We loved keygens back in the day. Our lawyers advise us to clarify that it’s because of the demo-scene style music embedded in them, not because we used them for piracy. [Patch] must feel the same way, as he has a lovely historical retrospective out on “The Internet’s Most Illegal Music” (embedded below).
After defining what he’s talking about for the younger set, who may never have seen a keygen in this degenerate era of software-by-subscription, [Patch] traces the history of the jaunty chiptunes that were so often embedded in this genre of program. He starts with the early demoscene and its relationship with cracker groups — those are coders who circulate “cracked” versions of games, with the copyright protection removed. In the old days, they’d embed an extra loading screen to take credit for the dastardly deeds that our lawyer says to disavow.
Because often the same people creating the amazing audio-video demos of the “demoscene” were involved in cracking, those loading screens could sometimes outshine the games themselves. (We saw it at a friend’s house one time.) There was almost always excellent music provided by the crackers, and given the limitations of the hardware of the era, it was what we’d know of today as a “chiptune”.
The association between crackers and chiptunes lasted long after the chips themselves had faded into obsolescence. Part of the longevity of the tracker-built tunes is that in the days of dial-up you’d much rather a keygen with a .MOD file embedded than an .mP3, or god forbid, an uncompressed .WAV that would take all day to download.
Nowadays, chiptunes are alive and well, and while they try and hearken back more to the demoscene than the less savory side of their history, the connection to peg-legged programmers is a story that deserves to be told. The best part of the video is the link to keygenmusic.tk/ where you can finally find out who was behind that bopping track that’s been stuck in your head intermittently since 1998. (When you heard it at a computer lab, not on your own machine, of course.)
The demoscene continues to push old machines to new heights, and its spirit lives on in hacking machines like the RP2040.
For more info on the demoscene itself, “Moleman 2: The Art of the Algorithms”, from 2012, is a feature-length documentary that’s available for free on YouTube, and it goes into more detail about the demoscene and its history.
For a great site on the music front of things that’s still alive despite some pretty terrible server issues of late, don’t hesitate to check out SceneSat.
For demos themselves across all platforms, Pouët is a one-stop-shop for all your needs.
Moleman 2 – Demoscene – The Art of the Algorithms (2012)
Moleman
6 Apr 2012
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRkZcTg1JWU
Your lawyers are no fun.
useless use of Your ;)
+1
Honestly, I didn’t check with legal; I just ran with the least fun thing they could say as a gag.
Introduction to Chiptunes – InversePhase (Brendan Becker)
Vintage Computer Federation
14 Jul 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0v712l2RWE
awesome talk and perfect timing. Toby Fox got me on a chiptunes kick. I’m gunna go jam on a SNES
When Introversion released Darwinia in 2005 they had a few “bootloader” screens as a nod to the past, including one with moving text claiming the game had been cracked by the DMA Crew. Allegedly it caused a bit of a panic when someone at Valve saw it just before the game was due to be released, and there were a lot of slightly concerned forum posts asking about it as well. I remember watching those screens for a while, just because of the music.
All I want is a safe copy of Photoshop 2020, and I don’t care if there are chip tunes! Adobe removed it from their site so you can’t even legit buy it any more! They’re evil. I would even be happy with Photoshop CS2019 but no, they removed that too.
Chiptune is a rather vague umbrella term, including but not limited to:
Integrated synthesizers and drum machines on 8/16/32 bit hardware (2A03, YM chips)
Sound font playback (SNES, PS1)
At some point certain things should not be colloquially referred to as chiptune:
MOD music (is more a PC specific thing, is not part of any game consoles)
Any physical performance whatsoever (chip tunes are a subset of computer music)
New or modern instruments or hardware (which might emulate chiptune sounds but is still distinctly not a chiptune. Chiptunes must be on hardware with integrated sound capabilities, which is NOT a PC. However FM synthesis from a soundcard might qualify.)
MOD music originated on the Amiga with Ultimate Soundtracker– which absolutely was on hardware with integrated sound capabilities. The Amiga was a “personal computer” but not a PC. I’ll let you decide how that fits into your definition. In any case, for me (and I suspect the majority) it’s about the sound, not the synthesis method.
Back in the day my back then employer hosted a server for demo scene music. These were exe files with a maximum size of 64kb and they had to have an entire song with music video inside them. There were thousands of files stored there and synced to other servers. It was pretty crazy. We had a program running with a TV in the background, playing random scene music all day long on a CRT TV.
Good to have a source for these old tunes without having to get a trojan on my machine :)
I love how every comment I post pointing out editing errors gets deleted but the errors don’t get fixed.
Effort well spent.
Really professional.
I see one comment from you in the trash pile. I did not delete it, but I expect someone felt it did not meet minimum standards of decorum.
I was also left puzzled by the correction you posited because it looks like in every version of the post stored on our servers, [Patch]’s name was, in fact, present; what I as the author didn’t realize is that wordpress takes “patch” as a tag when you put it in square brackets. I had left his name uncapitalized to match his YouTube handle. That’s my bad for doing my proofreading in the editor, I suppose.
This was corrected in the first paragraph, by the editor you were maligning. You were correct in pointing out we’re missing a name or pronoun in the second paragraph (again, P vs p in the name made it not show up), but you did it in a way that makes your complaints about professionalism ring very hollow.
At least he didn’t mention clams.
Many current keygens continue have wonderful music.
It should be noted that many early crack intros (C64 specifically) used music that were made for other games. One of the more famous examples of this is the classic Fairlight intro that uses music from the C64 game Druid II – Enlightenment from Firebird Software. The use of existing in-game music also spread to the demo scene (though I am lacking a good example of that at the moment). A good tune is a good tune. Conversely, some demoscene chiptune artists also wound up contributing to games (JCH / Maniacs of Noise for the game Batman, I believe).