Alternative Party 2003

The fluffiest ever

Folio's Keijo aiming with a raygun

The previous party was a success and we saw great potential in these larger parties organised in Gloria. Having learned from what we had done, we wanted to improve and we had also got some new contacts.

Jeff Minter speaking to the audience - "Llamasoft is back!"

Alternative Party 2003 was held at Kulttuuriareena Gloria, Helsinki, on 10-12 January 2003. The legendary game designer Jeff Minter was our special guest this year and he helped to make this party perhaps the best Alternative Party ever. Also Andrew Whittaker and Björn Lynne had promised to come but for personal reasons they were unfortunately unable to do se.

Jeff Minter was a wonderful person and was with us for the whole length of the party, watching demos, playing games and feeling happy with the hacker atmosphere that he had thought didn't exist anymore.

Disqualified or otherwise

BARBiTORiC by Defence Force, running on the Oric computer!

Our great invention for this party was the non-/disqualified demo competition. You could only take part with a demo that had not been qualified for another party. We saw many classics and the winner was ISO's Vati, not qualified at Juhla IV. The competition was a total success.

Adding to the atmosphere, we had interesting artists to perform at two stages. Folio and Grey Park offered some relaxed (and strange) electronic music while MRHC and dA JoRMaS were on the harder side.

With tAAt ry helping with the competitions, we had two real-time graphics competitions. One with the time limit being 30 seconds, the other had a limit of 30 minutes. Other competitions to note were the black and white video competition (won by a fictious invitation to Alternative Party XXXX!) and of course the demo competition which had 23 entries.

The demo competition was won by Robotic Warrior, a Vic-20 demo by PWP. The demo later was nominated for the Scene.org for best 4 kB intro. This legendary demo featured a singing voice synthesizer! Also the second and third places are worth a mention: Defence Force's BARBiTORiC on Oric and Sleber Eid's The Director - a Perl demo with text mode effects - received many votes.