There was intense rivalry during the 1990s among the best programmers, graphic artists and computer musicians to continually outdo each other's demos.
In Europe the Amiga was the undisputed leader of mainstream multimedia computing in the late 1980s and early 1990s, though it was eventually overtaken by PC architecture.
To utilize full hardware performance, Amiga demos were optimized and written entirely for one purpose in assembly (avoiding generic and portable code).
Red Sector Incorporated produced a piece of software called the RSI Demomaker, which allowed users to script their own demos, replete with scrolltext, vectorballs, plasma screens, etc.
Some active demo countries were Denmark, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, UK, Poland and others.
In fact, some demos even featured their source code as part of the executable to save hackers the trouble of disassembly, though it came strewn with incendiary comments for those who would seek to improve on it.