Outracks
Encyclopedia
Outracks is a Norwegian
Norway
Norway , officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic unitary constitutional monarchy whose territory comprises the western portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula, Jan Mayen, and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and Bouvet Island. Norway has a total area of and a population of about 4.9 million...

 demogroup
Demogroup
Demogroups are teams of demosceners, who make computer based audio-visual works of art known as demos. Demogroups form a subculture collectively known as the demoscene....

 who released their first demo
Demo (computer programming)
A demo is a non-interactive multimedia presentation made within the computer subculture known as the demoscene. Demogroups create demos to demonstrate their abilities in programming, music, drawing, and 3D modeling...

 in 2002. Best known for the demo "Synthematik
Synthematik
Synthematik is a demo made by the Norwegian demogroup Outracks in 2004. It was first presented at the demoscene party Scene Event, where it won third place, although many critics saw it as the moral winner of the competition. It was nominated for "Breakthrough Performance" in the 2004 Scene.org...

" from 2004, which got nominated for the "Breakthrough Performance" award at Scene.org
Scene.org
Scene.org is a non-profit organization, providing the currently largest demoscene file repository. It was founded in 1996 by Jaakko "Mellow-D" Manninen, though originally it existed as ftp.fm.org, an FTP-server for releases from the group Five Musicians. In 1997, it re-opened as Scene.org...

 Awards 2005, Outracks is still active today (as of 2009) in the Norwegian and European demoscene
Demoscene
The demoscene is a computer art subculture that specializes in producing demos, which are non-interactive audio-visual presentations that run in real-time on a computer...

.

Style

Outracks' demos are typically up-tempo, energetic and clean-looking. The visuals tend to be non-photorealistic and not containing much artistic content. Simplistic coder-art and procedural objects or simulation-effects are frequently featured. After Synthematik
Synthematik
Synthematik is a demo made by the Norwegian demogroup Outracks in 2004. It was first presented at the demoscene party Scene Event, where it won third place, although many critics saw it as the moral winner of the competition. It was nominated for "Breakthrough Performance" in the 2004 Scene.org...

 (2004), Outracks adopted the four red slashes as logo for the group, and the characteristic bright red logo in contrast with a rather colorless environment is found in Synthematik
Synthematik
Synthematik is a demo made by the Norwegian demogroup Outracks in 2004. It was first presented at the demoscene party Scene Event, where it won third place, although many critics saw it as the moral winner of the competition. It was nominated for "Breakthrough Performance" in the 2004 Scene.org...

 (2004), Blockbuster (2005) and Genesis (2006).

The music for most Outracks-demos after 2003 is made by Ivar "Irvin" Kvalvik. The music style spans in a variety of pure electronic flavours eventually featuring nostalgic chiptune
Chiptune
A chiptune, also known as chip music, is synthesized electronic music often produced with the sound chips of vintage computers and video game consoles, as well as with other methods such as emulation. In the early 1980s, personal computers became cheaper and more accessible than they had previously...

-like leads, in new school production. No Kelvin had a recorded vocal soundtrack which got very popular, though many critics found the demo itself unfit for its soundtrack.

Outracks is a PC/Windows-oriented demo group having produced only hardware-accelerated 3D-demos to date. All demos up to "No Kelvin" were written against OpenGL
OpenGL
OpenGL is a standard specification defining a cross-language, cross-platform API for writing applications that produce 2D and 3D computer graphics. The interface consists of over 250 different function calls which can be used to draw complex three-dimensional scenes from simple primitives. OpenGL...

 1.1-drivers, being able to run smoothly even on fairly old graphics hardware. Later productions require shader model 2.0 to run, somewhat shrinking the audience but maintaining much of the same style.

Accomplishments

  • 1st place at The Gathering 2004 demo competition with our.demo
  • Nominated for "Breakthrough performance" in the scene.org awards for 2004.
  • 1st place at The Gathering 2007 demo competition with gamma
    Gamma
    Gamma is the third letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 3. It was derived from the Phoenician letter Gimel . Letters that arose from Gamma include the Roman C and G and the Cyrillic letters Ge Г and Ghe Ґ.-Greek:In Ancient Greek, gamma represented a...

  • Won "Best Soundtrack" in the scene.org awards for 2007 with gamma
    Gamma
    Gamma is the third letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 3. It was derived from the Phoenician letter Gimel . Letters that arose from Gamma include the Roman C and G and the Cyrillic letters Ge Г and Ghe Ґ.-Greek:In Ancient Greek, gamma represented a...


Members

  • Duckers (Anders Lassen) - programming
  • Irvin (Ivar Kvalvik) - music
  • Znork (Kjetil Åltvedt) - graphics

Major releases

  • our.demo - (1st at The Gathering 2004)
  • Synthematik
    Synthematik
    Synthematik is a demo made by the Norwegian demogroup Outracks in 2004. It was first presented at the demoscene party Scene Event, where it won third place, although many critics saw it as the moral winner of the competition. It was nominated for "Breakthrough Performance" in the 2004 Scene.org...

     - (3rd at Scene Event 2004)
  • Little ball of water - (2nd at Kindergarden 2004)
  • We are the robots (1st at Digilab 2005)
  • No Kelvin - (2nd at The Gathering 2005)
  • Blockbuster - (1st at Scene Event 2005)
  • Genesis - (2nd at The Gathering 2006)
  • Summer Encounter - (1st at Solskogen 2006)
  • Still puzzled? - (1st at Digilab 2007)
  • Gamma - (1st at The Gathering 2007)
  • Raiders of the Lost Art - (1st at Kindergarden 2008 - Invitation demo for The Gathering 2009)

External links

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