Black Maiden

Black Maiden is a group of people — mainly from Europe — participating in various art disciplines like demos, music, textmode art, graphics design and graffiti. Black Maiden was founded in 1985 by two Luxemburgians known by the pseudonyms Voice and Tex, originally as an Amstrad CPC cracking group. Their interest in graphics grew and after doing pixel and game artwork on the Atari they moved on to the PC, where they discovered the textmode world of ANSI and ASCII and made their debut as an ANSI art group in December 1994.

During the rise of the European ANSI scene in the mid 1990s, Black Maiden became well known and established in the international textmode art scene. Several influential and well known artists (among those: Konami, Noize, Leonardo, Kyp and Avenger) released their work in artpacks called "BMBooks".

Through the fade of ANSI art in the late '90s, Black Maiden shifted their focus to the demo and music scene. Besides releasing artistic productions, the members of Black Maiden participate in the organization of Evoke, the second largest demo party in Germany, and coordinate additional demoscene-outreach related activities via Digitale Kultur e.V.

Other Black Maiden members are constantly producing music or are involved in many creative scene- and non-scene-disciplines.

Black Maiden members

* Amove (music)
* Avatar (booze)
* Avenger (ascii, ansi, 2d, org)
* Deviate (ansi, 2d)
* Dipswitch (ascii, music)
* Faxe (music)
* Jar (3d, code)
* Junk (2d, music)
* Kyp (ansi)
* Leonardo (ansi)
* Lord Chaos (ascii)
* Mool (booze)
* Mother (ascii)
* Nock (2d)
* Pandur (ansi, 3d, code, org)
* Poti (2d, org, booze)
* Potzkoten (ascii, ansi, 2d)
* Sarlac (code)
* Seltorn (ascii)
* Shiva (code)
* Smoke (ansi)
* Tex (founder)
* Toot (ansi)
* Voice (founder)
* Zaner (ascii, 2d)
* Zippy (ansi, 2d, music)

"Concrete" controversy

Black Maiden announced to release a demo called "Concrete" at The Ultimate Meeting in 2005. As they were working on the demo at the party, they gave the compo crew an unfinished test version to see if the engine works on the compo machine. They finished a "compo version" of the demo later, and won the competition with it. The group, however, insisted neither versions to be spread, because of the demo's largely unfinished state. This nevertheless wasn't enough to avoid the alleged test version of the demo to be available for a short period of time on the party's official FTP site, from where it began to spread among sceners. The file being later removed puzzled many, who didn't know the back story, but continued to share the file among each other in a rapid manner.

The demo eventually found its way to Pouët, where it garnered a major controversy, when Pouët-maintainers began to remove links for the demo and asking users posting links to remove the files from availability. Users of Pouët were quick to point out that the demo actually won the competition regardless of its state, and thus it should be traditionally shared for sceners to be able to judge the party results. Also, while the demo continued to spread via various Internet channels such as IRC, users began to experience strange problems such as the demo crashing with an error message even though it ran before. Black Maiden promised a fixed final version to be released in "about a week", but it didn't become reality.

Surprise came when on January 13, demogroup Limp Ninja presented a "cleaned up, cracked" version of the demo with an explanation: The demo featured a "timelock" that retrieved the Windows system date and crashed with an error message if the year value was larger or equal than 2006 - a feature that ensured that Black Maiden would have time to work on the final version while other's aren't able to watch the previous unfinished demo. (The "protection" was thus easily circumventable by rewinding the system clock.) Limp Ninja not only did remove this check (probably the first ever demo that actually needed to be cracked to run, albeit patching demos was nothing new), but changed around the demo's file structure which they found too messy, and added a little cracktro that ran every time someone tried to run the demo. Black Maiden members were reportedly amused by the "crack".

The final version of Concrete is still absent as of October 2006.

External links

* [http://www.blackmaiden.de Black Maiden official website]
* [http://www.pouet.net/groups.php?which=370 All Black Maiden demoscene products on pouet.net]