Synchrony, one of the US’s last active demoparties

Software cracking was especially prevalent in the C64 gaming community and when a new game was released crackers would race to become the first to remove copy protection so that the game could be modified and copied. According to Tamás Polgár, a scene veteran and the author of FREAX: The Brief History of the Demoscene, at the same time that software crackers were exploring the technical possibilities latent in the C64, gatherings known as “copyparties” began springing up all over Europe. A new generation of powerful and affordable PCs, most notably the Commodore Amiga, coupled with the development of tracking, which allowed for complex electronic music composition, allowed software crackers to create artistic programs that would’ve been unthinkable when the C64 was released a decade earlier.

Source: www.vice.com