Superior Art Creations

Superior Art Creations (SAC) is an underground artscene group which caters primarily to and is well known within the warez scene. SAC members have made, besides ANSI and ASCII art, VGA bitmap graphics, tracker music, and a variety of other works. SAC's character graphics have also been used in bottles and FTP servers.

Superior Art Creations (SAC)
Formation1994
PurposeArtscene warez
Location
  • Germany
Founders
Roy (aka Carsten Cumbrowski) and Hetero (aka Sebastian)
Products
SAC Scener Art Packs
WebsiteSuperiorArtCreations.com

Origin and brief history

SAC originated as a German-based art group, founded in December 1994 by six members: Dream Design, Kaethe, Raiser, Toxic Trancer and the two artists Hetero[1] and Roy, with Roy acting as the primary organizer of the group. The first SAC Art Pack was released the same month at "The Party" Demo Party in Herning, Denmark.

During the mid to late 1990s most of the notable ANSI artscene groups had distanced themselves from the warez scene, rather creating art for the sake of art, or for bulletin boards that were purely artscene related. Seizing this opportunity, SAC moved into this vacant territory and quickly became recognized as the leading group of warez scene artists.[2] SAC was also able to establish credibility and respect from non-warez art groups and also demogroups of the broad and diverse computer art scene that was already established at the time.

SAC organizational structure

From the very beginning SAC had a very loose group structure. Members worked mostly independently with little if any direction from the group leaders. Every member has the freedom to decide for himself which art requests he is willing to fulfill and which not. Seniority was achieved by being an active member for an extended period of time. Exceptions were made occasionally for outstanding contributions to the Group. New member applications were accepted or rejected by a simple majority vote of the existing members. It was never the decision of a single person (regardless of the status of that member). All new member applications and artwork samples were published in designated member-only areas at the SAC World Headquarter BBS "Closed Society" which was located in Berlin, Germany. The applications were also made available on the Internet at SAC's IRC Channel #SAC on the EFnet and SAC FTP Server HQ's.

The role of the leader

The role of the leader was primarily the task (which wasn't always simple) of collecting the new artwork produced by members and assembling the new SAC Art Pack, updating the group's NFO file and releasing the Pack. This was not a problem because the leader of SAC Roy/SAC was also the SysOp of the SAC World headquarter BBS called "Closed Society".

The job of the artists, musicians and coders
  • SAC artists created and still create today ASCII & ANSI Text art (.NFO release info file logos, file_id.diz logos, BBS artwork) and VGA pixel art for other computer groups, BBS's (bulletin board systems) and FTP sites, websites and more.
  • SAC musicians created "MOD" and later also MP3 music; just as a standalone piece of art or to be used in "Intros", Demo and other programs such as "Installers".
  • SAC "coders" or programmers programmed BBS ads, Cracktros and Intros using most of the time graphics and music created by fellow SAC Members.

SAC/PPE

For a brief period, SAC also had a PPE (PCBoard Programming Executable) section; this was eventually separated out from SAC and became the PPE Group "Peanuts" (Abbreviation: PNS).

PPE's are programs written in the proprietary PCBoard Script Language PPL (PCBoard Programming Language). They could only be used for PCBoard and no other BBS Software. PCBoard was very popular at the time and was used by over 90% of the warez BBS systems that were running on a PC. The introduction of PPL in PCBoard Version 15.0 boosted the popularity of the until then fairly unknown BBS software by Clark Development. Up to this time the PC (warez) scene did not have a powerful BBS software that could compete with the Amiga BBS software Ami-Express (Short: Ami-X or simply /X). Almost all warez BBS systems running on Amigas used /X. The PC adaptation of /X called PC Express saw a brief period of widespread use but was soon replaced by PCBoard 15.x.

All SAC PPE's and SAC Art Packs are available for download at the SAC founder's website. The official SAC website is currently under development.

SAC today and tomorrow

Towards the late 1990s, a good majority of NFO file ASCII art was created by various members of SAC. In 1999, lead ASCII artist ferrex ascended to the role of senior staff and leader, continuing to control the group to this day.

Now a globally operating organization, SAC employs approximately 40 artists and programmers worldwide and continues to be one of the groups creating art for the warez scene.

  • Dytec Ascii Logo by member artist Roy.
  • Skylight BBS Ansi by member artist Roy.
  • Energy VGA Logo by member artist Roy.
gollark: More memory bandwidth is probably good.
gollark: You can use Alder Lake with DDR4 too.
gollark: Interesting.
gollark: Would any of the AI art things actually make it that clean and symmetrical?
gollark: > We are so still at number 1. Is humanity worthy of unlimited power? I’ve heard Larry Page believes the AIs are our children and know more about righteousness than we do. But even early Yudkowsky writings understood this makes no sense, and that superintelligence doesn’t imply supermorality.

References
  1. Hetero, un coder pas comme les autres Archived 2007-01-26 at Archive.today (translated: Hetero, not a common coder) written by Line de Norvege (Line from Norway) PC Team Magazine (France), Issue #42, 01/1999, ISSN 1264-935X
  2. Announcement of the release of SAC Pack #17 Archived 2007-01-26 at Archive.today, mentioning Hetero, Dream Design and Roy and the group channel #SAC at the EFnet. PC Team Magazine (France), Issue #42, 01/1999, ISSN 1264-935X
  • Official Superior Art Creations website at SuperiorArtCreations.com
  • SAC Art Packs available for download, with file id.diz's, comments and NFO files viewable on-line
  • Official homepage of the 1st SAC founder and group leader Roy
  • Dark Domain The ACiD Artpacks Archive on DVD (ISBN 0-9746537-0-5), contains all SAC Packs until 2005
  • Video Captures of Cracktros created by SAC (YouTube.com playlist)

Offline websites via Archive.org

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