It's nineteen ninety-something, and another batch of the latest games just came off the line, but it's not the game that matters, it's what goes before it. The demoscene has been accepted as Dutch "intangible cultural heritage" by UNESCO [demoscene-the-art-of-coding.net, but you might need to hit archive.org as the site's down], following the earlier acceptance in Finland, Germany and Poland, "the first digital subculture to be put on an intangible cultural heritage list."
We very happy about the success of the Dutch demoscene to be accepted as a living national cultural heritage!
The Dutch inscription is continuing the success story of the demoscene as first digital culture accepted by the UNESCO. Previously the demoscene became cultural heritage in Finland, Germany and Poland.
Check out the official entry at the inventory (https://www.immaterieelerfgoed.nl/en/democene) and the safeguarding plan, which was the core of the application (http://demoscene-the-art-of-coding.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Translated_Borgings_plan_Demoscene_EN_for_NL.pdf).
North Sea counties. I always wondered why the Demoscene was not such a big thing in England, given that its "pirated Amiga stuff" market was among the largest in Europe (excepting Germany, perhaps) and we were certainly enjoying the output there. The move from Britain having child coders in the 8-bit era to consumers in the 16-bit era seems quite stark in retrospect. Successive Conservative governments slowly ending the BBC's involvement in computer literacy and education, perhaps? By the time I was studying "Information Technology" at GCSE level in the early 1990s, it was little more than a business training seminar, Excel and Word, and the teacher was a tennis coach who could not have cared less about that, let alone programming.
Then there's America…
