In here, you'll find a couple of stories of thing we've experienced through out the hardcore computing years.

"Breakthrough 2" by Panic - a homage to Flash Inc.
We released "Prometheus Unbound" in October 1992, and it would show that alot of groups liked it. Especially this finnish group called PANIC. I can't remember when I got their "Breakthrough 2" demo, but it showed that these guys were inspired by "Prometheus". Apart from that they used alot of finnish flags in the demo (we used swedish flags in our demo), they had copied the whole design and code idea from our 1120 scroll-plot part. They had the plots and the logo that said "PANIC - Finland number one in Icehockey", just like we wrote FLASH INC - "Sweden number one in Icehockey" (Sweden had just won the worldchampionships in hockey). Eventhough their parts weren't any better, I think the demo created a great buzz in the FHI camp. Too bad it didn't inspire us to do a new demo... Anyways, try to get hold of "Breakthrough 2" by PANIC and check it out.

Ex-M of ARM meets his idols from Sweden
It was the beginning of August 1991 and Me and The Spy had reached the last destination on our Interrail-tour through Europe. We were in Avenza, Italy to visit our good friends Zagor & Zoris of The Force, and we were about to stay there for 11 days. The guys had told their friends that we were coming, so we got to meet some other scene related people that was living near by. One of them was a guy called Ex-M of ARM. He had called up the guys a day or so before we came to Avenza, because he didn't know how to behave when he met us and he needed a few tips.

We had only stayed there for two days, when Ex-M called again. He had been training infront of the mirror, going: "Hi, I'm Ex-M of ARM, nice to meet you", or, "Hi guys, pleasure to meet you", but still he was very unsure of himself. I mean, he saw us like the gods of something I DON'T KNOW WHAT! Probably something extraordinary, but we never had that type of attitude, so we just thought Zoris was kidding us when he told us all these things (they talked in Italian ofcourse, so we didn't know what they were talking about). When we finally arrived at Ex-M's place he was trying to show off and was quite rude. He tried to impress us by showing his mixing skills. He wasn't very good, and he looked worse when Gabriel of THE FORCE, who had joined us on our trip, got up and showed him how things should be done. It was all a strange situation for us, but fun at the same time, and you know, our italian friends were just making fun of him and reminding him of thing he said on the phone, and why was trying to be so cool.

The Woise of Maniax story
I visited Unifier when he was living in Örebro sometime in 1991, it must have been right before the last Horizon party. I told him that I'd heard that the latest SH0CK issue was out and I wanted it because it was so darn good! He said that there's was this guy called Woise of MANIAX that lives nearby, why not call him and ask? I gave him a call and introduced myself, said I was in town and asked for the new SH0CK issue. He took a fast look and said, "Yes, I have it". When we arrived, we found out that this guy was a real Flash fan. And so there we sat, in this boy's room (he was around 14) waiting for him to find the disc with SH0CK on. I thought it was a bit strange that he couldn't find it, because he said he had it over the phone.

Then the phone rang. It was a guy from his group and he couldn't believe it when Woise told him that he had two members from Flash in his room (WOW!:-). The guy on phone really wanted to talk to us and so he started to ask us ALOT of questions about just everything. A couple of minutes after that phone call, Woise mother came into the room with soda and cookies. Now wasn't that sweet? The cookies looked weird but were really tasty so we ate them all. One hour had passed, but still no SH0CK. But suddenly: FLASH!!!!!! Woise picked up his camera and took a picture of us when we weren't ready and he didn't ask either. We started to laugh and asked him why he didn't ask. He said that he wanted to have proof of that we actually had been there and he showed us his book of pictures of guys from the scene. So there we are now, Unifier and me, in this book somewhere in Örebro. By the way, the SH0CK issue was never found.

Morpheus calls Mr. Z
Well, as every other game maniac, I collected every game I could get my hand of in the old days. One of them were "Yie Ar Kung-Fu" from IMAGINE, and ofcourse it was cracked by Mr. Z as almost every game you had. When the game intro came up, a phone number was written there. I threw myself on the phone and a lady in her 40's answered, and I said: "I want to talk to Mr. Z, please". What happened next was that she started to scream like a madman, "Who are you?", Why are you calling?", "Where did you get this number??". At that time I was 12 years old, didn't know much so I said: "I saw it in a game, and...". "What game?", she screamed. She kept on screaming, so I hung up.

A couple of years ago, The Spy and I were talking memories, and I mentioned this story to him. He told me that his old school mate (Pseudo) went to the class as Mr. Z and he knew the story behind this phone number. It was like this: a guy in this school that though he was the coolest one around because he had an Amiga 1000. Zoltan (Mr. Z) didn't think so, got tired of him and put the guys' number in "Yie Ar Kung-Fu" and according to Pseudo, hundreds of calls were made to that number, so no wonder that lady was mad! Today, I have his real phone number, but I haven't had the guts to call him...:-)

THE REBELS/AGILE party in Tyresö/Stockholm/Sweden
Yes, THE REBELS/AGILE party... Ahh.. My whole scene carrer started in a group called PEEK & POKE. We were four guys, with no special skills at all. This perticular party was the first one I ever visited. I went with Jum-Jum (Hellcat, Space Ace, Squelch) from P&P and it was the biggest thing. There we were with the Swedish elite around us, from SUPER SWAP SWEDEN to THUNDERCATS to AGILE. We were so amazed. The first thing that happened after we had unpacked my computer, was that the guys from THE REBELS came up to us and introduced themselves and asked who we were. They were really kind to us, and that's something I'll never forget. They asked us if we were gonna perticipate in the demo compo, but we said no because we had nothing to use. At that time, we only knew how to rip things and swap. They told us that maybe we could change the scrolltext in one of our older demos and go with that. We had one of our demo's with us, but Jum-Jum said that Andy Capp (Dark Lord, Squeek) had done something special with the scrolltext and that it was impossible to change it. Some years later when I was able to go into a monitor and check it out myself, I found out that each letter in the scroll-text were written like this: "A, shift+A - (rvs on)A, shift+A(rvs off)". Really neat. Really special, huh?

One other funny thing that happened at the party was when we were staring at our idols SUPER SWAP SWEDEN working on their new party demo. I can recall that Kjer and Bagder looked at us with this "watcha want lamebrains"-look. There we were, probably the smallest, most unknown group in the scene sitting only a couple of metres away from this HUGE group, staring us blind. It was scary! We had no friends there (apart from Trinity of AGILE), this TRONIX guy wrote about "lamers standing behind him staring at his TV-screen" in his party demo, my local Tensta-'friend', Qix of STAGE 3, didn't talk to us, we put a big scratch in the table we had my computer on, we couldn't change our demo and over all, it wasn't a lot of fun. We went home the next day.