Paper: Alex's 64k demo from 1996

Before Alex Evans was Alex Evans, he was a demoscene coder who went by the name Statix. "Paper" is one of his better known demos, which is just 64kb of hand written assembly language...

This was made in the days before 3d accelerators and graphics cards – everything is rendered by hand. But the thing that was coolest about it was that it was all about paper planes. An early time travelling nod to Tearaway, perhaps?!

The demo was first shown at a demo party in Belgium, Wired '96 – a demo party is a bit like a massive LAN party, where hundreds of geeks bring their PCs to a large hall for 3 sleepless days, but instead of playing games, they create music, graphics and code.

During the last day of wired '96, hundreds of people folded paper aeroplanes, and chucked them into the air. It was a wonderful moment to behold, until some poor bastard got one in the eye, leapt to his feet screaming unprintable French curse words. I felt quite guilty about it for some time…

– Alex Evans