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Effektz kicks the demo scene old school

by Eric March on July 20, 2009 at 12:47 am

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App Name:	Effektz
Developer:	Mobile1UP	Version:	1.0
Publisher:	Mobile1UP	Size:	150 KB
Category:	Entertainment	Price:	Free

What happens when a developer gets bored? Well, if he feels like coding and has no specific ideas in mine, he might decide to bring some old school demo scene effects to the iPhone just for kicks.

That’s what Mobile1UP have done with Effektz, and they’re no strangers to the demo scene. Years back, under their parent company Mobile Wizardry (who, speaking of retro, developed the Palm version of Atari Retro, which featured a number of classic Atari 2600 games), Aaron and Co. organized a Palm demo competition back in 2002 for Palm developers who wanted to stretch their coding and creative legs on the Palm v- and m-series platform (primarily aimed at the m505), and the turnout was pretty good, with some impressive entries, especially given the limited hardware they had to work with. I had and enjoyed some of those demos back in my early Palm days. In fact, I’ve been a follower of demo scenes from the 8-bit Atari, C64 and Spectrum through the Atari ST, Amiga and PC scenes, so stuff like this kicks me right in the retro.

So, feeling rather bored, Mobile1UP looked back all melancholy and misty-eyed on those heady days when PDAs were still PDAs and smartphones were in their infancy, and decided to bring back a little of that 90s demo scene flavour to the iPhone, the result being the rather simple but nostalgic Effektz. This little non-interactive toy features five vintage demo scene routines: The venerable vector cube, the ubiquitous starfield, the crowd-pleasing fire effect, psychedelic sinus plasma, and the old magnified lens routine. Just tap to advance to the next demo. Old school to be sure, but Effektz is just a starting point. Mobile1UP’s Aaron Ardiri plans to bring other old school demo crew effects to the table, too, and is even taking suggestions. Glenz vectors? Jelly vectors? Shadebobs? Sinus dots? All are possibilities. It could even be turned into an old school megademo-type thing. Who knows? It’s a totally open, spare-time, just for kicks ‘n giggles type of project that could go wherever they want to take it.