MountainBytes 2024 is over - and it was a Blast!

The demoscene is one of the oldest digital cultures in the world - and even recognised as a Living Tradition of Switzerland, along with beloved traditions like Fondue, Alphorn play and Alpine wandering.

In February, the Swiss and international demoscene gathers in Cham, ZG, to live a central custom of our culture: at demoparties, we present our latest demos, compete with them in different categories, pass on our skills and know-how and meet old friends and new.

We had the pleasure of hosting about 100 attendees, with 49 contributions making it to the big screen.

An extra treat was the fact that our Combined PC Realtime Compo had so many high-quality submissions, that the orga team decided to split it out into a compo for size-restricted and a compo for non-size-restricted submissions. This allowed us more fairness in recognising winners that went the extra mile to crunch and optimise their code, even if it comes at the expense of a (often visuals-based) lower ranking.

We are grateful to the contributors from all over the world, who helped us making not just our event very entertaining, but also inspired local demosceners to push further going forward.

The party also saw the return of CoLD StoRAGE not just to a demoparty stage after 13 years of absence, but also an entry into the competition - it’s a pleasure to have you back!

With the Meteoriks Awards jury announcing their 55 nominations in 11 categories for the Best Productions of 2023, we are also honoured to host one of the most revered institutions of the international demoscene on our stage.

We take special pride in our Demolab Workshop - within only 48 hours, four first-time releases made it to the bigscreen: some of which were created without any prior knowledge how to make a demo. It's important to carry on and share our knowledge, and we hope for even more future support to enable building our local scene, and foster anyone who is interested in expressing themselves in the digital arts and expand their skillset. A very big Thank You to our mentors moovie and dojoe as well as bod for providing an exclusive music selections for our attendees to chose from.

We have received a lot of feedback from visitors, especially first-timers as well as expats, thanking us for the opportunity to meet new people, and finally also find a home within a nerdier community in Switzerland. This means the world to us, as this is frankly why we do MountainBytes: to connect to people, and ensure we all have a place to call home.

We are looking forward to next year - yes, we will be back!

Results and Releases

https://demozoo.org/parties/4757/

Pictures and Reports

Pictures by BBS Index (Vitus Zeel): http://www.bbsindex.de/pc/gallery.php?album=26

Video Report by BBS Index: http://bbsindex.tv/v.php?w=137&r=7

More tbc (please get in contact with us if you took pictures and are willing to share them! We can't remember a thing in all the crazy happiness!)