| Amiga Scene Groups
"Stellar - Gods Themselves"
A well-known Amiga demo scene group from Finland.
In spring 1992, the Finnish division of Equinox led by Dalmak (who used the handle Orion at the time) joined Vision, only to leave almost immediately to form a new team, Stellar.
The group soon became known of their nice intros, which they released at a respectable rate. However, despite the outstanding quality of their products, Stellar never quite managed to make it into the legend category. They also had many talented members leave for "better" teams. Groo / CNCD once defined Stellar to me as "a group from which people join to Complex and other famous ones." For the most "elite" sceners Stellar seemed to be nothing but a comic relief, although they were prolific without neither sacrificing quality nor humor (most of which seemed to originate from Dalmak and Strobo). One reason for the legends' contempt might have been the small amount of big demo productions from Stellar, with the releases consisting almost solely of simple (but effective) intros.
In my opinion the best example of Stellar's style is Bananamen, an intro coded by Dweezil for Assembly'93. It introduced a never before seen fake-fractal-zoom'n'rotate effect to the Amiga scene inspiring many copycat intros during the following year.
In addition to their trademark intros, Stellar also produced the humorous Weekly "diskmag" (later remained into Stellar Times), the Gift of the Gods packdisk series by Dalmak, and - starting from issue #2 - the definitive Finnish scene chart Suomen Lista. The chart never got past issue #4, which is especially unfortunate since yours truly had already helped out by making a cool ASCII voting form for it. :)
For the duration of its existence, Stellar remained almost completely a Finnish group. A few people from abroad had their short stays, but without many notable achievements.
Around 1994-1995, as Amiga moved into the AGA era, Stellar started getting the recognition they deserved. With new members like Nose, Hook and Juliet&Case, they earned high standings in numerous demo party competitions.
The group quietly faded away in 1996, after the well received Lights demo. While most of the old members are quite invisible nowadays, Strobo (alias Niko Nyman) has even reached the UK TOP 40 with his Slusnik Luna music project.
As for personal encounters with Stellar people, I must say that Dalmak - despite freaking a friend of mine out with his psychedelic clothing - was one of the nicest people I ever met on the Amiga scene. Lobo was also a great guy, who unfortunately never got much of his skills put into use by the group.
Yes, knowing these persons might make my view of Stellar a bit biased. I always said I was their number one fan...
After getting nostalgic with UAE a few years ago, Mac has created a web page with most of the Stellar products available for download:
http://koti.mbnet.fi/~stellar/
Members:
still under construction - many diskmags to go through...
Information collected from various old Amiga diskmags and Stellar productions, plus my own memory from the good old days.
Some info, mainly considering the 1995-1996 members, came from Scenery Online at http://exotica.fix.no/info/scenery/online/s.html. Their list features some errors and missing data, about which I have noted the editor.
Before maliciously downvoting this, could you PLEASE /msg me and tell me what I have done wrong. Thank you.
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