[The History of the Future Crew]

1986-1987

Future Crew (FC) was founded in the year 1986 on the C-64. And only one
member has been in the group for the whole time - Psi. FC did two demos on the
C-64 before moving into the PC scene in the year 1988.


1988

FC's first PC demo was a EGA sinus-scroller called GR8. At that time the
members were HAL, JPM, SS (Psi) and SIDDER. DARK POWER was FC's BBS.


1989

Then there came YO! which was quite popular for a while. It used one of the
VGA's textmodes and included 'nice' PC-speaker music. It had many scrollers, a
sinusing YO!-logo, a little bouncing ball and a 2D-starfield. At this time ICE joined
and so FC had another BBS - SILICON DRAGON.


1990

In the year 1990 there was only one demo release from us, the Slideshow I. It was
the first PC demo which included 4 voice SoundBlaster music. It didn't include any
other special code for it was a VGA picture slideshow. And at this time there were
a lot of members in FC: Psi, ICE, HAL, JPM, SID, BIG, DAC, MAC and SEBU.
Only shortly after Slideshow I, Psi released his Scream Tracker 2.0 - a 4 voice
music editing program inspired by the Amiga SoundTracker. ST 2.0 was a real success.


1991

In summer 1991, FC released a demo called Mental Surgery. It had a big scroller
on the top of the screen, 3D-starfield, a nice writer, music scopes and of course 4
voice SoundBlaster music. This was the last FC demo that worked on a 286
machine. At this time the members were: Psi, ICE, Dr.Venkman and Purple
Motion. Little after this I (GORE) joined FC and ICE lost the interest to demos
and left FC along with his BBS.


1992

FC lived quietly for about half a year. But when the year 1992 came Trug, Pixel,
Skaven and Abyss joined FC. And when Abyss joined, FC had a BBS again,
called StarPort. In the beginning of 1992 FC had the following members:

Psi - Code
Trug - Code
GORE - Organizing
Pixel - GFX
Abyss - BBS Support
Skaven - Music & GFX
Purple Motion - Music

It was at this time that we had begun making UNREAL. Our first plan was to
release it at MEGA-Leif Convention - An Atari ST/PC party held in Uppsala,
Sweden. But about a month before MEGA-Leif, MeeGosh/Rebels (Amiga) called
GORE and told us about ASSEMBLY'92. He thought that it would be cool to
have also the PC scene there. So, he asked us to do an invitation intro for the PC
scene about this mega-event. We agreed and so, UNREAL was put to rest as Psi
got the idea of making something different - the Fishtro. It took us about two
weeks to create Fishtro from nothing, but when we went to MEGA-Leif
Convention, we still had a few little bugs in it and therefore we couldn't release it
until a week after MEGA-Leif. After we came back from MEGA-Leif, we started
on making Unreal again in order to get it finished for Assembly'92.

Assembly'92 was held in July, we entered our demo Unreal to the PC demo
competition and won it. Around 1000 people attended this party, which wasn't so
bad as it was being held for the first time. The total amount of PC demo scene
people was 300. After this we were contacted by the organizers of a big
Amiga/C64/PC party, called The Party 1992. They asked us to organize the PC
demo compo there and to make an Invitation Intro for PCs.

The Party 1992 Invitation Intro was mostly coded by Psi and WildFire. Wildfire
was our new coder who joined us in autumn 1992. He had before been active on
the Atari ST scene.

Then it was the time for another big demo. The making of Panic began. It was the
normal process of making demos with blood and sweat and annoying deadlines.
Wildfire was the one to assemble the demo together, but lots of code was also
done by Psi and Trug.

Then it was the time for The Party 1992. As we thought that it would be really nice
to get as many people as possible to The Party as cheaply as possible, we decided
to organize a bustrip there with the Amiga people. So we managed to load two
buses full of computer freaks and start our trip to The Party. At that time The Party
1992 was the biggest demo party ever. There were about 2500 computer freaks of
which around 300 were PC dudes. There we entered the demo compo with Panic,
and to our surprise we came second. Witan's Facts of Life had won the demo
compo. We were quite disappointed by this, because there was absolutely no
voting. The voting system on Amiga just didn't work. And then some Amiga
organizer just asked the last remaining PC organizer (A member of Danish Elite)
"What do you think were the best PC demos?" without telling him that these were
going to be the official results. And without thinking the PC organizer just said
"Witan's, FC's and Sonic's". However, The Party 1992 was a nice party.


1993

After The Party 1992 we lived quietly for a while. The only big change was that
Marvel (formerly in Sonic Amiga) joined us. We now had two GFX artists. Then
we began thinking of making a diskmag (Worldcharts). At first nobody really
wanted to code it, so we thought that we would make it as a co-operation with
Stone (a finnish demogroup). But after some co-operation trouble we began
making it 100% by ourselves. Only the first issue was released. Then we decided
to stop making it, for we had other more important projects to attend to. Then it
was the time for Assembly'93. Once again we were the PC organizers and we
made an invitation intro about it.

Assembly'93 was the biggest summer demo party ever. There were about 1500
people on the party place of which around 550 were PC demo freaks. Asm'93
was also a big advancement on the PC side. For the first time we also had an intro,
a music (4 channel and multichannel) and a graphics competition. Second Reality
was also first presented at Assembly'93.

Next was The Party 1993 (also known as The Party 3), and all we can say is that it
wasn't such a good party as it could have been. This was NOT the fault of the PC
organizing group Access Denied, but instead it seemed that the Amiga organizers
had underestimated the PC side and thus treated the PC side somewhat unfairly.
Already there is some talk about organizing a PC-only party for X-mas'94.
Anyway, we released the GUS version of our old Assembly'92 winner demo
Unreal, and Purple Motion's musicdisk called Journey (which also includes the
MDP - our MOD/S3M player for GUS/SB/SBPro).


1994

Future Crew is now almost 8 years old. We had big plans for this year, both in the
demo scene and in the commercial market. We organized Assembly '94 with
Accession, Sonic PC, Virtual Dreams and The Movement. It was a big party, with
about 3000 visitors. It was held on August 5th- 7th in the center of Helsinki (the
capital city of Finland). Many people expected that FC will release a demo at
ASM'94, and we too planned to do so. We had the demo designs ready, it would
have been called 'The Probe', but due to the fact that we wouldn't have been able
to make it satisfactory in time for ASM'94, we decided not to rush it ready. The
project was later forgotten altogether due to a few commercial projects took most
of our time.

Our major release this year has been the long-awaited Scream Tracker 3, a project
which has been in the making for over 2 years.
Traditionally, FC visited The Party '94, which was held again in Herning, Denmark,
just after Christmas. We didn't make a demo for TP'94.


1995

The year 1995 has been so far very quiet for The Future Crew. No new releases
this far. Our biggest hindrance this year has been the Finnish Army, which happens
to be mandatory for all Finnish guys. This year, first we lost Wildfire and Marvel
there in January, and then Pixel and Abyss in July. The military service lasts 8-11
months, depending on the branch and your 'skills'. This has left Future Crew with
little resources to spare for demo-making.

Although this year Future Crew was not officially linked with Assembly Organizing,
or Assembly '95, we were there. Most of us were there as visitors, but Jake and
Henchman organized the PC demo and Intro competitions (along with many other
things that were going to fail otherwise). This was the first time in history of big
demo parties, that there were no mishaps in the PC Demo competition! Skaven
and Purple Motion participated to the 32 channel music competition, and both
placed well: Purple Motion placed eight and Skaven won the competition by a
WIDE margin with his song Catch That Goblin.

The disappearance of Starport was the result of Abyss joining the army for his
compulsory military service. There was nothing dramatic to the end, Abyss just
didn't have any time to keep the system running.


1996

1996 was big year for Remedy Entertainment. Remedy produced their first game,
called "Death Rally".


1997

As all of you must have noticed we have been keeping quiet =). All of the coders
are involved in the Pyramid project and a number of members are working for
Remedy Entertainment.

But we haven't been completely dead as you can see from the results of
ASSEMBLY'97. Pixel took two second places, in graphics and in wild demo
categories. Marvel took the third place in raytrace compo.

Also the Pyramid 3D card was showcased at ASSEMBLY '97 and also Final
Reality, Remedy 3D benchmark, was premiered at ASM '97.

1998(by biXen)

Final Reality becoming a standard in 3d benchmarking.Bitboys working on Glaze3d,
Remedy working on MaxPayne. Not much time for making demos,but Trug told me that
they are working on a new demo together,not coming before 99.

The Future Crew history are � 1986-97 Future Crew
Used with kind permission from abyss/FC