Conspiracy ship an nfo with every release, a text file that lists what the group have made since November 2002, one production to a line. The copy in the archive of Chaos Theory carries the date 1 August 2006, and its last entries read like this:
[ Binary Flow - The Assembly'05 Invitation ]
cns!bnry.zip ................ 64k intro ... 1st at Breakpoint2005
[ Memento ]
cns!mmnt.zip ................ 64k intro ... 2nd at Breakpoint2006
[ Chaos Theory ]
cns!ct.zip .................. 64k intro ...... ? at Assembly 2006Above them the list runs back to 2003 and consists mostly of first places at Breakpoint and Assembly. Then comes a second place, and then a question mark. The 64k competition at Assembly ran on 6 August, and the question mark is still in the file today.
Watch it first: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAnhcUNHRW0
Cédric Renzi sent me this one on Wednesday and wondered whether it might deserve something. It does, and my thanks to Cédric for the nudge.
A first time, apparently
Gargaj wrote the readme on 4 August, two days before the competition, and it reads like the work of people who had stopped being nervous. "Apparently we finished another 64k," it begins, "Except that ALL of us are extremely satisfied with it. (Then again there's probably always a first time.)"
The reason follows, and it is about as unpretentious as reasons get: "all it took to have an intro that's fun to make and enjoyable to watch (for us) was around +50 BPM." The readme apologises for the change with a perfectly straight face, "Sorry for no deep emotions or touching scene poetry this time". Then it names what had made the difference: the defeat at Breakpoint that spring, which "helped the creative process immensely - freedom is AWESOME."
The credits are short. BoyC wrote the main code. The visuals are Zoom's, and Gargaj wrote the synthesiser as well as the music it plays, a track the group later released on its own as Rude Awakening. Conspiracy describe the result as "an up-tempo, high-energy journey through various representations of entropy", and the tagline on their release page is three words long: "One Constant Remains."
Sixty-four kilobytes, to the byte
Assembly's archive defines the category in two sentences. Entries were "limited in size to 64 kilobytes on a high-end 2006 PC computer", and 64 kilobytes "is enough space to generate desired graphics and music algorithmically but doesn't enable usage of drawn graphics or recorded music." Every surface in Chaos Theory is computed on the machine that shows it, and every note comes out of Gargaj's synthesiser on the same machine. The group later published a separate WAV writer for anyone who wanted the soundtrack as a file, since the intro itself holds no recording of it.
The archive on conspiracy.hu today contains the multicore fix of November 2007, and I measured its chaostheory.exe this morning: 65,536 bytes, which is 64 times 1,024 and therefore the limit itself, with not one byte to spare. The packing was done by kkrunchy, a packer written by ryg of Farbrausch, whose name still sits in the header of the file. The readme thanks ryg for it and, as it happens, in the same sentence thanks "the Opera guys at Assembly'06 for lending us a computer to enter the intro". One of the most admired 64k intros of its decade, then, reached the competition on a machine borrowed from a browser maker.
Second in the hall
The readme had sized up the field honestly: "Hard to say what chances do we have". Fairlight's dead ringer won the competition, Chaos Theory came second, and Aesterozoa by Kewlers and FR-048: Precision by Farbrausch followed. On Pouët a visitor was still not over the result a year later: "Ranked 2nd??? THIS is the best 64k I've seen so far."
The juries took a longer view. The Scene.org Awards for 2006 gave their prize for the best 64k intro to Chaos Theory, from a shortlist that included dead ringer and Conspiracy's own Memento. In 2007 the Prix Ars Electronica in Linz gave it an honorary mention in Computer Animation / Film / VFX, a category whose Golden Nica that year went to Ben Hibon's film Codehunters. Conspiracy keep a list of the places it has turned up since, and it has four entries: the Hungarian DVD of Ghost in the Shell, the Bitfilm Festival of 2006, the Axn Sci-fi channel and the Animation Theater at SIGGRAPH 2007. On Pouët someone wrote in 2011, "I use this whenever someone asks me what a demo is," and the intro has been rather good at that job ever since.
A group that had lost for once wrote a question mark into its own list, and then filled sixty-four kilobytes to the very last byte.