Commodore and community

An interesting thing happened at the Commodore LA Super Show last month in Burbank. I went to the show with three main objectives. Of course, one of them was to sell books (and I sold a few). The second was to demonstrate word processing on the Amiga with WordPerfect (a follow-up to the presentation I did about PaperClip on the Commodore 64from last year). But mostly, I wanted to tell the group about Escape from Arzack’s Castle, my new Amiga-inspired novel based on feedback I got from last year’s show.

I hoped to encourage a few of the attendees to sign up to be beta readers as I prepared for a second round of public feedback. I even transferred a chapter of my novel to WordPerfect to include in my presentation.

Then the unexpected happened. A group of the audience volunteered to create a demo based on the novel.

The demoscene is a big part of the Commodore community. Creators produce self-contained video and music programs on original hardware. What they can produce with a stock Commodore 64 or 1-MB Amiga is nothing short of amazing. We saw examples of this at a demo contest held at the Commodore LA Super Show. Since Escape from Arzack’s Castle is centered around a vintage video game…