text by Ghandy of Nukleus, title pictures by Prowler, Oepir Risti panels by Electron.
The first issue of the Amiga Diskmag Oepir Risti (OR) was published in June 1994, 31 years ago. This magazine was unlike anything else around at that time. It’s possible that this has continued right up to the present day. That’s why it’s worth remembering it even now.
Swedish Rolf Henrik Nilsson, better known as Puh of Agony who is the former magazine’s editor-in-chief, preferred to follow his own path rather than copying what others had done. Oepir Risti also never bothered with unfounded rumours or reporting about any scandals. With the exception of the final issue of Abnormalia, Puh was not featured in any of the major diskmags. But he also made guest appearances in Balance’s Magbox and other smaller disk magazines such as Edge’s Voices or Rage’s Blaskan.
These days, Puh only observes the scene from time to time and has not been active for a long time. If you would like to read an interview with him from some years ago, I would recommend this one, which is also available online.
Puh – a handle that was short and straightforward to type
Ghandy: Who or what is a Puh? Ist it something like phew or Ugh? Could you please introduce yourself to our dear readers?
Puh: “Puh” comes from the Swedish name of Winnie-the-Pooh, “Nalle Puh”. I believe I wanted a handle that was short and straightforward to type, and Puh sprang to mind. And indeed, Puh it was.
Ghandy: Henrik, you did Oepir Risti from 1993 to 1998. How did you come to start a disk magazine yourself? And how did you get in touch with the people who helped you? Prowler seems to have played an important role, or? Who else did?
Puh: Over time I was developing an interest in reading and, particularly, writing. I had no cultural aspirations, and I did not want to write the kind of stuff that was in vogue at the time – pompous, pretentious interpretations of love and societal injustice. I was thinking more like shark attacks, alien life, and supernatural beings. But I didn’t want to write just for writing’s sake – I wanted an audience, too. And not necessarily a Swedish one. For some time, I wrestled with how to accomplish that, because this was the time before www.
At some point I stumbled on a diskmag – Lobster Pot, if I remember correctly – and it dawned on me that I could use a similar format to publish my short stories. It would effectively be like publishing a book, albeit a digital one. I would get an international, or at least European, audience!
The high school class next door offered additional talent …
As luck would have it, my high school class offered not one but two very skilled sceners: S.Duvan and e- (Electron). Producing the code and the graphics for such a short story collection was a walk in the park for them, skilled and talented as they were. They were furthermore well connected and were able to obtain permission to use a killer tune by Jogeir Liljedahl for use as background music. At some point along this trajectory, we presumably noticed that putting out a release with a mere five or six story stories was a bit underwhelming. We toyed with the idea of including additional material, and before we knew it, OR was born. The high school class next door offered additional talent in the form of Prowler, who soon joined the effort.
I should say that by now, my memory of this period of my life is a bit sketchy. This was more than 30 years ago, after all. But while the passage of time comes with significant drawbacks, it does carry some advantages too. One of them is that I tend to remember the positive at the expense of the negative. That is how I remember the OR times these days: an absurd, unbridled explosion of fun, creativity, literary ambition, and artistic expression.
And that’s also how I’d like to continue remembering it. If I were to revisit the OR issues, I’m pretty sure I would find that my contributions have not stood the test of time. Maybe they never did. Better not go there, right. We were young, we were strong, and there just was no stopping us. That’s how I’m going to remember it.
While old disk magazines like RAW or Seenpoint focused on a sort of scandal journalism, you went a completely different way. What rules did you use to create Oepir Risti? What was YOUR idea of a diskmag? What should it look like? Looking back, what would you say: Did you come close? I always found it enviable that you didn’t pay attention to the existing rules of the scene. You’ve always done your own thing. Don’t you give a fuck what the people thought? Or are you just as stubborn as me? 🙂
“Only a mother could love it, and we did.”
Ha, yes, we did take that artistic license for a ride, didn’t we. While all of us were consumers and fans of scene material, I don’t think anyone of us paid much attention to the minutiae of scene life. Who was kicked out from what group, who were topping the BBS charts, who’s was in war with whom, I think we viewed much of that as a tempest in a teapot. The content of OR was in large measure left to the vagaries of chance. I recall that we published a heady mixture of school projects, bespoke articles on less common topics (including fish species!), music, untypical scene material, and what essentially amounted to written consciousness streams. A non-trivial proportion of it was in Swedish. The end product must have come across as incoherent and utterly absurd, particularly to our international audience. Only a mother could love it, and we did.
I recall that we laid great store on language, or at least we tried to. You will recall that many diskmags of the day more or less competed to sport the worst, slang-rich, profane language. Well, we would have none of that. A reasonable linguistic standard was our primary arbiter of what we published in the end. More or less all topics were welcome. I vaguely recall rejecting some few overly traditional scene-related “newz” articles plus one or two articles whose language was beyond rescue.
We were certainly interested to hear about what other people had to say about OR, and I recall reading the first review of OR#1 that came out. We were expecting to have it from both barrels, but instead the review was mixed, bordering on the positive. I think all reviews praised the underlying coding, music, and graphics whereas they were more reserved towards the actual articles. We were thrilled. Some reviews were pitch black, and we loved it. Changing the way we did OR as a result of reviews or street opinion was never on the table. OR was always a take-it-or-leave-it kind of endeavour.
Which disk mags did you like to read back then, which maybe even served as an example for you? Which ones did you dislike if not hate and why?
I recall that there were a number of diskmags that I liked and whose every issue I read, although their names escape me these days. Some editors were really good, I remember, and put out stuff with meaning and purpose beyond the scene. I sometimes catch myself wondering what became of them.
The reasons for the end of Oepir Risti.: “Life is what happened.”
Why did you leave the Amiga scene at the end of the 90s? The collapsing hardware market? The death of many established groups or was it more due to your studies which took up more and more of your attention?
Life. Life is what happened and what put an end to OR. We sustained operations a year or two after high school, but other things pretty soon came in between, slowly grinding operations to a halt. Military service, full time studies, private commitments, a summer job – all that. If I remember correctly, what turned out to be the final issue of OR was more emaciated than normal. We didn’t plan for it to be the final issue. OR simply ebbed out.
Over time it became clear that there would be no more issues. We were done with OR, and we committed to other, non-scene things instead. The Amiga scene was in a declining state at the time, perhaps as a consequence of the collapsing hardware market as you mention, and somehow the magic was largely gone, for me at least. I knew very well that I would never again possess what I was about to part with. I recall feeling some sort of vague pride at what we had accomplished with OR during those vibrant, youthful years. But it was time for other things.
“I don’t regret my career choice.”
You were already studying biology when we met at The Party in the mid-90s. Did journalism never appeal to you as a career?
The Party! Oh brother, what I wouldn’t do to relive select copy parties from the past. But time is relentlessly unidirectional, isn’t it. In answer to your question, yes, back then I considered both journalism and photography as future careers. I lacked the school grades for the former and the talent for the latter, so it was quite clear that these esteemed pursuits would have to make do without me.
Another longstanding fascination rested with biology. I more or less lacked the grades for that too, but I was admitted as the last person in the class of 96. In hindsight I don’t regret my career choice. It’s heavy on writing, and I get to take some photos too every now and then. I love it.
You are now a university researcher, husband and father of three children. Have you ever told them how great the Amiga from Commodore used to be? Or don’t they know about them?
Oh, I tried all right. I started when they were tiny and showed them demos. But they always preferred modern PC demos over legacy C64 and Amiga demos. And as they grew older, they always preferred PC games over PC demos. In the end there was no room left for demos. It’s all games now, I’m afraid. I was never much for gaming myself, although at some point I’ll make another attempt at wrapping up H.E.R.O. on some C64 simulator.
Limitation makes masters
You still occasionally watch the demos that show up at the big parties. Probably as YouTube videos, right? Which demos do you remember that you particularly liked?
That’s correct – I try to watch the top 3 entries of most competition classes after at least the largest parties each year. Revision comes to mind. But for some reason, the best C64 releases tend to stem from tiny, more or less local parties. Memento mori by Genesis Project left a lasting impression on me, for instance. I tend to prefer C64 demos and other competition classes with strict limitations, notably 4k and 64k compos. Limitation makes masters, right.
“I’m grateful that I was imbued with C64 and Amiga music from an early age.”
Have you been able to use any of the skills you’ve learned in the scene in your later professional life? Maybe coordinating a team for a specific project, your interpersonal skills, etc?
If you had asked me back then, I would probably not have come up with much sensible to say. Some contours, perhaps, but not the overall picture. My vantage point today – 30 years later – is much improved, so here comes a belated answer.
I’d like to think that my scene days left an indelible impression on me. For one, I’m grateful that I was imbued with C64 and Amiga music from an early age. How can you not love those unique soundscapes, right. If I hadn’t been exposed to this type of music early on, I’d probably listen to and like whatever everyone else in society listens to and likes – unbearable, predictable radio-friendly rubbish. What a horrible thought. But that was not to be my destiny – thank you, scene, for that.
I learned to look on authority and authorities with some healthy degree of suspicion. For instance, the so-called IT experts in society, what do they really know about computers compared to some of the people in the scene? Scene life also made it patently clear that in some situations, there are more powerful motivational factors than money. It’s impressive there are people who are willing to go to hell and back to meet the deadline for a demo compo, knowing full well that the reward will be primarily or even exclusively symbolic, or bestowed upon them only in the next life. I suppose I miss that in society today, where everything needs to translate into green figures immediately.
The use of handles meant that most of the time, you had no idea who the person behind the work was. Only when you met them in person did you learn who was behind the handle. On several occasions I met master composers, graphics artists, and programmers that I think I had known and admired only by handle – and some of them certainly did not look like much. Never in a million years would I have guessed that the façade in front of me hid all that talent, skill, intelligence, and motivation. Judging a book by its cover just isn’t a very productive thing to do. That’s easier said than done, even today, but I’m grateful that my scene years started me on that journey.
Finally, my OR association meant a lot of writing. I didn’t think of it as “training to write”, just as writing and editing that I had to do. The language, most of the time, was English. So without thinking about it, I ended up accumulating non-trivial training hours. Only much later, when at the university, did I start to notice that the writing that came so easy to me, well, was more hard-fought for others. In those pre-www days, my fellow students had not been exposed to English to the extent that I had been, and they had never had to write debate articles, reply to other articles – or, for that matter, write articles on basking sharks. I’m thinking that my OR time facilitated my future writing – indeed, paved the way for my future career – to no small degree. This makes it a bit depressing to hear how little our young read and write today, and how good they are becoming at letting AI do their writing for them. They will not have what I had. Doors that were open to me will remain closed to them. By no stretch of imagination can I find anything good to say about this development.
“Having a UNESCO flag onboard cannot hurt (…)”
The demo scene is now a UNESCO-protected and financially supported cultural asset in some EU countries. Do you think this helps to keep the memory of the scene alive? If most of the people who were active back then are no longer alive in 20 or 30 years, will there still be a demo scene? Or will it fade out with their death? What do you think?
I’d like to think of the demo scene as a force of nature. Promoting it won’t change it. Neither will trying to suppress or fight it. It simply is and will continue to be. I anticipate that it will keep attracting young talents for all time to come. Having a UNESCO flag onboard cannot hurt, and I’m all for it. I was never very interested in the forms of artistic expression that we usually brand as culture, so I greet this widening of the term to encompass scene work with open arms. There are many things that the scene can offer the world that culture sensu stricto simply could never offer me – the wild but overlooked talent, the jaw-dropping surprises, the fierce competition, the unbridled creativity, the absurdity, the sheer wrath. For me, the scene was always the place where new colours were born.
Stay open-minded. I never want to be any older than I am right now.
And what will you do in 20 or 30 years?
Staying young while growing old is the ultimate challenge, isn’t it. The failure rate borders on one hundred percent. But it isn’t exactly one hundred percent. Many years ago, I had the pleasure of spending non-trivial time with the grandfather of Estonian mycology.
He was certainly old in terms of years. But, man, what a vigorous mind he had. He started doing DNA sequencing for mycological pursuits when, well, he must have been over 80. Started writing bash scripts at the tender age of something like 82. An interest in web servers and CGI scripts – 83.
That’s what I’m going for, I promised myself right there and then. The years may come and go as they please, but I will never be older than I am now. And that’s still the plan.
Thanks a lot for your replies!
In the last interview with him, which appeared around 25 years ago, he wished to meet a nice young woman who was deaf so that he could continue composing SID melodies. Well, who knows if she can hear well. But his children can certainly hear what his SID tunes sound like.
He probably spends more time playing with his children now than with the lizard he wanted to buy to keep him company as he got older. 😉
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