Outracks

Outracks is a Norwegian demogroup who released their first demo in 2002. Best known for the demo "Synthematik" from 2004, which got nominated for the "Breakthrough Performance" award at Scene.org Awards 2005, Outracks is still active today (as of 2007) in the Norwegian and European demoscene.

Style

Outracks' demos are typically up-tempo, energetic and clean-looking. The visuals tend to be non-photorealistic and not containing much artistic content. Simplistic coder-art and procedural objects or simulation-effects are frequently featured. After Synthematik (2004), Outracks adopted the four red slashes as logo for the group, and the characteristic bright red logo in contrast with a rather colorless environment is found in Synthematik (2004), Blockbuster (2005) and Genesis (2006).

The music for most Outracks-demos after 2003 is made by Ivar "Irvin" Kvalvik. The music style spans in a variety of pure electronic flavours eventually featuring nostalgical chiptune-like leads, in new school production. No Kelvin had a recorded vocal soundtrack which got very popular, though many critics found the demo itself unfit for its soundtrack.

Outracks is a PC/Windows-oriented demo group having produced only hardware-accelerated 3D-demos to date. All demos up to "No Kelvin" were written against OpenGL 1.1-drivers, being able to run smoothly even on fairly old graphics hardware. Later productions require shader model 2.0 to run, somewhat shrinking the audience but maintaining much of the same style.

Accomplishments

The group first won international recognition in 2004 by winning the demo competition at The Gathering with our.demo. The subsequent release of Synthematik at Scene Event the following summer brought the group even more attention, leading to a nomination for "Breakthrough performance" at Scene.org Awards 2004. Later Outracks has won several smaller demo competitions and placed 2nd at The Gathering in 2005 and 2006.

Members

• Duckers (Anders Lassen) - programming
• Irvin (Ivar Kvalvik) - music
• Znork (Kjetil Åltvedt) - graphics

Major releases

• our.demo - (1st at The Gathering 2004)
• Synthematik - (3rd at Scene Event 2004)
• Little ball of water - (2nd at Kindergarden 2004)
• We are the robots (1st at Digilab 2005)
• No Kelvin - (2nd at The Gathering 2005)
• Blockbuster - (1st at Scene Event 2005)
• Genesis - (2nd at The Gathering 2006)
• Summer Encounter - (1st at Solskogen 2006)
• Still puzzled? - (1st at Digilab 2007)
• Gamma - (1st at The Gathering 2007)

External links

• Outracks official site
• Outracks on Pouët
• Outracks at demoscene.tv