The history of KMAC by Odbyt Design
It’s a dark and grim late evening in 1997 in Poland when I receive a phone call from a Freezers’ swapper: Mr Uhu. He found out that there is a swapper living nearby and decided to call me.
That same evening, I was at his place, meeting other demosceners from our home town. We instantly become friends and soon Uhu introduces me to a crazy demo group: Odbyt Design (Anus Design), that was secretly run by people from Freezers and Shadows under bizarrely sounded nicknames. This was the beginning of my adventure with the demoscene.
The idea to create Amiga disk-mag has been pestering us (Shogoth and Uhu) since we’ve met. Uhu has already been published in demoscene zines and I’ve had experience in writing and publishing my own paper zines, and once I’ve coded a very primitive disk-mag in Amos, but it took us quite a lot of time and alcohol to finally turn this into reality.
We lived very close to each other which was cool because we could easily skip school and join forces in creating crazy demos. Did I mention that alcohol was involved? Yes? Ok, I can continue then.
One day we decided on the spur to make the most absurd crazy mag in history, and we would publish content too insane for any other Amiga zine. We’ve called KMAC (Catholic Magazine of Anonymous Drunkards). I started coding it in Amos but at some point, my friend Verbes came to the rescue. He was learning Assembler and he thought this is going to be a great coding exercise for him. And for us… the opportunity to publish texts that didn’t really fit classic scene-centred zines. So it was made by a scene for the scene but not about the scene.
I think it was around mid 1998 when we released the first issue. Surprisingly the reception was quite good, we even managed to get a warm review in the biggest Polish magazine ‘Amiga’. It was a great feeling even when they misspelt my handle and printed Szogun instead Shogoth.
Publishing Kmac was an amazing and funny experience. Chasing deadlines, making the graphics was surprisingly cool, but the writing was definitely one of the best experiences in my life. We gathered at Uhu’s place, we drank cheap wine and we came out with absolutely outrageous ideas like f.i. describing experiences of making a poo in real time, one person was evacuating and sharing experiences with another who was writing these words of wisdom on Amiga 1200. I still cannot forget the animated navigation with sheep which I made for issue 4 where those lovely animals were smoking, drinking, copulating and masturbating and all in 256 AGA colours.
We managed to release 5 issues before I switched to PC and our coder left town, but KMAC was still released as a paper zine. Everything has been handmade, cut out from printouts of the most funny short texts from the coded version, plus some new stuff like our obscene (for some) drawings, we also have had a graphic novel in episodes on the last page! The zine was printed on both sides of A4 sheets, photocopied and spread across Poland and it was aimed for the non-scene audience. We still have a master copy and… unreleased issue 6 with the final episode of comics. In 2003 this form also died out and KMAC was officially dead.
Fifteen years later and both of us are over 40s and overweight, we cannot smoke because of the active space of our lungs shrunk to the size of a box of matches and drinking alcohol causes strange stinging pains under the ribcage, but after all those years we’ve discovered that we are mature enough to accept our past in full and face ODBYT (anus) again. So we’ve released the new issue of KMAC in December 2018 full of absolutely brain-damaging pieces of literacy that will definitely impact on culture and hopefully will spin the followers. And there’s more coming before Christmas!
You can download our zine at: http://odbyt.design/index.html#kmac [PL]
If you want to know about the crazy history of a twisted like hell group please check the documentary on YT: Odbyt Design The Movie [PL/EN]
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