The Black Lotus

The Black Lotus (TBL) is a demogroup which was founded in 1989 by two Swedish sceners who went by the handles Dickhead and Rubberduck. The group expanded itself into two major sections — the Swedish section mainly produced releases on the Amiga, while the Dutch section focused on the IBM PC. TBL is considered to be an accomplished demogroup on both platforms and has received over a dozen high-honor awards at demoparties throughout Europe, including parties such as The Gathering, Breakpoint, and its predecessor, Mekka & Symposium.
TBL Amiga
TBL has consistently been one of the most prominent and well-remembered Amiga demogroups over the years, bearing such works as Tint, one of the defining demos on the AGA chipset. The crew has continually released various successful demos over the years — Ocean Machine has placed 1st in the Amiga demo competition at Breakpoint 2005, and received an award for best soundtrack at the Scene.org Awards 2005. Their latest award winning release is Starstruck, which ran and won against PC demos at the Assembly 2006 demo competition.
TBL demos on the Amiga usually follow a distinctive approach; bombastic music with extremely detailed 3D scenes (usually containing some sort of character animation), mixed subtly with prerendered animations. While there is usually little consistency between the scenes themselves, the over-the-top climatic delivery usually wins the acclaim of demoscene critics. Music for their latest productions were provided by Olof Gustafsson.
TBL also adopted the Decepticon logo as their official logo; it was visible in every demo since Captured Dreams, albeit with varied visibility.
A running joke for TBL Amiga demos is the consistently non-sequitur titles: "A Perfect Circle" came from the band of the same name, "Little Nell" was a reference to Nell Campbell, "Silkcut" comes from a cigarette brand, "Ocean Machine" is a side-project of Devin Townsend, and Starstruck is, among others, a stage play.
A common criticism of the TBL Amiga demos (and the subsequent PSP demo Suicide Barbie, done by mostly the same people) was plagiarism: the demos often featured notable copies of design elements or ideas of other known nu-media graphic artists. Suicide Barbie was particularly singled out, containing not only sampled (and unauthorized) vocals from Swedish singer Veronica Maggio, but also used ideas from various marketing agencies' advertisements, such as PSYOP and D-Strkt. Defenders of the demos appealed that these ideas were merely sources of inspiration, and were applied as fair use.
TBL PC
TBL's PC section is most often remembered for being the pioneers of procedural generation: Jizz and Stash were among the first (if not the first) 64k intros to use generated textures and music — a feat unseen before at that time. Stash was also notable for employing the later famous "part 2" trick; having two distinct parts in a single 64k intro. TBL's PC 64k intros were also notorious for giving birth to the term "Dutch color scheme" — a phrase coined by Danish scener Rasmus "Macaw" Kaae to label the textures in the 64k's as too brash and colorful.

Main Menu

See Also

Main Menu