Stripe

Some Memories of Each Party

1991

Well it all began after visiting the Dexion party in Odense/Denmark back in 1990, in my opinion a fun, badly organized party (no offence to the Dexion organizers), on a school. The idea of trying to making it better, find a better place, and make better organizing started to haunt me.

At the moment I was the sysop at High Tension, a Rebels BBS, which I ran together with a guy called Flemming (Trix/Rebels, later Anarchy) and he had the connections to spread the word. One of the users on my BBS was a guy called Felix (Flex) who was also very interested in doing a better party. It's was a fact at that time, that you could not host a party without being somebody, so Flex contacted Paleface & Seen / Quartex which were member of a powerful group and together we began to plan The Party.

During the planning Paleface & Seen changed group to Crystal, Trix changed to Anarchy and I changed to Silents, and that's the demo-groups that ended up hosting The Party 1991. At that time I was living in the small city of Aars and it had a exhibition center which at that time felt very big to me. It somewhat felt unreal to walk through the empty center thinking I'm going to rent this, maybe this will costs me a lot, but it will be so cool..

The time of The Party 1991 were closing fast and the number of reservations were growing fast, a lot faster than we have ever imagined. Then The Party began, and lots and lots a people were coming. We thought, this is great, everything is under control, this is cool and the atmosphere were perfects. But the fact were that we had no control what so ever, the fact that the competitions worked out almost perfectly is still a mystery to me.

We were just a lot of people running around doing something without coordination. Seen from the guests I belive it was a great party, seen from an organizers point of view - it was a disaster. We were absolutely NOT going to host any party anymore.

1992

But then is happened, everybody started to write, phone, etc. us, telling us to host another party. We wouldn't...and well okay we might... yeah, we're damn if we do, and doomed if we don't. So we did, and this time the organization of The Party 1992 had to be just right.

At the moment I was out of school and out of work, so I used all my time and planned everything myself. The other organizers weren't to satisfied with it, so we ended up having a meeting where every single organizer were present and everybody had equal power to decide how things should be done. This meeting ran for almost 24 hours nonstop, and now we thought we really had something to work on.
So The Party 1992 - the final, was a reality. The subtitle The final was added to tell people that this WOULD be the final, and that you just can live with yourself if you miss it. And so it seemed when The Party opened. More and more people just kept arriving. Although we rented the entire exhibition center in Aars, the place were still totally stuffed with people.

If we though the 1200 guests in 1991 were a lot, then the 2400 in 1992 totally blew our minds. Ok, this time we had an external guy to do the sound and another guy to run the big screen, the organizers were scheduled to do the different tasks throughout The Party and we even had a concerts with Kyd/Balle of Silents. Well the concert was an huge success, the sound equipment could play as loud as it was supposed to and the guy in change of the big screen weren't very good. And on top of all this the time schedule, where every organizer was supposed to work a couple of hours in every area throughout the day totally fucked up, and we ended up with a few people doing all the work.

Once again I belive the guests were satisfied with The Party, and us organizers were like zombies for 5 days after The Party had ended.

1993

1993 should be the year of change. First of all I put together a 5 man main organizer group which planned and carried out all tasks before The Party, and then we had a 30 man organizer group during The Party. Each main organizer would then have their own area and group of organizers to run and each organizer would then only have one job during The Party.

This was also the year where we did everything our self, no external sound/video people. We also rented a really big screen and sound equipment from a professional company to ensure the quality when presenting the productions. The Party had up to now been an Amiga party, but this year we realized that the PC demo scene was growing fast and we decided (with a lot of protests) to equal the score and make the conditions equal for both Amiga and PC competitions.

As we were not that good at working with PC's we decided to work together with Access Denied from Holland on the PC compo's. A good idea? - not! They did not know anything about how to run a competition and they also told us that they had a huge range of sponsored prizes, so that the cash part of the prizes would be much lower and all together still equal to the Amiga compo's. We didn't see any of these prizes and the rest is history.

One of the most important moves I think, was that we moved to a much bigger and better (and MUCH more expensive) exhibition center. Messecenter Herning was the ideal place to host The Party, although it was located in the middle of nowhere.
And then The Party 1993 - you can't beat the feeling was in progress. The subtitle became a statement from us, not just something that sounded great, but a hint of how The Party was supposed to be. There isn't really that much to say about The Party 1993, except that it ran smoothly. Okay there was some fuckups in the compo's, the cafeteria prizes was too high but in general it was a great party in my opinion.

1994

1994 was the year of the problems. Internally us main organizers couldn't agree on anything, and ended up back stabbing (verbally of course) each other more than once. The exhibition center became even more expensive although we now had to setup and remove the tables and chairs our self, and even do the cleaning (it was easier to just lay down and die). Well somehow we managed to host The Party 1994 - don't try this at home. On the bright side 1994 was also the year where we dropped the demo group names as organizers of The Party. In fact it was only in 1991 and 1992 that 5-7 organizers were actually members of any group. We felt that The Party had grown old enough, and didn't need the names of the demo groups to promote it.

1995

In 1995 it was time to clean up our act, and therefor we introduced a bunch of new blood into the organization. In the Main organizer group only 2 of the original people were left, so we moved 2 of the best organizer during the 2 previous year up to main status. Also among the organizers we cleaned out a bit, in fact half of the crew was replaced with people who already knew a lot about their specific area, eg. doormen from disco's for security, professional technicians for the tech. crew. etc.

Another major change is that we moved The Party to another exhibition center. And why's that? - well Messecenter Herning was getting too expensive and in Fredericia we could solve the problem with having some guests sitting in another hall. In Fredericia everybody would be in the main hall and be able to watch the big screen from their seats.

Okay, better organizers, better party place, but still some fuckups. There had been some misinformation that led people to belive that a PC demo was not shown because we forgot it, and not because it didn't work at all, which we also showed to the creator of the demo. The T-shirt was a big mistake, a very complex 3Dstudio thing but still a mistake, it had no party feeling and style. Our sound was absolutely perfect for the first time, although some people watching the demos right beside the speakers complained that it was too loud. The cafeteria prices were still too high, even though we had been promised some fair prices. And of course we didn't have any laserdisc room, due to some unclear rules in Denmark regarding showing movies in public. But the competitions was never more than 15 minutes late.