Amiga Scene Groups
One of the most legendary Amiga demo scene groups from Finland.
After organizing the famous copy party disaster in Lahti along with X-Men and Deathstar, the two groups Overload and Phalanx teamed up to form Complex in spring 1989. While Overload didn't have many notable releases under its name, Phalanx had already presented early versions of Tai-Pan's vector routine along with a few other intros and music disks.
With their many talented coders, Complex was very productive during the early years. They released many intros, perhaps the most memorable ones being the ones where Tai-Pan and Cable tried to break eachothers' bob records. The group also started releasing a humorous diskmag called Maggy, which became very popular (and notorious) among the Finnish scene.
Complex cleaned out in summer 1991 at Society's party held in Kajaani, Finland. The demo Vector Preview won the first price, showing the second version of Tai-Pan's vectors (which was still a "preview"!). They also came third with the Universal Intensity trackmo coded by Dalton, which is especially memorable due to the music made by Turtle / Frantic.
Unfortunately, the rate of releases started slowing down. Complex had a lot of famous but inactive members, and the group's focus seemed to shift from democoding into modem trading. There were the occasional intros, like the brilliant Gospel Karaoke, but overall the group was starting to seem like a retirement home for old scene legends.
Around 1992-1994 the "turnover rate" was extremely high, with people joining, releasing a small product and then leaving for greener pastures. Somebody once joked that every Finnish scene person would be a Complex member at some point of their career.
While the team was formed in Finland, later on it did acquire people from other countries as well. In addition to the necessary modem traders and sysops in various countries, they also had a strong presence in Germany at one point. When Amiga moved into the AGA age, the French division of Digital joined Complex and released some memorable AGA demos like Origin, which won the compo at The Party '93.
As the Amiga scene started fading out around 1995, Complex seemed more or less dead. But they surprised everybody - well, at least me - by making a comeback on PC with their new coder JMagic. Dope was more or less their breakthrough PC product, with great code, extremely catchy music, plus graphics from the most famous Finnish scene graphician of all time, Reward.
Unlike most of the groups born over 10 years ago Complex is still somewhat alive, having changed their name to Komplex. They have released a demo every now and then, although the group has been very silent in 2001. Their memberlist still features many of the most legendary Finnish programmers, but in reality only very few of them can be considered "active".
However, I have hard time believing we have seen the last of them. As their classic slogan says.. Complex - Suxx forever!
All of Complex' PC productions, along with many of the old Amiga ones can be found at their website, http://www.komplex.org/.
Current memberlist:
All members are from Finland.
Past Members:
Information collected from dozens of sources, mostly from numerous Amiga diskmags (including several issues of RAW and Top Secret) plus Complex' own productions.
Some info came from the Byterapers website at http://www.byterapers.scene.org/ and Scenery Online at http://exotica.fix.no/info/scenery/online/.
If you notice any errors, please /msg me and I'll correct them.