Madison on the keys. Just a quick report from the Boom! Party in Poland, which I had the pleasure to visit. Boom! Party is located in the northern center of Poland, about 100km south of Gdansk in the village of Tuchola. We left Berlin with our rented camper van Friday morning, the 24th of July. I was only able to convince my family to join because the party location is surrounded by forest with a river going by closely. The trip from Berlin took us about 6 hours but it was well worth it. Boom! Party is not your regular German Demo Scene party. The orga team around Steffan and Sachy made sure this is a proper Polish party with bonfire, sausages and a big enough dance floor to keep everyone one their feet till late at night, and have a ‘deftiges’ breakfast at 9 in the morning.

Madison & Sachy

Other then many parties I’ve visited, the focus was less on the sceners setting up their beloved machines in a dark room. Stary Tartak (‘old sawmill’) has a large, fairly bright room which had mostly seating for the compos (overview video). Compos would start on Friday and Saturday around 6:30 pm, and would end latest by 10 pm. There were live acts and constant dance music playing outside, and fortunately the weather made it super nice to hang out outside the whole time.

DJ Wacek live gig

Boom! Party is strict on the compo focus: C64 and Amiga OCS - that’s it! It happened more then once that I got asked, which do I prefer. This was not about which is the better machine, but only about which one you love more :) And you could see this with the quality of the compo entries (check the results on Demozoo for Boom! Party).

Mystic and TRSI made first place in Amiga demo (Dataverse) and graphics (Sentinel of Time) compos, with this beautiful pixel monument by Vasyl, which gave me Chaos Engine vibes. Tedi has been working on a new engine for the crazy effects in Dataverse (looking forward to continue that chat at Deadline in October!) and the results are remarkable for an unpimped Amiga 500!

Tedi acceptance speech at price giving ceremony

We drove back on Sunday noon after the price giving ceremony, a bit heady hearted. Was it worth it the long drive? Hell yeah! :) I hope to be back in 2 years to join this great party and meet the amazing sceners in Tuchola again.