in love with the scene. My cousin later commuted suicide RIP. He truly had the talent. It is sad when someon ends their life with no reason

  • This is truly the one that set the demo standard ! i love it !!

  • Makes one think back with a smile :)

  • I just looked him up in wikipedia, you can search "Purple Motion". Apparently he is becoming a master composer. No wonder really. ;-)

  • Endless Respect to Purple Motion for making this phenomenal music track. He was only 17 when he wrote it. I remember last spring I had the window open, the new season was coming in, and the demo playing at full volume. It is the energy of life.

  • it was writen by skaven and purple motin. fuure crew was after all a crew lol.

  • You're right, Lord! Such music hasn't been released once more since Second Reality. Back in 1993. Jeez, that's such a long time since then...

  • Oh, brings back memories. Bought my GUS especially to enjoy this demo. And hey, where can I find more music like this? Never hear such cool music on the radio. Our own DJ Tiësto and Armin van Buuren do not seem to produce music as good as this, come on guys... ;)

  • The first demo to match the ability of the Commodore Amiga.

    It only took the IBM PC world 8 years to catch up.

  • it fuckin makes my eyes wet. damnit

  • P.S.

    Don't forget to check-out the 8-bit version on the Commodore=64. The graphics aren't as good, but the sound is almost the same quality.

  • youtube framerate is not enough to display this in it's whole extent.. some parts of it just don't display right

  • God, this takes me back a decade and half. Fantastic.

  • One short word - GREAT. I'll always remember this superb demo.

  • For some great Skaven music, check out the game, Bejeweled. Bejeweled 2 is even better. It's basically 3 different songs that fade into each other and loop forever. It's crazy but you never get sick of it!!

    As for this YouTube post and all the comments - AWESOME! It's amazing how some of the people who seemed to not be a part of this back in the day want to be. I never read all comments but I just did. I've known forever about DosBox but this is the first time I've seen this on YouTube.

  • I must add the comment that most of the music in this demo is made by Purple Motion. only the last flying city skene has music made by Skaven.

  • Intro is also by Skaven

  • Ah I was never aware of that. I always thought Bejeweled 2 had a demoscene sound but always thought it a happy coincidence. Awesome.

  • Skaven has done other music for Pop Cap Games. There might be a lot more than I know, but another good track(s) of his is from the game, Big Money.

  • This is the pinnacle of the lost art of demo coding. This is to Directx 10 software coding what shaoling kung-fu is to olympic martial arts. A different league.

    The fact that a bunch of 17 year old kids back in 93 got a 30Mhz 80386 to do this real time, is well...worth of a place on the Voyager space probe disc.

  • @cocobongotm > Absolutely AGREE!!! People don't realise what an achievement this was given the hardware and software available at the time!!

  • @cocobongotm Totally agree!! Amazing Feat!!

  • I remember watching this when I was like 14! I was on Acid which made it 20 times better LOL!

  • what?! this video is cut short, at least a couple minutes missing at the end (credits and such)

  • Far beyond epic. Bricks were shat worldwide.

  • It owns so much.

  • It was the year 1993...

  • EPIC!  :)

  • ah, brings back great memories =)

  • its always a win win situation with amazing demos like this: its either "I can't believe a standard PC DId that in real time" (1993) or "I cant believe a PC could do that in 1993!"

    ultimately amazing

  • It was mind-numbing in 1993. Today it still thrills me.

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  • These people must have known the hardware they were working on down to clock-by-clock timing. Absolutely amazing.

  • I was never part of Future Crew, but I remember back in 1993 when I was 15 years old, taking 386 assembly code and literally taking basic math operations and using tricks to shave 1-3 clocks off of them to speed up code. Makes you a much more efficient programmer today, although if today code was written with that much care, we'd be doing Genome decoding with our Iphones...

  • Well of course. I work in embedded systems. These techniques remain true, since you might only have 25MHz with an entire 2K of RAM and ROM, respectively. Depending on how much of a jerk the design team is. As a collective. And boy howdy can they ever be.

  • @dbfbody I've never been a coder but I appreciate history and understand systems pretty well. Having worked with a lot of programmers you can almost always tell the good ones from the bad ones without having to see their code. If they talk enthusiastically about assembly it means they understand that sloppy code sucks, If they caught the tail end of assembly then their code is decent, if they got a CS degree because computers are where the money's at their code suffers greatly.

  • @dbfbody i think nobody would have the brain capacity to shave the last clocks off from programs running on nowadays' computers as they are so complex and have so many abstraction layers to offer, using of which takes one-hundredth of the coder's time compared to hand-writing assembler code :) i've never programmed to a 386, c64 or any of the old cpu's but just guessing :P

  • @moptim if u speed up something at least of 1 clock, then with all the asbtraction layers it much more in final

  • @dbfbody i'm quite sure that second reality wasn't coded with assembly. c or something. but still this demo is one of the most important ones in the history of demo coding..

  • @dbfbody Efficient I'll give you, but the question is _effective_?

  • @dbfbody We also wouldn't have iphones. Optimization that minuscule is next to worthless these days; the programmer's time is far more costly than the price of a few clock cycles.

  • an outstanding piece of digital art!

  • music 4:58 sounds sooooo better on c64 ver! :)

  • Genesis. Time stood still the first time I saw this. The Pink Floyd of PC Demos.

  • imagine this being the first demo you ever saw... that's how it was for me. can't even describe it.

  • mine too. Was 14 at the moment. Changed my life.

  • @Zaffydoo

    Indeed.

  • @Zaffydoo

    I must totally agree with this.

  • Aaaahhhh!:D its still balsts my mind... after 15+ years......

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  • Back at the time it wasn't that easy to deal with graphic modes, sound or even memory. Also the artist tools were modest. In hindsight, I think the true achievement of this demo is not so much the tricks themselves (which were mindblowing at the time anyway), but the overall presentation, timing and "polisheness". This is a true classic.

  • Black Lotus later did some amazing demos as well. They were like the newer Future Crew

  • Simply jaw droping,its so amazing that graphics like this were around back then!

  • Anfang der 90er Jahre gab es die Homecomputer, die zum Spielen da waren und die Personal-Computer für die Tabellenkalkulationen und die Textverarbeitungen.

    Diese Demo hat zum ersten mal gezeigt, dass PC (-Hardware) für mehr als nur Büroarbeiten gut ist.

    Die Demo war für mich ein Meilenstein...

  • First demo I ever seen. I heard mistakenly that the demo was for a general assembly language competition, and a bunch of smart kids decided to throw this together: a full multimedia demo doing stuff that was just not possible on the PC. I later learned about the history of them and the demoscene, so it became less impressive, but still VERY impressive. Even if flawed slightly, I'll remember my original thoughts forever. Amazing.

  • EPIC!

  • Its beyond epic, this is awe inspiring, jaw dropping, eye popping, motivational, emotional and absolutely fucking unbelievable. My favorite demo of all time, made me want to be a developer! The music synergy is really awesome. Respect out to these guys, this was and is, some of the best code ever run on a PC.

  • it was revealed at some point that the 3d animation at the end they cheated on, which was why the demo came out technically 1 megabyte oversized. but it was pointless to even have stuck it in there, the demo totally ruled without it.

  • legendary. ppl who say this is cheesy have no idea what the demoscene was about --> namely HAVING SICK CODING SKILLZ. lmao.

    VIDEO MODE 13 ftw.. even billagates had no idea how they did this. the bouncing marbles at 6:15 ... that part still leaves me just *speechless* ... that they acheived that on that hardware. my god. future crew = legendary.

  • I started programming mode 13 and mode x after this demo and discovered many of the tricks they pulled off. Lower resolution in X and Y for the plasma cube, but alternated drawing to hide it. No depth sorting for the marbles. Palette changing for the glenz ball bouncing. Simple stuff, but they still did it first, and made things that were impossible possible. It blew me away. Amazing stuff. Best demo ever made, I believe, at least in terms of the hardware they had to work with.

  • Best demo ever. I still get goose bumps in the last part. Amazing presentation, amazing music. Nobody ever laid down the smack like that again since Asm 93. FC 93 forever!!

  • 3:43 that scroller... it always be in my mind...

  • Awesome. A classic. This was the first demo I ever saw on a PC. So nice to see it again. Just goes to show what efficient coding can achieve.

  • cheesy

  • I loved this back in the day, and I still do, this stuff inspired me and my friends to get into video productions!