Late August 2003, with Barcelona melting under an infernal heat, merlucin received a mysterious message from Trace, who was at Buenzli12 with bp in Switzerland and had decided to enter the Fast Compo.
More info
The instructions were simple: there had to be a cow, an organ and the parking lot from Kasparov's demo. Somehow, against all odds, Cow playing an organ in Kasparov's parking was born.
The demo was taking shape, but there was still one important thing missing: the music. Trace had the engine ready, xplsv's engine, developed by Mac, and there was already a 3D scene that could be used for the fly-by, so Merlucin was put in charge of making the whole thing sound appropriately apocalyptic. He contacted Dynimix, who, in remarkably little time, produced an organ based track and sent it over to Barcelona. Merlucin took it from there, adding some rhythm and cymbals until it started to sound less like an organ recital and more like the soundtrack to the end of civilisation.
The next challenge was getting the music back to Switzerland. Nobody seems to remember exactly how it happened, and at the time there were certainly no convenient cloud drives or instant file sharing services to save the day. The files somehow made their way from Barcelona to Buenzli12 through some arcane combination of whatever technology was available at the time, probably involving FTP, IRC, a modem and a considerable amount of faith. Somehow, Trace got the music, integrated it with the xplsv engine and the existing 3D scene, and the whole thing finally came together as a beautifully absurd piece of demoscene engineering.
The result was entered into the competition and, against absolutely nobody's expectations, took first place. There was, however, a small detail that made the victory somewhat easier to achieve: they were the only participants. Still, a first place at Buenzli12 was a first place at Buenzli12, and somewhere in Switzerland a cow, an organ and Kasparov's parking lot had managed to bring the end of the world to the screen.