What demo hooked you?

Not sure what demos got me interested, but I recall seeing some of the early TNT demosets(for example) and really liking what I saw. I've been hooked ever since.
Peo, Panter, Esko, Kren, Humpert, Jurjako,... just beautiful stuff.

What demos or players got you interested in demo-watching?

Like you, I can watch any demo (you know that already heh). Prefer NM and movies.

The first demoset seen by me - yes, that was Final Doom grand master pack, when I read that it was done with -fast parameter, i confused it with -turbo then and thought, cool, fast action :) Back in that time, Aug 1997 IIRC, I had just switched from keyboard to mouse (and that was just because my keyboard was broken and many keys didn't wanna work) and stopped using -turbo. Was I astonished when I realized that the monsters were fast, not the player! And this demopack had quite a few NM demos, too. I remember watching Plutonia MAP09 in NM and just not believing what I saw. Eh, nostalgia :)

Probably 30nm6520 more than any other. I think I had watched some before that, but just to see how a particular map was done (mostly Icarus, Final Doom {incl. the GM pack that Donce mentions} and Eternal), and not viewing demos as an art form in their own right.

It was curiosity about whether Winterfeldt's run had been beaten that brought me back to Doom after a period when I'd been playing other games (mostly HL and UT). Of course, I discovered not only that Panter had beaten it, but that Winterfeldt was believed to have cheated. I soon after found the (old) TAS site. Initially, I was most interested in TAS demos, not really realizing how close to perfection some of the compet-n demos (esp. the single-map demos) also were.

Perhaps the demo that has influenced my preferences most (as both a watcher and more recently a recorder) is pn22-123 (HR22 NM Pacifist TAS by Cameron Prosser). It still seems like pure witchcraft to me.

Nowadays I watch pretty much all demos that are made public, and am slowly working my way through some of the old classics.

Panter's 30nm4949. Good demo to start things off, eh? ;-)

Funny enough, I didn't get it from the COMPET-N, I didn't learn about that until about a year later at least... At that time, or more correctly prior to this (this must've been early 2000 or so) I'd viewed NM as a "joke" category, because I didn't believe anyone was skilled enough to take on most maps on NM.

What I saw completely blew my socks off - and believe me, I was wearing socks. After that, I got into demo making, and came up with my own "categories" without knowing about the official categories. For example, I came up with "running through a map without firing a single shot" which translates (roughly) into pacifist. I called it "Gandhi". :-D

So I played, and recorded, and enjoyed my own recordings and various recordings I came across. Then I found out all about COMPET-N and the SDA (probably followed some link somewhere), and the rest, as they say, is history.

As I recall some of the first demos I ever watched were for Doom, and those were the ones located at Competn's Nostalgia. I saw some of those tricks (such as the infamous 192-unit gap jump at then end of E1M4 for example) and thought they were some of the coolest things I had ever seen. Pretty soon I had downloaded all of them and wanted more.
So then it was on to Doom2. The tricks for Doom2 were just as good as the ones for Doom, if not better and soon I downloaded all of those too.
Soon after I got into watching miscellaneous demos for Doom, Doom2, TNT, and Plutonia, and more recently, Heretic. I haven't stopped since :)

Yonatan Donner's HR demos, he plays in such a way that his levels looks easy... after watching his demos, I tried to replicate his smooth gameplay movement... needless to say, three cyberdemons stepped in front of me. nuts.

strangely, quake done quick.

TBDM2-T and 23UVNET2.

Note that the first demo is v1.666.

Quake done quick. Got in touch with Yonatan after that and was pointed towards the Compet-N. Daniels lv13 speedrun from 1997 (can't recall the time on the fly) made for frantic discussions between me and Henning in the middle of a dull highschool classroom.

The first game demo I watched was Quake done quick, I didn't have internet at home then and relied on PCZone for news. It certainly changed my view of my own skills.

I didn't really notice Doom demo's until 10sectors was released.

A couple of demopacks, mostly the first HR pack.

I think the ones that really got me interested in demos were the 89 some demo pack made for Eternal Doom, and the GM style Icarus runs by George Bell. They opened up a whole new world in this game for me. Nothing has been the same since.

Searcher said:

GM style Icarus runs by George Bell

Just a tiny correction: the Icarus GM collection was by Roger Moraga and Mike Reid. George Bell did the UV Max collection.

For some reason I've been rewatching quite a few of those lately, together with Andy Olivera's more recent UV Max TAS set. BTW, it took me a while to find a way to watch Andy's demos that play back with Boom 2.02 (can't get it work in XP) but not Doom2.exe. PrBoom 2.02 does the trick, and works fine in Windows XP.

Oh, and I forgot to mention 30hr2843, which I must have watched rather a lot of times.

Grazza's santa demos! rofl

Those aren't bad at all, but if they got you hooked, then wouldn't you be disappointed to watch more "normal" demos? ;-)

Grazza said:

Just a tiny correction: the Icarus GM collection was by Roger Moraga and Mike Reid. George Bell did the UV Max collection.

For some reason I've been rewatching quite a few of those lately, together with Andy Olivera's more recent UV Max TAS set. BTW, it took me a while to find a way to watch Andy's demos that play back with Boom 2.02 (can't get it work in XP) but not Doom2.exe. PrBoom 2.02 does the trick, and works fine in Windows XP.

Oh, and I forgot to mention 30hr2843, which I must have watched rather a lot of times.

yea all those.

I thought that the shell for the Eternal maps and demo sets were so cool I converted that shell to be used for Icarus too. I still use it on my win 98 system. Plays maps and demos just great. It does not -timedemo however. Simple command line for that.

I am pretty backed up on my demos and demo watching of late. Just to much real life and mapping in the way.

A few weeks ago I had a quiet night and watched that 30hr2843 at least 6 times. There are so many things a guy can learn from watching demos it is just amazing.

Mr. Woot said:

Grazza's santa demos! rofl

What, are you serious? They were fun, but I didn't expect that reaction. That in itself makes the effort worthwhile.

If it was the weirdness of them that you liked, then there are plenty demos in the archives that are weird in all sorts of ways.

Grazza said:
That in itself makes the effort worthwhile.

Yeah, that's how it is.. As long as one guy (or girl) watches your demo - and doesn't think it was a complete waste of time - then it was worth recording it.

Well, it's enough that you like it yourself really, but someone else also liking it is doubly good.

I didn't exclude the possibility of yourself being that guy (or girl). ;-D

It was the demopack of Plutonia max pack done by Anders, Henning, Rudy, Hegyi, and some others. I don't remember the date of the demopack, but it was all 32 maps. I think it was in under 2 hours as well. It had "COMPET-N" somewhere in the text file, and I found a URL to the page somewhere, and then I found it, and was amazed at what I saw...and well...then I started recording...and that's that ^_^

It was the Final Doom Nightmare and GM (uv -fast) packs sometime in 1997 by I forget who. The names included at least Peo Sjoblom and Istvan Pataki, I do believe. I specifically remember how easy the guy (who was it?) made pf07 look, and trying to replicate it without success. They had beaten 48 of the 64 levels on nightmare. I was impressed. One of the unconquered ones was ev06, one of my very favorites in TNT (I hadn't beaten plutonia yet at that point), so I went for it. It was at least a year later, in late 1998, that I actually pulled it off. Another year later I ran into #nightmare on ircnet, and those guys said no one gives a shit about TNT. Another year later I discovered that some people actually did give a shit about TNT, at least to the point where demos of it were being accepted to c-n, so I uploaded.

D2DQ, I think. I later discovered the Compet-N and the TAS page. TAS and Sedlo or AdamH demos are the best (there's usually little difference =)

HR-UV Max demo pack

The very 1st demos I watched were from the old compet-n archive on cdrom.com . Although this archive was not updated anynore for ages, I got really impressed by Demonlord, Kai, Anthe, Peo and Istvan (and prolly a couple others).
At that time I really got hooked by the nightmare demos, I really could not believe this skill was playable at all.

The speed demos and the tricks amazed me greatly too...

I decided to switch to mouse, practice it and try to record demos (I didnt know the archive was dead). I uploaded some TNT crap (map07 and map31 i think) and the cdrom maintainer sent em to Adam that mailed me back telling that my demos were slower than the current records and he gave me new url for Compet-N. (adam_h if ur reading these lines, if you have these demos I'd love to see em again)

Then I got hooked, played a bit for Compet-N. But soon PublicDang popped up so I played a whole lot there as well as some Compet-N :)

I like demos for gigantic levels. You know, those that last for 20 minutes at full speed. Vrack2 comes to mind.

/me waits for AdamH to redo his max run for the finished version of Vrack 3

opulent, you got a link to that "epic struggle" kren run on doom2 to level 15, i'm curious about its epicisity

vrack3 is a good map, but vrack2 is a thousand times better gameplay wise, even though vrack3 looks more detailed than the 2nd opus (I look more on gameplay than on design).

cycloid said:

opulent, you got a link to that "epic struggle" kren run on doom2 to level 15, i'm curious about its epicisity

ftp://3darchives.in-span.net/pub/idgames/lmps/dht-exams/dht5/titles/d2s/d2s-aak.zip
there are several others though.