retroperspective of ROM by mop/Alcatraz
It all started with one unknown man from Malta. That was the seed. Now we need soil and a pot. And water.
The Rewarding Orthorgraphical Masterpiece… what a journey it was, from the very first days of 1994 until the 3w online incarnation that went offline during the end of the century. ROM started to breathe in a time when Commodore went bust and diskmags were on the decline. The people behind ROM wanted to actively show support to the Amiga demoscene and give a sense of importance to the active scener by rewarding good demo productions with written features.
Few people that are still around in today’s scene know this, but the ROM concept started way back in 1993. The McDisk project had just ended and Disney of Alcatraz wanted to build a new diskmag. I did not have any interest in doing another clone of Zine or Raw. Over the weeks that followed, the idea of publishing article work for the more mature 25-30 year old sceners grew on me. And whilst we were at it, we could update the graphical format and include more clip art. Disney had other plans though, and the first and only issue of Compass was the result. It was only 1% ROM, and that didn’t arouse my interest enough to do a second issue. Eventually, I started discussions with my closest contacts at the time to make the ROM project a reality. Thanks to some great communication with PowerSwap and Touchstone, ROM became reality through EssEncE, but at one point in time it almost ended up as an AXIS project during the days when TeeVaan was still involved in the group. According to the demoscene book FREAX, there were heated debates in various scene circles and forums on this move for many months! I did not hear any commotion here in Malta, but then the demoscene was always taken more seriously all over the rest of Europe!
“I did not have any interest in doing another clone of Zine or Raw“
The first issue was curiously released as a trackloaded magazine, and according to FREAX the cultured language and new scene vocabulary we tried to instil in ROM affected scene terminology from that point onwards to this date. Today you hear the news that the demoscene is being considered as an intangible cultural heritage by Unesco, so it’s good that they can look up ROM and not all the fucks and swear words in Cracker Journal! Indeed ROM was not meant for school kids. Out were the pseudo cool words borrowed from the cracking scene. Many “kool dudez” did not like that and complained that ROM was difficult to read and featured long articles. According to FREAX, this was also an era where some editors used their magazines to discredit groups or persons they didn’t like. Yes, this happened a lot, and when ROM shot to the number 1 in the charts of the day, this transpired all the time! There were even diskmags built just for the job of mocking ROM! Yet the concept of someone from an exotic island such as Malta, making a chart-topping demoscene production was wild and dreamy! What is this Malta? Up to this day, many sceners would have never heard of Malta if it wasn’t for ROM and if you look closely at some Facebook posts there are still those who think that I’m the only man living on this island!
ROM also tried to approach the demoscene from a social point of view. While other diskmags wrote on naughty scoops and rumours, ROM explored the premise of the phenomenon of the scene, trying to uncover temporary trends interspersed with humouristic sections from prolific writers like Macno, Rokdazone, Ripper, Posdnuos and Parsec. These articles nitpicked on what was going on in the demoscene at the time and gave them a scifi and somehow satirical spin. Sometimes they read too realistic and you would think that the “Masters of the Scene” were a real cabal and were manipulating everything and everyone! These are timeless articles and some of my favourites ever published in ROM. We also had the first real sceness, Christine De La Queen, who brought a feminine point of view to the diskmag world. She was no Patsy! There were hundreds of other scene characters that also worked on ROM, but I’m an old man of almost 50 now, and names have to be looked up. Better, just load up a ROM issue and check out the names for yourself! These days, Magic of Nah Kolor is my only guilty pleasure from yesteryear’s diskmag scene. He’s always lurking around a corner as if trying to jump on you and somehow convince you to be part of some project! Some months ago I even had a quick chat with Lord Helmet! What a character!
ROM also streamlined the “look” department of the diskmags of the day. The influence of ROM was so massive that soon after, every diskmag looked very similar… not just on Amiga but also on PC!
“We also had the first real sceness, Christine De La Queen,
who brought a feminine point of view to the diskmag world“
ROM 9 was the last disk-based issue ever released. It had more than 800K of text contributions. I clearly remember a whole summer of celebrations after that! In mid-1997 we started a live www scene magazine called 3w:ROM with all graphics designed by Diesel8. We started publishing news articles and party reports as they happened. We also topped the online content by putting a selection of articles from past ROM issues every week. Up to that time, other diskmags just dumped all the text of their disk-based issues online as is. It was a gargantuan effort and it was eating up a lot of time to work on 3w:ROM on a daily basis. We planned on collecting the best texts from 3w:ROM twice a year and make a disk-based ROM issue out of it, but it never happened. 3w:ROM kept going steady until the end of 1998, and then slowly faded away in 1999. At that point in time, I started my own software business as the year 2000 bug provided a lot of work. Amiga demoscene releases were getting fewer by the month, and the bigger demos were 68060 based, and few sceners had that sort of setup. I did not. It had come to a point where to watch Amiga demos, you had to visit a demoscene party! As more and more sceners drifted away from the Amiga, so did I. EssEncE closed down in summer 1998 and that brought a layer of gloom. I remember pasting all the source code that I had written throughout the years and never released, and doing an anniversary intro for my first demo group. I was clutching at straws. In 2000 I packed away my A500 and A1200.
But that’s not the end! Three years ago I unpacked my old Amigas. It’s a different world now. FPGA Amigas are the standard of the day, sceners had kids who are now sceners themselves and Amiga demos are cross assembled on PC! Not even 2001 A Space Odyssey could predict that! Unfortunately, my hard drive is gone (just for now!), but other interesting Amiga projects are in the works…
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