In September of 1993, the PC demo scene was screaming for Future Crew to release "Second Reality". Assembly '93 had concluded a month ago, and still the first place demo had yet to be publically released. Most of the songs, graphics, and intros from Assembly '93 were in distribution and people were not happy with FC for delaying the release. Not happy at all.

Those were the golden days of the PC demo scene. There were 4 demo parties a year: Assembly (Finland), The Party (Denmark), The Gathering (Norway), and The Computer Crossroads (Sweden). There was no need for a DemoNews Calander -- people knew all the parties and often memorized the starting/ending dates.

Take a moment and note what countries those parties were held in: Finland, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. In 1993, it was pretty difficult to contribute to the PC demo scene if you weren't from Scandinavia. Actually, contributing wasn't the hard part (since there were many BBS's around the world willing to be a distro site for you). The difficulty was in competing. If you weren't from Europe you had to fly there to compete. Flying cost money.

In 1993 I was eating noodle packs and Cheese Macaroni, struggling to make it through university. Money was very hard to come by. I wanted so badly to attend a demo party, compete in a music compo, but simply could not afford to. My feelings were shared by almost 20 other American musicians (that is to say, the entire American music scene).

When I had started university just a few months earlier, I learned about this thing called "The Internet". Crazy as it might sound, you could call up FTP sites from around the world and use only a local phone line for your connection! No longer did I have to pay expensive telephone charges for downloading new files from BBS's. I could even write "electronic mail" and send it anywhere in the world in less than a day. Simply incredible.

I gradually started to find other demo sceners who also had Internet accounts. We amused ourselves with whacky .sig files, ytalk, and trading address of different FTP sites. We gossiped about Future Crew, when/if Scream Tracker 3.0 would ever come out, and who the best musician in the world was. I found and read my first copy of DemoNews.

One day in the middle of September, I was in shower getting cleaned up for school. It hit me. Why not have a "virtual" demo party music compo? Yeah! I could collect entries on a BBS and have judges download and vote on them, rather than fly to Europe and listen to them at a party. I could even send email to some demo sceners on the Internet to get the word out.

Music Contest was born.