so way back in 1990, my family still hadn't made the jump to a PC yet. all we had was a TRS-80 Color Computer, and a Mattel Intellivision.
but we had just moved to an acreage in another province, and i found out that one of the neighbours' dads had a computer: a Zenith AT/XT
my friend's dad would come home with random diskettes, probably copied from someone at his chemical engineering job. we'd pop them in and usually find something decent to play.
we played a lot of cga two-player SOPWITH.COM and a moon patrol clone that was honestly pretty good, even in eyeball-piercing magenta.
but one day he came home with a disk that just said 'JOLT' on it. we ran the exe, and i was instantly blown away. it was a jolt can, perfectly digitized in VGA, spinning around in circles faster and faster, until it was barely recognizable. i watched the animation a dozen times before my friends got bored and wanted to play something else.
the next day, i told my best friends at school about the animation. no one believed me, and the diskette "mysteriously" disappeared the next time i visited my buddy's house.
i was haunted by the jolt cola can animation for decades. that is, until a while ago i ended up finding it buried in an ms-dos demoscene site.
here it is, over 30 years later, with an original file date of February 22, 1990. ❤️
@vga256 Registered here just respond to this thread, but happy to have discovered this place!
I was briefly part of the MS-DOS demo scene in the late 90s / early 00s, and it was impossible for me not to love the 1995 movie Hackers, which I feel was laced with little tributes to the demo scene (the tunnels and bouncing 3D smileys, to name a few). My love for Jolt Cola came with it.
When I stumbled upon some expired, deadstock Jolt Cola down here in the Netherlands a few years back, I purchased all of it and decided to put up a little page to sell it to fellow fans. (No buyers, sadly.) But seeing this VGA animation, reminds me of the WebGL animation I made for my webpage:
@oscaralexander 🤣 that is absolutely amazing. jolt was unavailable in my part of canada in the 90s, so that made it all the more elusive and attractive to us schoolkids.
@vga256 Haha! In 2001, when I was 18, my friend who introduced me to Hackers and I traveled to New York to see some of the movie locations and of course to try and find our first can of Jolt. Wasn't available anywhere.
Then, weeks after we got back home, I randomly ran into a handful of cans at De Bijenkorf in Amsterdam, our local Macy's equivalent.
@vga256 Isn't it funny how even just looking at media like this was exciting for a specific type of person at a specific place and time. There were days when you'd open up some random program and feel like you were suddenly getting a glimpse of the future.
@ThreeOhFour absolutely. i would buy games that specifically had "digitized photos" or "digitized video" just because it was jaw-dropping to see images move on a computer monitor. that entire mode of thinking is hilariously antiquated now... it would be like a 1920s kid seeing their first colour film, or talkie
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