We spoke with the creative Swede about his YouTube channel, demoscene productions and other projects.
One night a couple of years ago, YouTube decided that this was the time for me to become interested in accordions made using Commodore 64 computers. So it suggested that I should take a look at lftkryo’s latest video, The Commodordion. Of course, it ended up with a «like» and «subscribe».
But lftkryo, or Linus Åkesson as he also calls himself, is not a one-hit wonder. His channel is full of exciting videos that tickle both the nerdy and nostalgic areas of the brain. Upon closer inspection, it turns out that over the years he has carried out many different projects, and of course everything is neatly documented on a very rich website (reminds me a bit of someone we know).
With the latest video where Linus has fun persuading his C64 to make music, we were convinced that now is the time to hear something from this guy. Is he as nice and nerdy as he seems or is it all an act?
Introductions and interactive fiction
Firstly, some quick questions about you, who are you?
I’m a Swedish guy from Lund, born in 1981. I come from a musical family, so it was natural for me to start playing instruments as a child. I started taking piano lessons when I was six, and drums/percussion as well a few years later. From a young age I was also fascinated by machines, electronics, and technical systems in general.
I decided that I wanted to keep my two interests separate: I wanted to work with technology, and keep music strictly as a hobby, so I wouldn’t grow tired of it. So I got my master’s degree in computer science and technology, and I work with embedded systems programming. In recent years I’m less strict about this separation, though; I now work for a synthesizer company.
So, Linus, we understand that you have been raised into the world of music, but how did your history with computers begin?
I had to pick a single starting point it would be the day my father bought an Amiga 1000. I would have been six or seven years old at the time.
At first I only had access to the software that was bundled with the machine (such as the Preferences tools, including a graphical editor for icons) and a music program called Aegis Sonix, but this was already plenty to explore.
Later I started swapping disks with friends at school. These would contain cracked games, and sometimes demos or music disks, but there was a recurring problem: My friends invariably had the Amiga 500 model, with twice as much memory, and most games — certainly the latest and greatest ones — just wouldn’t run on the old A1000.
On the flip side, I cherished the handful of games that did work: The NewZealand Story, Fire And Ice, Duck Tales, Guldkorn-expressen, Lemmings, to name a few early favourites.
When I grew older and eventually bought my own first computer, it was a used Amiga 1200 with a modem and a huge collection of floppy disks. Over night, I found myself in a predicament that’s perhaps more relatable today: Lots of games to choose from, too many in fact, and not enough time to give them all a fair chance.
There were also utility disks in the collection, little tools to explore and manipulate the system, music-making software, and also programming tools. In the long run, those were more interesting than the games.
We are primary a website about gaming, and your website reveals your interest in interactive fiction. You’ve also created your own game, The Impossible Bottle. How did this interest emerge?
My uncle had a Commodore 64, and one of the games he had was an illustrated text adventure called Dallas Quest. As you’d expect from an early text adventure, it was a quite unforgiving; you died a lot and had to restart from the beginning, and you also had to wait for each illustration to load even if you’d already seen it a hundred times, but I was stubborn and kept going and eventually completed it.
I came across a few other early text games as well, like The Hobbit, but never got too far with them.
But then, during my Amiga 1200 years, I discovered the point-and-click adventures from LucasArts, especially Monkey Island 1 and 2. This was pure gold! They’re not text games, of course, but they are story-driven puzzle fests with witty dialogue, and in my view they’re clearly interactive fiction in the broad sense of the term.
There was a platform war going on throughout the 80s and 90s, and I was firmly entrenched in the Amiga camp. Even to this day I hesitate to touch anything Microsoft- or Windows-related. But as the 90s progressed, it was getting increasingly hard to stick with the Amiga as one’s primary computer system. Hard, but not impossible!
If you wanted some particular functionality, perhaps you could implement it yourself. Or you could browse AmiNet for free software. One of the things I found there was TADS, the Text Adventure Development System, and I remember dabbling with it for a while.
Many years later, maybe in the late noughties, I stumbled over the Annual Interactive Fiction Competitio (ifcomp). I decided to try some recent winners, and was delighted by how far the genre had come in terms of quality and playability. I also discovered that many of the people who played these games, the «judges», would write extensive and often thoughtful reviews of the games in plain text.
One holdover from the Amiga days is that I find it cosy to sit down and read a well-written text file, and here was a veritable treasure trove of them! One thing led to the other, and thus I went through phases of playing, judging, reviewing, developing a programming language for, and finally authoring games.
Among recent works of IF, some of my favourites are Lost Pig, Taco Fiction, Make It Good, The Wizard Sniffer, and 9:05. Of the old and more unforgiving classics: Trinity, Anchorhead, and Varicella.
But the work with The Impossible Bottle and the accompanying Dialog development system got a bit too much and I decided to take a break from interactive fiction. I suspect that I’ll find my way back at some point, and it’ll probably start with me picking up a recent ifcomp winner.
Do you play any games today?
Modern 3D games aren’t really to my taste, although I did enjoy Portal. And I’ll occasionally play a round of Go, the ancient board game, which is largely an online game these days. But by and large, I’m busy with other projects.
The demoscene
Many of us who grew up in front of a monitor in the eighties and nineties were fascinated by the possibilities that the computer gave us to create art and music. There were also arranged competitions and gatherings, and the subculture was eventually called the demoscene.
A while back Linus released a YouTube video as a homage to Guitar Slinger by Jogeir Liljedahl which is a classic MOD artwork. In this way Linus reveals his strong ties to the subculture.
What are your thoughts on the demoscene, Linus?
I was aware of the demoscene quite early, but only as something that happened elsewhere, something you’d read about in scroll texts and on bulletin boards. At some point in the late 90s I realized that I could go and visit one, so I did. It was an amazing atmosphere, and I was hooked!
In my early scene years I released some music and a couple of joke productions, but nothing particularly good. It would take another decade before I started to reach competitive levels.
At those combined gaming and demoscene events, the scene compos were pretty meagre; sometimes it was enough to participate to get a 2nd place. But you still got a big audience reaction and perhaps even a crate of Jolt cola as prize, so why not? And then, when I didn’t win, I’d reflect on what made that other entry better than mine, and try to incorporate some of that into my own work.
I remember the first time that I brought a compo-tune to a party and felt that I had a good chance of winning. «Mike the Grasshopper» was no joke production, but a good, well-polished tune for the chip-music compo. It ended up in the middle of the field, and I remember being very disappointed at the time, but in hindsight results aren’t that important; I still think of it as my first good entry in a competition, and that makes it a big step for me personally.
Eventually I came to think of the demoscene as a thing of the past, at least the Amiga scene that I was interested in. Then, in the mid-noughties, somebody told me that the (PC) scene was alive and well, and convinced me to come along on a trip to a large event that was part gaming, part demoscene.
At this event there was a seminar about various techniques for coding 4k intros, which was something that had seemed elusive and way too difficult for me. But the remarkable thing was that I understood everything they were saying, and it didn’t seem impossible at all! Tricky, perhaps, but well within reach.
During the intervening years I had apparently matured as a programmer, partly due to my university studies but also through tinkering with my own projects, and I felt intrigued and ready to take on the challenge. The next year I went back there with a Linux 4k intro that didn’t win, and the year after that I brought one that did.
Then I started going to Breakpoint in Germany, the world’s biggest demoscene-only event at the time, where I gradually discovered the Commodore 64 scene as this weird subculture-within-a-subculture with even more hardcore programming challenges.
Yes, why do you think there is still such an active community for the Commodore 64?
To some degree, there’s a demographic phenomenon at play. The Commodore 64 follows a single generation. These people (a few years older than myself) have a strong nostalgic connection with the machine, and they’ve spent endless hours in their adolescence learning the machine inside and out. They got older, started families, lost their spare time, but now their kids have grown up and the spare time is coming back. That’s why we’ve seen a lot of old C64 groups returning to the demoscene lately.
But there are also technical reasons, and those are the reasons that attracted me to the platform. In short, the Commodore 64 is an eminently hackable machine. You can trick the hardware into doing all sorts of things that it wasn’t designed to do, things that seem impossible, and these hacks work reliably because everybody has identical hardware. And with a demo platform that’s remained unchanged for forty years, if you manage to do something new, you’re not only exploring new ground, you’re also beating all the old legends that went before you, who could in principle have achieved the same thing, but never did.
The Amiga, on the contrary, is a diverse platform; techniques that work on one Amiga don’t necessarily work on another, as was evident already when I was swapping disks in elementary school. The Amiga scene has recently started to converge on a standard setup, an Amiga 500 with Kickstart 1.3 and a 512 KB RAM expansion, and that’s perhaps a good starting point. But I don’t think we’ll ever see a widespread computer platform that’s set in stone in the same way that the Commodore 64 was (and is).
I still remember trackers like Jeroen Tel, Elwood, Dr. Awesome and Xerxes. Did you have any trackers you looked to for inspiration?
I was always a big fan of Jogeir Liljedahl. I finally got to meet him in real life last summer at the X party in the Netherlands, and it was almost surreal to shake hands with this idol from my childhood. Other musicians that made an impression at the time are HeatBeat, Pink of Abyss, Mr. Man, 4-mat and Lizardking. On the C64 side, it’s the old masters: Hubbard, Galway and Hülsbeck.
Success on YouTube
Throughout many of your videos it’s clear that you put extra effort into getting the best sound quality from the C64 chips. I’m very impressed by the end result in many of your inventions. How have you been able to acquired such level of knowledge?
This has been a gradual process. Back when I was young and knew everything, I didn’t care much about sound quality at all. I considered the musical composition to be essential, while the recording was just something superficial; a vessel for transporting the composition into the listener’s brain. Now I would probably counter that argument and say that a bad recording can distract from the composition.
The knowledge comes from many sources, Google certainly included, but the motivation often comes from listening to my own work and feeling disappointed. Once you start to notice a flaw, some kind of noise perhaps, then there’s no way to un-hear it.
And so the next time you work hard to avoid that particular problem, only to notice some other issue that was perhaps masked by the earlier noise. Iterate this process a few times, and it starts to make a big difference.
Where do you find inspiration for your videos and your cool and a bit weird inventions?
I’m the kind of person who gets a lot of ideas. Not necessarily good ones, but ideas that I find interesting and would like to try out. This leads to a situation where I have — and keep getting — more ideas than I will ever have the time to implement.
I’ve decided, quite selfishly and perhaps irrationally, to prioritize my own ideas before the ideas of others. At work, I spend time on other people’s ideas, but in my spare time I only want to pursue my own. But then, as a logical consequence, I don’t want «the algorithm» to dictate what kind of videos I create and what kind of projects I do. Then it would become work.
That being said, I still strive to make videos that are interesting and entertaining to watch. I’m honoured that people choose to give me their attention, and I want them to enjoy the experience. But only as long as I enjoy it too.
The popularity of videos is surprisingly unpredictable. I had a good feeling about the original Chipophone and Commodordion videos (which turned out to be right), but I had the same feeling about the Theremin video which got a rather lukewarm response at first.
On the other hand I had low expectations for my latest video (Making 8-bit music from scratch at the BASIC prompt), but that one turned out to be a hit. In hindsight I can understand why people like it, but on the day I posted it I thought it would be an incomprehensible disappointment to a large part of my audience. Well, all the more reason to keep doing what I feel like instead of trying to adapt to what I think the audience would like. =)
How has it been to break through on YouTube?
I’m pleasantly surprised, because I don’t try to maximize it. I would rather have a small group of followers who like what I do, than do what millions of subscribers would like to see.
The fact that over 30,000 people are interested in my crazy endeavours is quite flattering, and I try to not let it go to my head. Likewise with Patreon; I didn’t know what to expect, but I thought it was worth a shot. And then a whole bunch of people signed up on the first day.
I try to promote myself in a humble and sensible way, primarily by thanking the people who choose to support me. The money is very helpful because it allows me to spend more time on my projects — but again I’m careful not to maximize my income at the cost of my freedom to do what I feel like.
I read all the comments I get, and they generally make me very happy! Somehow I ended up with a very positive, intelligent, and supportive audience. I’m not quite sure how it happened, but I’m very grateful for it.
Taking a step back, though, I’m concerned about the way the internet has shifted from an open landscape of independent websites to a handful of big platforms. YouTube has many merits and it has certainly helped me reach a wider audience, but I’m not too keen on becoming dependent on it and locking myself in.
I still cling to the idea that my website is my main creative outlet, and YouTube is just a convenient tool for hosting large video files, but that’s not necessarily a view rooted in reality. Time will tell.
Which video are you the most proud of?
My upcoming one, of course! =) I keep raising the bar in terms of video editing, audio quality, and overall ambition, so in that sense every new video is the best one yet.
The original Chipophone video has a special place in my heart, despite its shortcomings. Guitar Slinger was quite innovative, where I used tracker data to drive the video editing, and I like how the fast-paced explanations in the Sixtyforgan and Theremin videos ended up.
As for the musical performances, some of my personal favourites are Spellbound, Vocalise, A Prehistoric Tale, the Partita Prelude, and ClownC0re’s Computers.
You are a man of many talents, and you’re working with everything from hardware, software to music. What do you really find most interesting?
Nowadays I write code that runs close to the hardware in synthesizers, so I suppose I managed to find a niche where it all comes together.
But as a bit of general life advice, I would recommend everyone to learn at least two separate skills. That way you’ll find yourself surrounded by two groups of peers, where one group is impressed by something that’s common knowledge in the other, and vice versa. =)
Finally, how many portraits of unknown people are hanging at your walls?
Ah, you are referring to my top tier on Patreon, the «Mixed Waveform Medici». Nobody has signed up for that so far, which is fine; I wouldn’t afford it either. =)
But we have a saying in Sweden: Aim for the stars, and land in the tree tops.
We’d like to thank Linus for taking the time to answer our questions, and look forward to seeing what he comes up with next.
For more content in English, including interviews and features, please see this page.