Interview with Alien of Virtual Dreams/FLT. by Hollywood. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Enigmatic. Finnish. Alien. Interview. Read. - Were you a cute baby? Hmm, well that's what people say. At least, I was cuter than I am nowadays. :) - When did you first touch an Amiga keyboard? About 1988... a friend of mine had bought an Amiga and I _tried_ to use Protracker with it :) - What was your first demo like? And do you think anyone still has a copy? It was an intro called "Waterfall", and it was also the first intro featuring Jaco's graphics.. it was a _really_ lame vertically scrolling 'Hit Squadron' logo, a water effect, and a scroller...quite a lot like my demos nowadays :) I certainly hope there are no copies of it left .. - I think a few people are unclear as to what exactly you do in Virtual Dreams, and what part you've played in their productions. Could you tell us? I do all sorts of things, mainly coding and music, and I have rendered a couple of logos for VD, even.. I can't really draw anything, so I had to buy a P150 to get Lightwave and Photoshop running at reasonable speed.. As for my work for VD, I've done some music for "Absolute Inebriation", a couple of pictures, some music and vector-routine coding in Fullmoon, one vector logo for Love (hmm, that's like nothing ?!), coding and music for BreathTaker, Trance 1:24 and Faktory, 50% of coding and all the gfx for Nagual, one crack intro (crappy shit), Assembly95 Invitation coding... That's all I can remember for now. - Were you always happy with VD's association with Fairlight? What were the advantages of it for you? We (me, Skull, Jaco, Tsunami, Bart, Matti&Teppo) joined Fairlight because it was easier to get noticed at first (far easier than starting from scratch) and because FLT had some really cool boards (it was easier to get cool warez and so on..) We thought about joining some other teams, too, but we thought Fairlight was a legend and it was worth joining... Yes, I am pretty happy with this symbiosis with FLT, just go check out the Fairlight WWW-pages at www.fairlight.com .. it will contain lots of graphics by us when it's finished. - Do you get on well with the other VD-ers? Or do you secretly hate them all? Well, I haven't killed any of them... yet :) Of course, we have different opinions about different things (design-ideas-colour maps etc.) but the group spirit has been generally pretty good. - Had you already made up your mind to make Faktory your farewell demo on the Amiga before your computer got stolen at The Party 5? I started writing "Third Eye" some weeks before Assembly'95, and because it never got finished we decided to take some routines from it and slash them together with some nice pictures that Jaco had made.. So it wasn't going to be a farewell demo, it was just made to get some money from TP95 :) As usual, things fucked up, Jaco got ill and wasn't able to finish the GFX/design (that's one of the reasons why it doesn't look too good in some parts; Kerberos did some pretty nice photoshopping on the images at TP95, though..) I ran out of time (nothing new, ehh?). Faktory was supposed to run on A1200 standard and fit onto one disk (now it doesn't even work on all 4mb+68030-machines thanks to the stupid way it uses memory. I was going to fix it but it seems to be pretty much impossible now... - Are Jaco's amazing pictures in that demo partially digitised? Yes, partly digitized, hand-drawn, Photoshop-composed and converted with ADPro.. nothing rendered this time. - Do you really believe the message of "Faktory", that machines are taking over our lives? Not really; it just sounded (or looked) cool :-) - What are your Virtual Dreams for the future of Alien? I guess we'll start making PC-demos with Jaco, and I'm also interested in making a video demo and some commercial music.. it would be pretty nice if I knew where to sell this kind of stuff, though :) - What are the other Virtual Dreamers working on? Tsunami & Jaco are studying, Skull & Kerberos are working on commercial side; they're currently working on a network-game with Hybrid's Surrender-gfx-engine on PC (I guess it will be great). They're also doing commercial graphics for all sorts of projects, such as WWW-pages and so-on. You can get more information about current VD projects from http://vdreams.icon.fi .. Open Eyes + Zany have been inactive for some time now, they're also working on with their studies. VD modem section is also keeping a pretty low profile these days; the only members of VD who have an Amiga are Jaco and Bart, so I think VD Amiga is DEAD! Maybe an intro or two will be released... - Do you ever have virtual dreams? :) :) "Cool guys don't dream. Cool guys can see their dream in the middle of the day." --------------------------------------------------------------------------- INDEX