If you're interested, [1] has a long and detailed description of the group's history.
As someone who was a fledgling member of the demo scene back in the late 80s/early 90s, it's really weird that Scoopex is still so active and talked about. I guess that's being legendary, in a way.
Scoopex' Vectrex [1] was one of the first intros I saw on the Amiga, and I still have the music to it in my music library. It's not advanced by Amiga standards (I don't mean that to insult them; when it was released most demo groups were still learning the Amiga; it stood up fine alongside other releases at the time, but by a couple of years later it was a totally different ballgame) - I mostly remember it because it was a huge step up from the C64 I was used to, but it did impress me at the time.
As for being legendary, I think for many of these groups part of it is simply surviving. Very few had many enough members and/or members with close enough friendships to have longevity past people moving apart after school etc..
Of course part of that certainly is down to having grown to a certain status quickly enough to be attractive to be members of, so I'm not suggesting that longevity alone is enough.
But the sheer number of well received early releases gave them a reputation that made longevity much easier, and longevity makes maintaining that reputation a lot easier.
[as a total digression, only related in that it's about scene fame/status, this reminds me when I dug up the phone number for Strider of Fairlight from some release he made before he was well known and called him at his home in Sweden (recently he turned up as a Republican politician in California...) to try to convice him to swap with me; he was "famous" by then and I was an annoying little kid disturbing him at dinner; I wonder how often he got calls like that from total strangers in other countries - some of these people had a weird level of niche fame that most people have no idea about]
> "he was "famous" by then and I was an annoying little kid disturbing him at dinner"
At the age of 14, I and a friend decided to pay a surprise visit to a famous demoscene musician at his home in Espoo, Finland. He was not very impressed by this pilgrimage.
This was still in the BBS era, just pre-Internet (around 1994), so scene people would regularly include their mail address for contact purposes. I don't think they expected young teenage fans to show up.
Really cool! I miss that era. It was quite easy to implement cool effects in assembly on Amiga, even with limited programming knowledge. As a 12-years old kid, you could buy a magazine, read some tutorial or having a friend showing you a few tricks, and you would start from there. Of course, what Scoopex did was another level. It felt like magic back then, especially without the proper CS background.
I'm tempted to play a little bit with these tutorials, but there are so many things to learn, simply to somehow keep up with the innovation...
I also wonder what these guys did for a living and what they do with their computers nowadays. Have they transferred their skills and interests to the systems and organizations of our time?
Don't get me wrong, but without Assembly it seems to lose its charm and clarity. Assembly instructions are far more clear given the subject at hand is hardware programming
And those noooooo screams when your speedcode generator writes all over memory crashing the system and you did not save for an hour...
Luckily memory contents (including source code) was often still in RAM after reboot.
RAM disks were pretty common that time. Especially if you had lots of fast RAM, but no hard disk. It also usually survived reboot.
Other common demo writing tools included CygnusEd (text editor), Directory Opus (file management), Deluxe Paint, various crunchers and packers, graphics conversion utilities, Noise/Pro/whatever trackers and of course X-Copy.
Well, you usually quickly learned to be careful to avoid most crashes. You'd also have a very optimized disk for fast booting. Loading full WorkBench was pointless, when a CLI window would do.
Truly being one with the machine and, it's an interesting machine too. I guess similar to old SmallTalk and Lisp machines, only much much cooler and faster.
As someone who was a fledgling member of the demo scene back in the late 80s/early 90s, it's really weird that Scoopex is still so active and talked about. I guess that's being legendary, in a way.
[1] https://demozoo.org/groups/361/