It takes guts to enter a competition or explore a new discipline for the first time - all the more we celebrate and welcome new talents into our scene: from brilliant new musicians, coders pushing their skills to graphics artists bringing fresh ideas and styles to the scene.

This category recognises demosceners that either made a memorable entrance in the past year with their first productions, or suddenly came to full glory with a breakthrough improvement to their skill. We are excited about our nominees’ potential, and can’t wait to see them slipping into the other categories in the coming years!

Pushing boundaries has always been at the demoscene’s core. Sceners don't just reproduce what others have done before. Whether by technical experimentation on exotic platforms, breaking with tradition or complacency, or bringing a breath of fresh air in style choices, they strive to break new ground and expand the creative vocabulary of the scene.

With this category we recognize productions that went off the beaten path, left their (and the audience’s) comfort zones behind and brought us something new that made us sit up during a competition. Polish, execution or lack thereof do not matter here, it’s the idea that counts.

Amazing still images like nominees in this category can meet the 4 kilobyte limit only with one thing: massive polish. Over the past fifteen years shaders have become more and more elaborate, and have been the starting point for many new talents as well as hobby to seasoned (or returning) demosceners, thanks to an ever growing, constructive and friendly community.

This category does not just honour the undoubted technical prowess and mastery of rendering algorithms, but also factors in composition, concept, artistic choice and complexity of the depicted scenes.

From A for “Amstrad” to Z for ZX Spectrum: 40 years after the emergence of the home computers and - inevitably - the first demos, we still push the boundaries on the hardware this scene first hailed from. To this day, hundreds of productions each year celebrate the nostalgia, limitations and unique challenges that these platforms present.

And we celebrate with them - the best overall productions running on a platform with an 8-bit bus or smaller.

From the late 80s to this day, technical possibilities took a leap forward with the introduction of the Amiga series and other 16-bit platforms. And as we have seen over the past years, this category regularly holds surprises even for its own disciples.

With over 40 years of computer history on the scene, separating "oldschool" from "newschool" just isn't enough. In this category, we honour productions on the platforms with a 16-bits bus that might have seemed unfairly powerful compared to the competition. This category also includes the newschool fantasy consoles that harken back to the good old days but with a bit more processing kick.

It is no secret that a good soundtrack is a democompo half won. Music and sound do not just connect the scenes and visuals of a production, they draw the audience into a prod’s pacing, anticipation and relief. Even more so if the music manages this within the limitations of intros or oldschool platforms.

We honour the productions that did not just produce great music along with the visuals, but where both truly intertwine into an audio-visual artwork, with the soundtrack at its core and centre.

What does the demoscene stand for, if not for pushing the envelope and delivering productions that impress even fellow aficionados and experts on their respective platforms? This category may be one of the oldest, most natural to our community, honoring prods that make possible what would have been dismissed as impossible before, leaving the audience with open mouths and the question “WHAT?!” on their minds.

While we traditionally show-off technical capabilities in demos, the demoscene evolved to deliver a true feast for the eye. This category does not only address intricate designs, new approaches to play with light and shadow effects or composition of colours. It celebrates and honours the productions that go beyond the demonstration of skill, to create something that is aesthetically significant even to a wider audience outside the demoscene.

Recent decades have not made it easier for demosceners to test their mettle. With the increasing processing power and variety of modern computers, the look of a demo was more often than not determined by the hardware one could afford rather than the craftsmanship and dedication of its makers. Limitations had to be artificially set by demosceners that still wanted to challenge themselves and others in competition.

Hence intros, size-restricted demos, became a master discipline of the demoscene, and with it the fierce competition for the best effects, the most intricate sound engineering and synthesis, and eventually story-telling and composition in a trade-off against maximum file sizes. This category honours the best productions in tiny (byte-sized) to maximum 64 kilobyte-sized intros.

When making a demo, one might not immediately have direction in mind - after all, thinking about guiding the eye through a purely computer-generated scene may be counter-intuitive. And yet direction is what breathes life into a production, turning it from a pure effect show into an immersive work of art that tells a story.

The nominees in this category transform values to tools: lighting is not just there to make an object visible, but into giving it a surrounding and an ambience, the camera becomes an active protagonist, and plays with the audience’s focus and perception, timing and pacing convey moods and truly immerse us in the production.

The gloves are off, and the only limitations for this category are that it needs to run in realtime on a PC… and the availability and affordability of a powerful GPU. With the advent of third-party high-level engines, easy-to-use software for music and graphics and - as of late - generative art tools, productions need to go above and beyond in this category in order to stand out.

From original concepts and storytelling, collaboration between top-notch artists, great soundtracks, visual perfection or innovative direction methods: For these productions, all those threads must come together to earn them a nomination in this category.