A flying basset hound may seem more likely to form the basis of a viral YouTube clip to amuse the cubicle-bound than to set message boards buzzing. Yet, when Linger In Shadows was unveiled at the demoscene festival Breakpoint08 in Germany, the internet leapt up to speculate, with sites suggesting the footage was everything from a leaked tech display to the first signs of the new Team Ico game.

Telling the strange, half-story of a rooftop encounter between a cat, a dog, a Sentinel-like robot and a sinister black cloud, Linger is, in fact, the work of Plastic, a Polish demogroup, and rather than a teaser it appears to be something stranger – a demoscene effort funded by a videogame corporation.

The demoscene began in the mid-’80s in the form of cracktros (graphical clips hackers put at the start of pirated software) before evolving into more elaborate pieces. The ethos was to push hardware to its limits, with many coders getting shockingly good results from C64s and Amigas.

“Nowadays the challenge has changed a bit: there’s no single platform that can be pushed to the max any more,” Felix Bohmann, a Breakpoint organizer, explains. “I guess you could say that it’s evolved into a nice mix of technology and art. Some of the original demosceners are still around, and there’s still stuff being produced on old-school platforms, but the main development is happening on PC, with lots of new, younger sceners involved.”



The demoscene and the videogame industry have long been intertwined – besides using the same technology and skills, many European developers started out making demos before they made games. Linger is not its first brush with consoles, either: the original Xbox was popular thanks to its compromised security, and PSP, longtime homebrew darling, has hosted work such as Suicide Barbie, by The Black Lotus. But what makes Plastic’s demo so different is that this time the platform-holder was on board from the start.

“I think that Sony wanted a real demoscene demo, not altered in any way,” says Plastic’s lead designer and ‘tyrant’, Michal Staniszewski, whose team was approached directly by Sony’s Santa Monica Studio several years ago. Staniszewski already seems weary of answering questions pertaining to the future of Linger, primarily as many news sites assume that it’s merely the first glimpse of a bigger project rather than a work in its own right. That doesn’t mean he’s not willing to tease a little about the demo’s future himself.

“What you’ve seen so far is of course not everything. The demo is interactive and the gameplay you’ll encounter will be different from any other games.” A PlayStation Network release for the code is rumored to be slated for later this year.

Community responses on boards like Pouet.net are mixed so far, with some worrying that an influx of corporate money could damage the scene. “I think Linger was generally well received, but there was lots of confusion about how or why it came to be,” says Bohmann. And if the demo allows Sony to showcase its console’s power and establish a kind of underground credibility at the same time, Bohmann feels the company may be missing the point if it treats the demoscene as merely another form of PR.



“Personally, I think Sony somewhat got the idea of the demoscene wrong. An ‘invite only’ demoscene on a closed platform with NDAs is not really going to happen. In general, consoles have always been different: in reality, not too much is happening on the current generation.” And asked whether Microsoft’s XNA tools may be able to court demosceners more successfully than Sony, Bohmann is equally skeptical. “Demosceners usually don’t like managed code, since it’s about getting the most out of any given hardware. XNA is a real downer for demosceners I’ve spoken to.”

Even so, and regardless of what eventually happens with Linger (Sony trademarked the name in November 2007, so further developments are not impossible), Sony is already working with other demoscene groups to produce more of the same.

“There is real money involved, which makes it even more commercial,” sighs Bohmann. Ironically for Sony, the key to getting the real scene going may be to hand over the control rather than the cash.

“In my personal opinion,” says Bohmann, “the PS3 could very well become a pretty viable demo platform, since it has lots of processing power and interesting hardware. It could very well be the next Amiga if they decide to allow us demosceners to really use it. But until they actually give us access to the GPU, not too much will happen on PS3. If they want the demoscene for real, they should just let us use the full machine, then they don’t even need to pay for demos.”

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