Demozoo is a website dedicated to collecting and organizing the history of the demoscene - its productions, people, events and many other bits of information. We cover all platforms and all aspects, from the demoscene's very early beginnnings on 8-bit machines in the 80s, up to and including the current day and future. We are a community-driven website, where we invite everyone to contribute. Together, we help document the productions, people, groups and events that compose the demoscene, and everything in between.
We are not the first website of our kind, but we bring a unique attention to detail, user-editability and an open, free attitude to the table. The entire website is open source, and we post a daily dump of our database, in the interest of an open data model. Apart from this;
- We’re platform-agnostic, lavishing equal detail on all platforms that has had scene productions made for it.
- We are deeply commited to preservation of demoscene materials and metadata - we also track productions that are presumed "lost", and due to this have been able to find and make available huge parts of our shared history. Please see this page for further information on what to do if you can help.
- We have a tag system in place, allowing us to connect productions that are in a series, or a common trait like the tool used to crate it.
Contributing to Demozoo
Most of Demozoo is user-editable, to enable to community to most freely add information to the site. As a normal user, you can;
- Add productions, music, graphics, groups, sceners, and parties
- Add and change download links, screenshots, credits, soundtracks, memberships, info text files and release dates
As a normal user, you can NOT;
- Delete productions, music, graphics, groups, sceners or parties
- Delete screenshots
- Edit the trivia/note fields
The reason some fields are not editable to normal users, is the potential for vandalism or accidental vandalism. However, if you have information that you feel is pertinent, please feel free to let the staff know in any number of ways - we have a Discord where you can chat with us directly, you can post in the Fix me beautiful thread on our forum, or just add a comment if the item in question is a production, graphic or music.
Release dates
We feel placing productions in as accurate a timeframe as possible is key to documenting history, and as such we have in place a very flexible date system. For one, it accepts dates in a multitude of formats, and we are as accurate as the information on hand allows - that is, a date can be either "1988", "april 1988" or "4 april 1988", depending on what we know.
For some productions, there is no information released with the production to indicate a release date, and in these cases we feel it's better to not enter information without a proper source of information. In other cases, circumstancial evidence can provide the date without it being present in the production; for instance a different production can mention it came out the previous month, or some party results can reveal it was released at that event. If so, please document the source of information whenever possible - use the comment field or talk to us on our Discord server, and we'll make sure the info gets into the trivia field.
Production titles
We commonly sanitize titles for consistency, unless where the production clearly defines it is to be presented with an "incorrect" capitalization or other stylized presentation. We commonly capitalize the first letter of all words (like for instance also Discogs does).
Screenshots
For some general info, tips and guidelines about screenshots on Demozoo, consult this article.
Scener records
For our scener records, we record both current and previous group affiliations. We attempt to keep these as up to date as possible, but users are permitted to set membership status to either active or previous.
Criteria for setting a scener as an "ex" or previous member of a group can be either of the following;
- The group has published a more recent memberlist where the person in question is not included.
- The person has explicitly claimed they are no longer in that group, either by stating they are "ex-" or by listing their current groups in a later release with it excluded.
- Common sense - if a group made its last release in the 90s, we can somewhat safely assume the members are no longer really active.
Also be aware that Demozoo is constantly evolving, and we're quite aware not every single person in the database is perfectly edited to reflect reality. We're working on it. For the foreseeable forever. :)
Tags
Tags are a way for productions, graphics and music to be connected for whatever reason. This can be anything, because they are in a series (diskmagazines, packs), because they are tools of the same type (trackers, packers) or because they are cracktros for the same game. Tags autocomplete as you type, which will be useful for finding a tag that works with your use case.
Unfortunately, we often see misuse of this feature, with users for instance adding tags for the authors or the platform. This is covered in the production metadata itself, and should not be added to tags. We do have functionality to block certain tags, to avoid the most common pitfalls.
We make heavy use of tags in our bbs coverage, and an overview of tags in use and what they man can be found here.