There is no shortage of creative coders in New York City. This was clear as soon as I pulled open the door to the basement of Babycastles, a gallery for independent video games in Manhattan, to reveal a room packed with people swaying to the sounds of algorithmically generated music. I had arrived just in time to catch the end of a set by the electronic musician Melody Loveless , who was at a folding table near the front of the room writing code that generated the music.

Each year since its founding in 2016, Synchrony participants have gathered for a night of dancing before boarding a train for Canada in the morning. Participants use the time on the train to create their demos, which are then judged at a competition in Montreal. The traveling aspect of Synchrony makes it unique among demoparties, but it's also notable for being the only annual demoparty in New York City.

Demoparties are gatherings where programmers showcase artistic audiovisual works, known as demos, after a day- or days-long coding marathon that is part bacchanal and part competition. Demos are often made by teams of programmers and are almost always rendered in real time (as opposed to, say, an animated movie, which is a pre-rendered recording). Demoparty competitions, or compos, are generally divided into categories where demo submissions must adhere to certain restrictions. For example, some compos only allow demos that were made on a Commodore 64 computer or demos that were created using under 4,000 bytes of data. In every case, however, the point of the competition is to push computing hardware to its limits in the service of digital art.

These sorts of live coding performances have been a staple of demoparties—gatherings organized by and for the creative computing underground—for decades. It was only appropriate, then, that the kickoff party for Synchrony , one of the last active demoparties in the US, was an “ algorave ” hosted in the basement of an experimental, DIY arcade.

Given the abundance of digital art institutions in New York— Eyebeam , Rhizome , LiveCode.NYC , and the School for Poetic Computation —the lack of demoparties is conspicuous and in stark contrast to the European demoscene, which boasts dozens of annual demoparties, some of which attract thousands of participants. With this discrepancy in mind, I tagged along with the Synchrony crew this year in pursuit of an answer to a deceptively simple question—who killed the American demoscene?

The Commodore 64, or C64, was not only vastly more powerful than any of its competitors when it was released in 1982, but it was also far cheaper. This turned it into one of the best selling computers in history and its domination of the market meant that most novice programmers cut their teeth developing free C64 software or trying to break copy protection features on proprietary software, a pastime known as cracking.

Prior to the development of the microprocessor in the 1970s, computing was a domain-specific activity. Giant mainframe computers were developed for use in specific contexts, such as academic, government, or military institutions, but the microprocessor revolution paved the way for personal computers that could be wielded according to the individual user’s needs. The development of the microprocessor resulted in an explosion of PCs hitting the market in the early 1980s, but one stood above the rest: the Commodore 64.

Software cracking was especially prevalent in the C64 gaming community and when a new game was released crackers would race to become the first to remove copy protection so that the game could be modified and copied. There were various techniques used to crack software, but most required a fairly in-depth understanding of computer hardware and an ability to work with binary code.

To stake a claim for their accomplishment, crackers would often create a crack introduction, or “cracktro,” that would play before users could access the game. Early cracktros were simple affairs that would usually display the cracker’s name, shoutouts to friends and other cracking crews, and some basic graphics, like changing the color of the screen. As the 80s progressed, however, software crackers developed new techniques for programming the C64, in some cases even discovering new methods to render graphics on the computer that weren’t included in the manual. By the end of the 80s, C64 video game cracktros were sophisticated audiovisual presentations that had become an artform in its own right that prefigured the demoscene that was to come into its own in the 90s.

According to Tamás Polgár, a scene veteran and the author of FREAX: The Brief History of the Demoscene, at the same time that software crackers were exploring the technical possibilities latent in the C64, gatherings known as “copyparties” began springing up all over Europe. Software crackers, programmers, and gaming enthusiasts would gather IRL to swap pirated games, known as warez, which would be copied on to floppy disks. Swaps were a well worn tradition when it came to music, which could easily be copied onto tapes, but unlike music, cracked video games didn’t degrade in quality each time they were copied. The code remained the same whether it was copied once or a million times, which allowed pirated software to spread like wildfire.