Howdy! Bartman/Abyss again on the keys to bring you some hardcore stupid poses from The Party 7, Aars, Denmark, 27-29 Dec 1997. This is where the journey all started for most Abyss members: In Munich, Southern Germany. What you see in the picture on the left is the map of the public transport in munich. I could tell you where I live, but you won't find it on the map, because the quality of Pink's digital camera is way too low... Up next are some photos of people traveling with our Party-bus, that has been organized by Weasel, and it was really cool.

This is Wintermute/Interactive: He provided us with a Nintendo64 during the Party, that really ruled as we played Diddy Kong Racing with 4 players against each other or Yoshi's Story Book, although it was quite hard if you don't understand japanese language 8-)

On this photo you see Weasel, our bus-organizer; okay, seems to be a really stupid camera perspective, but you know, only we bring you the stupidest poses... No, seriously, he did a damned good job, we had a 4-star-bus (some 50 seats) with air condition, a wiener-grill, coffee-machine, vcr, toilet, soft drinks and friendly bus-drivers. It really rules watching 6 hours of "Kalkofe's Mattscheibe" (Germans should know that), "Braindead" or orher cool movies...

This is Dexter/Abyss, who turned 20 at 27-Dec-1997. He coded the Amiga 40k-Intro "Cruisin'", which later came #2 in the Amiga Intro-competition at TP7. I still hear him saying "I don't wanna code that shit, it's not gonna be cool anyway", well maybe he was right, but at least he made some money 8-)

Poet/Abyss, the world's best coder (TM), took a self-snapshot; Pink's camera has a 180° rotatable objective, so you can do such crazy stuff... Although he did not release anything for a long period he told me that he wants to do something for Symposium 1998. Till then you can call him Mr. Quake!

Another party attender from munich: Zeg; although he doesn't do any releases, he collects all demos, intros, modules, graphics, etc... and I think he's already got some 6 gigs of it (he doesn't know exactly either). He has also the most hardcore Amiga configuration I ever saw: A4000, 68060, 128MB RAM, Toccata, Cybervision, Wacom Art Pad, ... He also got an Silicon Graphics Indigo (180 MHz, 192 MB RAM), as he says, only for MP3 encoding 8-))

Here is a view from inside our party bus, somewhere throughout southern germany, but don't ask me where exactly, doesn't matter either...

This photo has been made as it was already dark, so it looks rather red... It shows you the back of our bus. The writing on the back says "Busfahren is cool -- versuch's doch mal" (english: riding the bus is cool -- just try it) 8-)

After 18 hours of traveling (we spent over 1 hour in Hamburg, Germany searching for a McDonald's that has opened past 20:00...) we finally arrived at Messecenter Aars, Denmark. After distributing the entry passes, we ran into the hall to get our reserved seats just right of the big-screen... Well, that wasn't extremely cool at the first day, because the video-beamer burned out with smoke and therefore nothing actually happened on the big-screen. But they got it fixed for the opening ceremony.

This is the entrance of the Messecenter (take the previous picture, zoom in to the left and rotate 45° to the left).

This is a view of the infodesk from behind. "Shall I tell you the story about the voting?" 8-)

This is how the main hall looked like at 07:00...

... And it looked like that a few hours later... On this photo you can see a good view across the main hall... Ofcourse in the center of the picture the big-screen...

This is also hall 1, but a view into the other direction; on the left is the laser-disc room where they showed movied like Scream, Golden Eye, Lost World, Dante's Peak, ...

This is a shot into the direction of hall 2 (see the yellow/green sign right of the "Compaq" sign)...

This is Hall 2... not much to say!

Another view onto the big-screen, seemingly before it burned out 8-) Now let me use this space to tell you about the not-so-cool power breakdown at TP7: It was about 20:00 at the 1st day when the organizers told us to shut down all equipment because the power will be turned off shortly. But apparently not all people did that, and when the power broke down, and the backup-generator started, all computers, monitors etc. booted up at once, immediately overloading the backup-generator and causing it to break down, too. That's when, time by time, all lights went out, and the organizers showed us a 1 meter tall fuse that blew. They told us to have power again in about 5 hours....

...Then people started boo-ing to the organizers, singing songs, and doing other crazy stuff... Then, some people brought their "LED scroll display" (as you know it from stores, cinemas, etc...) on the stage and the display read something like "Come to Symposium & Mekka 1998 where there will be enough power" and "Car-batteries rule..." This was also the time where people re-wrote the Party motto "Batteries not included" to "Power not included" or "The Power 1997 - Party not included"...

...After that, I and Miroslaff went down the "city" to get ourselves some Pizza; while we're waiting for the pizzas, we were figuring out what the danish stuff on the pizza-price-list like køgsauce and æg meant 8-) Okay, but back at the Party, after about 2 hours, there was power up again! Although every 5 minutes the big-screen said "Lower your power usage! The system is beyond its maximum", no-one ever does that...

On this photo so see some stupid PC lamers watching some x-rated photos... Although allegedly there wasn't an animal-porno this year at The Party, lotsa people did nothing but watching porn stuff throughout the whole party... That's what I call scene-spirit (nearly as much as constantly quaking)... 8-)

    Crow/Interactive's PC with Abyss-stickers. This PC was used for downloading stuff from the party-ftps and voting... Speaking of voting: Voting was really a pain in the ass. Here's the procedure: At the entrance of the party you got a small booklet explaining the net etc. and there's a voting-key on page 22 (it's like 20 chars). To vote you need to log-on to the party site and 1) create an account (4 steps), 2) validate your vote-key (2 steps) and 3) vote! That's really much too complicated, especially if you have 1 PC for 30 people that want to vote! ...

Oh, by the way, what you can see on the left, is a snapshot from "Automobili Lamborghini" on N64...

One of the few guys, that were lucky during the power-down, he got a laptop.....

This is the last photo for the first session;
that also shows you hall 1...

Go to page 2 for more photos!