In which we consider the dearth of activity on the Atari Falcon over the last few years, but a welcome revival and rebirth has followed this more recently.

What happened?

The Atari Falcon has had a long and distinguished career, ever since its launch in 1993 (did anyone get their machines in 1992?) The Atari demo scene was dominated by that platform for the rest of that decade. We all fondly recall the likes of EKO, Lazer, Avena, Escape, and plenty more. For the first years, the Falcon excelled over what it had done previously. The future seemed to be bright with golden possibilities.

After a few years, the Falcon shared the plaudits with a revived ST scene, slowing down from that first excited rush of activity. The lower hanging fruit had been picked. Breaking limits was a bit more difficult, but not impossible. However, as the first ten years passed by, it was becoming apparent that interest in the Falcon had plateau'd. A brief dalliance with higher end accelerators petered out in the mid-2000's. We were seemingly left with little more than fond memories of times past.

A good a place as any to go to for confirmation of that hunch, is the Pouet 'prods list'. Searching under Atari Falcon shows that the last major period of activity was mid-2006. This coincided with two big '060 demos, 'Derealisation' and 'Supernatural', not to mention the Chosneck 5 magazine and demo from Mystic Bytes. After then, activity doesn't completely stop, but it becomes much sparser.

Hidden away in there is the triple helping of Black Lotus demo ports to the '060, culminating in 'Starstruck' in May 2009. This provides some relief for fans of the higher end Falcon but little consolation for owners of unmodified hardware. For the period from 2007-ish, there are a few music disks, some games, and more disturbingly, a thing made with the words 'Dildo' and 'Fatwa' in them. It seems that we're staring at the end, my friend?

However, let's go to the Sillyventure parties, for a revival of fortunes. The 2011 party had a Falcon invite, and also a VGA mode puzzler from Cooper of Paradize Software at the party itself.

It was at the 2012 party, that the Falcon made more of a determined comeback. As well as the invite, we've also got a couple of proper demo entries at last! A small but welcome life sign from Extream, and a more ambitious production from Paradox. Their demo, called '2x1287' was a commemoration of the Falcon's 20th anniversary. It managed to do this, but pointed out the dearth of recent activity even more emphatically than I could manage. This was not billed as a kick-ass multi effect demo, but managed to hang together well, considering its rapid creation.

At the same time, Thadoss of Dune was showing other possibilities for a revived Falcon, that of successfully emulating a kick-ass high end game console, with his Sega styled game 'Beats of Rage'. There was also another game from Paradize as well.

Elsewhere in late 2012, a conversation with Beetle, manages to produce a port of the 'Planet Hively' music disk for 060 class Falcons.

After that splurge of activity, it's gone quiet again, apart from another port of a high end Amiga demo, this time, the Revision 2012 winner 'Kioea' from Mad Wizards, brought to us by Britelite in May 2013 at the Outline party.

We're waiting until the next Sillyventure wave of activity at the end of 2013.

The pattern almost repeats itself, with a couple of intro's from Lamers, who are very new to the Falcon, and a welcome reappearance of an old friend, namely Sqward of Mystic Bytes, whose contribution was a new demo, 'in2ituion' for the standard Falcon. This was good, but appeared to be a few effects short. Sqward revealed that some DSP-based effects he was trying, didn't come off.

Thadoss is also back with another brash and bold game, this one is 'Racer', a racing game, naturellement!

Of course, we've still got the best to come. As a revived Doug Little releases his first version of 'Doom on the Falcon', namely the 'Badmood' engine, at an alpha stage release in January 2014. This is actual official no compromises proper ID Software 'Doom' worked to run decently even on a standard Falcon (with 14 MB). Doug promises further improvements and an enhanced game experience to follow.

The next landmark for the Falcon comes completely out of the blue. It's a new release of Ace Tracker from New Beat, now at a version 2.0 with loads of new features in June 2014. Maybe we will still see Willies Adventures completed one day?

Whilst we're waiting for what delights the 2014 edition of Sillyventure will bring, Insane of tSCc ports over a couple of old but classic releases from Fit, namely 'Stercus Accidit' and 'Hex Pistols' in September 2014. For these releases, they were intended to be easily portable to different formats. In the case of Stercus Accidit, this may have been previously done by another, who did not release it as they had other projects in mind?

But it is at Sillyventure 2014 where it all came together for the Falcon.

Apart from the jungle themed invite from Thadoss, we had a properly stocked demo competition. Extream were back with some 'old stuff' which freshened up nicely. There were a couple of entries representing the higher end Falcons, with a brand new release 'Payback 2015' from Dekadance and some 'Unexpected Fun' from Orion. However, the clear winner was on the standard Falcon, where Thadoss and others excelled themselves with 'Tere Ra'i'. This beautiful demo has its own review in the demos section.

But the fun did not stop there, as Thadoss pulled out a massively revamped and enhanced 'Racer 2' in the gaming competition.

We also had a couple more massive releases, which were at Sillyventure, but not in the competitions. These were a port of the latest Black Lotus opus, 'Rift', which was the 2014 winner of Revision. Also, Doug Little was back with his latest work, 'Badmood Beta', which was everything promised.

What next?

So we've written briefly about the highlights of the last few years on the Atari Falcon. The tone of the article includes some degree of relief that there have been highlights to enjoy. It does seem that the Falcon is back as of the end of 2014, but what of now and the future?

In the period since last December, there's not been a sausage on the demo front. The Atari STe has re-emerged as the dominant format of choice for innovation and new ideas on the Atari demo scene. This is not a complaint, as the STE is my other favourite hardware.

On the other hand, the Falcon is still making waves as a first choice of top class gaming platform. Anima has provided an optimised 'ChorenSha', which is reviewed separately, and completely redefines the implementation of massive arcade quality shoot-em-ups. With a bit of work, the Falcon seems to be capable of running games made for the Sharp X68000, which is practically an arcade machine! We wait with interest what will come from that direction.

For the Falcon 060, we have an officially Team 17 blessed port of 'Worms' from Beetle. This was shown at Outline, and keenly awaited for a final release.

Slightly further in the future, signs and portents are Doug Little shaped, as he's shown off a working Quake 2 engine for a standard machine. It looks like there is even crazier and limit bending stuff to come from him soon?

We would like to ask about the whereabouts of the previous big players like Dead Hackers? The Nature Brothers were showing a Supervidel powered arcade shooter. it has been suggested there are more goodies waiting their chance.

So in conclusion, we have gone from a quiet period of limited activity, to a time where more significant releases are making their way out again, if on a lower overall level than before. We're not going to get back the heady days of 1993-95, but the quality of what we're getting will be better than ever.

Great times for the Falcon flying, now and in the future!

CiH - For Maggie 25th Anniversary issue, September 2015.

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