Parrot
Parrot was a diskmag by the Finnish group Crypton. Three issues were released in the year 1994. Parrot had several main editors. In the first two issues both Lethal and Bw (who later renamed to Marlon) were the main editors. In the third issue, Wicked became a third main editor.
The magazines work fine using DOSBox. They can be downloaded from scene.org (about 450 downloads so far).
Parrot #1
Parrot #1 was released in July 1994. It contained about 30 articles. The engine was coded by Control of Crypton. The graphics were made by Lethal and Bw. There was no music in this issue, the reason for which was according to the editorial that the coder didn't have a soundcard.
After the editorial came the news corner, sorted by group name. Then there were three interviews: Shade of Fulmar Designs, Rooster of Diffusion and Sysostar of MindProbe. The interviews were pretty short (around three pages each), that's bad. Many of the other articles were
not longer, either. There were no charts in this issue as only 10 people had voted. In the reviews section there was only an article about the demo Serious by Jeskola!Productions. The adverts mostly were about the group Crypton itself. The party section mostly dealt with Abduction 1994. The scene articles were not too interesting. One article was called "Oldest in The Scene", he we could learn that Dr. Awesome was already 28 years old at the time Parrot #1 was released. There was also a list of active groups in the demoscene (more than 100). The "universal articles" finally mostly dealt with music and food.
The level of the English language was pretty good although the editors made some mistakes repeatedly. The layout of most of the articles was in two columns, which looked good.
Not a really good mag, this first issue of Parrot, but we'll see that it improved with time.
Parrot #2
Parrot #2 was from August 1994. After the title picture by the Greek graphician Fat Morgan of Deus was displayed for a few parts of a second, the music started playing, which was composed by WodeTc. The panel graphics were created by Bw.
Content-wise, there was again a news corner. The interviews
were about Devastator of EMF, Phanton of Jeskola!Productions, Purple Motion of Future Crew, and Black Hell. They were longer than the interviews in the previous issue, which is a good sign. Some of the scene articles deal with the various types of mail swapping and disk stealing. A new article
series was started in this issue of Parrot: "Group Analysis". This time Future Crew and Surprise!Productions were analyzed: who were the members, what strengths and weaknesses did they have. There was also an updated demoscene groups list. The "Party Line" section contained several reports of Assembly 1994. In "Universal Articles" there were some quite challenging, interesting mathematical questions and riddles. After the adverts section finally the charts came. They were based on 24 voters. The categories were: groups, demos, intros, coders, graphicians, musicians, demo design, intro designs, module players, module trackers, and parties. A variable number of points was required in each category to enter the charts. Also, there was a "super chart" which served as the inspiration for the combined chart in Imphobia.
This issue of Parrot was a bit better than its predecessor.
Parrot #3
The third and final issue was released in November 1994. The graphics, which were made by Marlon, were not so good as in Parrot #2, in my opinion. The soundtrack by $volkraq of Gollum also contained some rather annoying parts. However, the good thing about this issue was that it contained more
articles than ever before.
In addition to the news and rumours, there was a corner called "alternative news" which was supposed to be humorous, but didn't make me laugh. For the first (and last) time, there was also a messages corner in Parrot. There were quite a lot of interviews, dealing with $volkraq, File Master, Maxwood of Majic 12, Pentalysion of Snythesis, Quark of Anarchy, Steffen of Speedy, Sulphur of Orange, and Zodiak of Imphobia Cascada. In the Party Line, we could read a long article about why a party called "The Competition" was cancelled. There was a review corner in this issue of Parrot, dealing with some demos and diskmags. The new section "Frequently Asked Questions" introduced the demogroup Anarchy and Crypton. In the scene articles section, Marlon wrote about the trend to copy pictures from "real-world" artists. The group analysis corner this time focused on Orange. The universal articles were about how to use text editors efficiently, science fiction and other things. Breeze also published some tips for the Nethack game. There was a new stories section with three very short works by Cross. Finally, there were the charts. The only new category was 4 kb intros. Moreover, there was now a graph showing the age distribution of the voters, which was interesting: the average age of voters was apparently 16 years. The scene has grown older since then...
All in all an okay issue, though not too overwhelming.