Competitions
Underground Conference is a very special party, and so are its competitions.
At this point we'd like to point out that cheating, hacking the voting system or handing in your entry into the wrong competition is absolutely welcome.
Underground Conference is a very special party, and so are its competitions.
At this point we'd like to point out that cheating, hacking the voting system or handing in your entry into the wrong competition is absolutely welcome.
A detailed timetable will become available soon. Rule of thumb: There will be fast compos all week, and all compos listed on this page will run Thursday to Sunday.
Finally a real-life party to release all your amazing releases at. Fuck streaming. Experience your work on our bad-ass bigscreen with perfect sound system under the open sky.
While UC might be an event focussed on rather weird competitions, we all do appreciate serious art, too.
Therefore the following old-fashioned compos will be held:
- PC Demo
- PC Combined 64k / 4k
- Oldschool Demo / Intro (all platforms older than 20 years)
- Pixel Graphics
We have more than enough music compos to pick from.
For oldschool demo/intro: We'll have some, but if possible please bring the real hardware. Scanconverters etc we have plenty.
To make your releases shine we got a bad-ass compo PC:
Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-11900K @ 3.50GHz 3.50 GHz,
32.0 GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090
Invented for UC9, this turned out to be so fucking amazing that we did it again at UC10, UC11 and UC12. But now it's time for a change. Seaworld will be different this year.
The point is, that by now, we are very happy that the lake still exists.
Still, either the possibility of radioactively enhanced Carp armadas, or the ever-sinking water level, has made us re-think the Compo formerly known as Seaworld Graphics.
Stay tuned. (And radioactively sober.)
This is the longest-running compo at Underground Conference, existing since back in 1995. Beat on an old pot with a stick. We will sample it and measure the BPM-Rate. You have to get as close as possible to 180 BPM and then stay there to win.
That's actually not at all easy.
PerfectPC is disqualified and banned from this compo, due to cheating at UC8. This means he is more than welcome to enter again.
Love is all around? Not so at Underground Conference. We want you to show your hate. All of it. Pick any demo/intro you really really hate, and screw it up. Replace parts, distort it, whatever. Just make really plausible that you really hate it.
Happy Hardcore used to be a non-mainstream kind of electronic music. Cheesy vocals, strings and pianos, combined with a hard beat at between 180 and 190 BPM. The dutch flavour of it often also contained break beats.
These days Happy Hardcore is typically called "UK Hardcore". This is because the dutchies went for Hardstyle (which is related) instead, where the UK guys kept it up for a couple of years, before the scene over there also mostly died.
Back when Happy Hardcore was close to what could be called "popular", a couple of commercial tracks from people like "Blümchen" or even (yuck) "Scooter" entered the charts. Create a music track that's better than that.
In case you need some reference, check out these mixes done by scamp. The best of audiophilicczyzs excellence combined with some seriously lacking mixing skills:
This is the compo most often underestimated by first-time UC visitors. The general idea is to hand in a really bad tune.
But as you'll learn, Shitmusic is a true art form.
No, it's not just a matter of not hitting the notes, or having a crappy beat, or tempo changes. To stand any chance against world-class record holders, you'll need to have all of that and far more.
"Just because you are bad at it doesn't mean you are good at being bad."
Just so you know what you are competing against, here are a couple of tracks to use as a reference:
JCO - John Williams Rehersal With Professionals
Saga Musix - Music a Music remix Remix
Bundy - GoT in a Nutshell
This competition one day used to be about doing headbanging on stage while some c64 SID track was being played. It escalated quickly from there, from people beating each other with ladders, over hurtful body slams, up to rather weird on-stage performances.
Basically, anything goes, as long as you are on stage and a SID song is playing in the background while you are doing whatever you believe to have to do.
Throw these bloody HDDs into the air! Due to a (very) long-standing tradition, measurements are done in Elitegroup member steps.
No SSDs allowed!
However, it has been a proven tactic in the past to try build catapults that then fail miserably. Rockets have also been done. You'll find your way to cheat through this compo again.
Well, this is not really a compo. However, due to the RULE card payment system, we can track how much you are drinking at the party. So let's make a challenge out of it: Try to impress your "friends" by drinking far too much alcohol just to become the top of the pops.
And in case you are wondering: The amounts on the picture here are given in LITERs, so don't believe this one to be easy to win.
Everyone loves it, so make sure not to miss this chance for a contribution. Create a module with your favourite tracker (mp3s are ok too, these days...). At the party you have to "support" your song live.
Either with your voice or with some weird instrument or whatever comes into your mind. Yes, penis enlargements do count as a musical instrument.
This is a fast competition happening on-site. Everything is how you would expect from a graphics competition, however, you will be required to work with an upside-down Monitor we will be providing only.
You will be provided with a stitching board at the beginning of the party. You then have the week to create wonderful pixel art on that stitching board until the end of week.
In a great attempt to deceive you that this is not an obvious misheard-lyrics, we celebrate our special connection with nature by making YOU think about it.
In regular demoparty terms, this would be a "fast video compo". But that's only half the story -- This is Wald Compo.
The quest is as follows: there will be a nice corner of Wald and there will be a probably nice scener who knows that location and has a camera. Now you decide what to do with that Wald. Get creative and steal whatever equipment you can find (that's not likely in use by our very competent party disorganizers).
You will get a limited time to be recorded whatever live-wald-demo you perform (15min max, divided in multiple takes as you want). You will get the raw recordings and then are again free to edit it down, in whatever way you like, to a video of max. 90 seconds length. Assets, Musics, Shaders, Effects, all up to you. Make it Wald!
Bonus points if you manage to use Clipchamp for editing, but who are we kidding, you won't manage to use Clipchamp for editing.
What would a demoparty without a gaming compo be? Right, a proper demoparty. That's not what we are. So pack in your Apple Vision Pro to throw it into the lake, and then join us for a ride through the very "best" of the chinese gaming industry.
This is a "fast-compo" in the sense as any Paintover - you do it on location, live and in color (haha).
But! We found it important to deliberately distance ourselves from the weird, somewhat fake-stochastic, geometrical, most likely powered by crypto startups, shapes that are usually the canvas for your creativity.
We also found it important to very distinctively take a stance against these "Computers" the newer generation seems addicted to. Real Art has more colors than all these Nintendos; I mean what are you, extra-halfbrite?
Over the years UC has seen all different kinds of catastrophic weather events. How will things be looking this time? YOU decide!
Of course we had been thinking about the weather for a while ourselves. And as much as we approve non-being-lethally-endangered, we couldn't help but notice how it's virtually impossible to plan this thing.
We tried to outsmart it by moving to June, and we tried to laugh it off by placing our theme around Nature striking back, but extrapolating from our previous experiences we are pretty positive that some serious sh*t is about to go down.
But maybe you have other ideas and projections. So, prepare a slide show and give us a good weather forecast - live done on stage, or handed in as a demo, music track, or a bucket of water.
The red sea. Ships. Huthis. Rocket Anger Management problems. What could possibly go wrong? We will find out.
Party like the swiss would do! In this very special fast compo you will be joining Cowee the cow for some serious live action roleplaying. PETA would be proud!
The best thing about Music Sizecoding - even if it's terrible, at least it's only tinily terrible!
But -- as everybody's going old, we have to ditch the Acid Gabber Trancecore, seat ourselves in our red leather wingchair, pull out our gramophone and put our best Classical Symphonies to go down with a good alcohol-free vegan red wine. Or maybe not, but make something CUTE, so you do not get executed! E.g. Acid Gabber Cutecore.
That interpretation is up to you. As long as it's as cute as 32k!
