20 Minute Chip Compo (20mc)

An IRC competition, held on EFnet channel #ChIpCoMpO from September 1995, in which trackers had twenty minutes to make a chiptune from a shared sample pack; organised by amusic (Sotiris Varotsis, Bass Productions, Greece), later with Floss (George Nowik — not mental-floss, who is Andrew McCallum of Kosmic; source: s-tw119-interview-mental-floss), and reported weekly in traxweekly from issue #26 (source: s-tw032-20-minute-chip-compo).

Origin#

DarkHeart and DeathBringer joked on #trax about a time-limited online compo; AmusiC made a chip-sample pack, opened the channel, wrote a rules file and ran the first round the same night — five entrants, won by Mute, Rimbo second, DeathBringer third. Popcorn, then TraxWeekly's editor, gave it a column, and Snowman of hornet a home on ftp.cdrom.com (/demos/incoming/music/20mc/, one 20mc_xxx.zip per round). Imphobia forwarded the announcement; Kxmode put it on his WWW trax page; Axl (Thomas Axelsson) wrote the chip.irc script (source: s-tw032-20-minute-chip-compo).

Rules (autumn 1995)#

Disqualifications were routine: five channels instead of four (Mystical, compo #6, though his tune out-scored the winner), not declaring, dropping out, or a sample pack the entrant could not load — compo #2's pack was IFF 8SVX and "seemed to have compatibility problems with ST3 and FT2" (source: s-tw032-20-minute-chip-compo).

Results on record#

• Compo #2 (16 September 1995; 11 contestants): necros 123, Charlatan 102, balrog 100, SnowMan 83, Octoque 77, Axl 55, Acechan 42.
• Compo #6 (13 October 1995; 22 contestants, 18 voters): Calvin 267, Balrog and Zodiak 264, Floss 247, H0llywood 220, Charlatan 212 … 17 places; Fred 11th, ender 13th.
• Compo #8 (28 October 1995; 23 contestants, 14 voters, 0–9 system): Mystical/Purple 8.31, Zeus 7.15, Calvin 6.62, Lepra 6.57, Sikamikaniko 6.38, Charlatan 6.14, Grave Digger and Phoenix 5.86, smeghead 8th at 5.5, LuvK 9th, Fred 10th … zinc 15th at 3.29 (source: s-tw032-20-minute-chip-compo; full tables there).

The mailing list grew from 32 (#32) to 43 subscribers (#33); #chipspread was opened for swapping work, #chipcompo moderated (source: s-tw032-20-minute-chip-compo).

Stop and return#

By December 1995 Szalemandre blamed the compo for "an EXPLOSION of chiptune-making" that had "driven them into the ground", while DennisC thanked AmusiC "for bringing more quality chippage to my ears in such a short span of time" (source: s-tw037-death-of-the-chiptune-debate). AmusiC's own account (#50, 7 March 1996): after Christmas people stopped voting and "complained that the scene was full of chiptunes, which were of a really bad quality"; a poll on continuing drew no replies, so the staff paused it "so they could … actually miss the chipcompo". The second cycle, "20mc b'", was bi-weekly, in cycles of ten compos plus a 20-day chipcompo with breaks between, results every second Thursday, with its own Newsletter Mailing List; the purpose, restated: "not the creation of many good chiptunes, but to have hours of fun and tension, and give a task to people, which actually made them improve their tracking abilities" (sources: s-tw032-20-minute-chip-compo, s-traxweekly-archive for the #50 TOC line "20 MeEnUhTz Compo is BACK!").

In the interviews (1995–97)#

• The organiser. AmusiC had been tracking since mid-1994, joined Bass Productions through a TraxWeekly advert (Sirrus decided), had an Amiga-first taste and "mostly compose[d] or play[ed] the piano" (source: s-tw017-interview-amusic). Bass Productions was shut down in 1996 "due to lack of activity"; AmusiC and liam-the-lemming then founded Mach One (source: s-tw066-interview-liam-the-lemming).
• Entrants' verdicts. mick-rippon (January 1996): the controversial compo "should be treated like an experiment than an indication of 'who is the best chip muso'" — "if they don't like it, they can stay out of it" (source: s-tw041-interview-mick-rippon). clef "entered 20mc a few times.. and won twice" (rounds not stated; not in the tables above) and thanks Heizann for "all those wonderful 20mc's"; Zinc, interviewing him, admitted he had once placed last (source: s-tw055-interview-clef). kal-zakath's one-line definition (May 1996): "in 20mc, you get a set of chipsamples and have 20 minutes to write a tune"; rage: "I can't do anything good in twenty minutes" (source: s-tw060-interview-rage).

Sibling compos#

zinc's ImpromptuCompo (from late 1995; channel #ImpCompo, with gd) was the full-sample counterpart: 45 minutes, a DCC'd pack of regular-quality samples instead of chips, no channel limit — "unlike chip compos, you get enough time and good enough samples to compose something decent" (source: s-tw041-interview-zinc). The general form is on compos. trixter (November 1995) set the 20mc — "how fast you can build a tune with chip samples", the current trend in "bare-metal" tracking — beside the four-channel compos of Assembly and The Party, which in his view "require more skill" (source: s-tw033-4channel-lives-on).

Related#

compos · chiptune · chip-samples · necros · hornet · traxweekly · tracker-scene-history · amusic · balrog · clef · smeghead

Sources#

s-tw032-20-minute-chip-compo · s-tw037-death-of-the-chiptune-debate · s-traxweekly-archive · s-tw041-interview-zinc · s-tw033-4channel-lives-on · s-tw017-interview-amusic · s-tw029-faces-in-the-crowd-smeghead · s-tw041-interview-mick-rippon · s-tw055-interview-clef · s-tw042-interview-balrog · s-tw066-interview-liam-the-lemming · s-tw060-interview-rage · s-tw119-interview-mental-floss