Dark Side of the Spoon (1991)
Marco BreddinUnlimited Matricks (ULM) showed the world what the Dark Side of the Spoon looks like in January 1991. Hailing from the tiny country of Luxembourg, ULM’s classic megademo was anything but small. This celebrated Atari ST production includes also three guest screens: two from the British team The Lost Boys and one from German group The Respectables.
Dark Side of the Spoon features an awe-inspiring interactive menu where demo screens are chosen by flying a winged lion in a fantasy palace. The entire menu is technically very impressive, running borderless and with smooth multidirectional 50 Hz scrolling. When you enter the “wow arena”, you are blown away by a multi-layered parallax fullscreen with sample sound and fast distorting scrollers.
Such a megademo clearly shows that hardware limitations are not necessarily the boundaries of “chip design”, and the limits are often only set by human imagination and clever programming. Coder Georges Kesseler (Gunstick) has struggled for months to make his magic work. At the time, this was the most complex demo screen on a basic Atari ST.