Sanity – Interference Recoded (Demo or Die)

cougar_sanity_train

20 years ago Sanity released the Interference dentro on the Amiga and blew pretty much everyone away. It had a fantastic combination of excellent graphics, a superb soundtrack by Virgill and some very technically advanced coding (and cheating!). It’s little wonder it’s rated so highly in the Amiga demoscene.

20 years later one of the original coders Joerg Messner (Microforce / Sanity) has decided to recode it all in JavaScript / Canvas. The code is kept purely to the Canvas API with no WebGL or shaders being used. It’s interesting that Joerg doesn’t consider it a true demo, because when you have no limitations there’s no real technical challenge left, it’s just down to design and art, which I can appreciate for sure – but even so some of the canvas effects he manages to pull off in Interference are still top-notch, even 20 years on.

Personally I find it fascinating how many old sceners are using the browser as a means to express themselves creatively these days, and having a lot of fun while doing it. Sites like We Are Back now hold upwards of 240 HTML5 demos and is constantly growing.

So kick it back old-skool for a moment and view Interference Recoded. Joerg recommends Chrome but it ran fine in Firefox 25+ for me, and even mostly runs in IE11 other than one small part.