A game idea has been haunting me for over 20 years. Its title has ranged between "World simulator", "Bottom-up Civilization", "Multi-player Populous" and "Self-sufficient Community Simulator", but the general idea has remained pretty much the same. Imagine non-extractive but technological human life in a world where the environment actually reacts to what you do.

I've started to implement the game several times, but it always fell apart at the world-shaping stages (climate/weather most often). Now I've started it yet another time, this time focusing on the gameplay/interface layer first. I've also been taking ideas from Dwarf Fortress and RimWorld even though my original design took somewhat different routes.

Vannevar Bush's Memex is often mentioned in histories of computing, but Paul Otlet, who had similar visions already in the 1930s, is often disregarded. In the 1920s, Otlet, with Robert Goldschmidt, had even demonstrated a microfilm-based "library in a suitcase" with a pocket-sized viewer. In the same era, Emanuel Goldberg invented a viewer that used perforated microfilms to automate searching, but the project ultimately failed because he was a Jew in Nazi Germany.

In an alternate history, mass-market microfilm might very well have succeeded, perhaps starting from huge encylopedias compressed in microfilm. This would have affected people's ideas and exceptations about personal computing even before it started. No need for counterculturalists such as Stewart Brand to explain why owning a computer would be cool. The technology would have situated closer to the existing literate culture and further from TV/radio. Many kids would still have found computers fascinating, but the fascination would have taken different channels based on the entirely different zeitgeist.

I ended up first in the oldskool demo competition of this year's Assembly. This wasn't self-evident, as there were several high-quality entries in the compo.

Technically, it's a one-file C-64 demo mostly consisting of character-mode animation made with the same tools I've used for a few VIC-20 demos. As for the social/political message, I also feel I'm repeating things I've said earlier, but perhaps I'm somewhat clearer this time.

"Transcend the Game" by PWP (which turned 30 years old a couple of weeks ago)
csdb.dk/release/?id=244634
youtube.com/watch?v=9HqOD1QUP3…
#demoscene

Demomaking in progress. It seems I haven't made a single demo in this decade yet, so it's about time to do something. Especially given that PWP just turned 30 years old.

The platform is C-64, but I'm reusing the technical concept and tools I used in some of my VIC-20 demos. Also following the esthetic of keeping the number of unique characters low, so I probably won't run out of the huge 64K RAM. #demoscene