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[ Atariscne.org - News ] Silly Venture 2K26 SE - a party report

Written by: Tecer
Dwór Uphagena, Gdansk, 30 July - 2 August 2026

There is a workshop in Gdansk where people build electric guitars. Beautiful and expensive ones, current waiting time: 14 months. Mayones started there in 1982, in a family garage, and forty-four years later they are shipping custom instruments to players all over the world - but the shop still works the way it worked at the beginning. You pick the woods. Somebody's hands do the rest. Every instrument that leaves the building is a series of decisions a person made on purpose.

I went there on the Friday afternoon of Silly Venture. It cost me the Shotgun tournament and one of the Silly Talks, and I would do it again, partly because it is a remarkable place and partly because it put me in exactly the right frame of mind for what was going on across town at Silly Venture.

Because that is what a demoparty is too. Seventy-four productions came out of this one, and every one of them is somebody having decided, deliberately and at length, where each byte goes.

Let me take the weekend in order.

Thursday, July 30th

I arrived on time. My luggage took a more relaxed view of the schedule.

The route was via Amsterdam, and somewhere in the transfer my bag formed its own opinion about which plane to be on. Schiphol runs two flights a day to Gdansk; I was on the earlier one, and my bag, having weighed the options, chose the later. This is the best possible version of losing your luggage, and I say that as somebody who spent the intervening hours not entirely convinced of it. The bag turned up in the evening, intact, having seen slightly more of the Netherlands than I had.

Gdansk itself was packed with people. Peak summer, and on top of the usual tourist load the city was in the middle of St. Dominic's Fair, running late July to mid-August, the largest open-air market in Poland. Several hundred stalls of people selling things they made, threaded through the old town, for three weeks every summer, since the thirteenth century.

So consider the city this party takes place in: a centuries old market of handmade goods, a guitar workshop that has been carving instruments one at a time since 1982, and a hall full of people who spent their year hand-assembling code for computers that went out of production before some of those stallholders were born. Gdansk is extremely good at this sort of thing.

This was, after several Silly Ventures over the years, the first time I have stayed at the hotel on the same site as the venue - the party hall sits in a building directly behind it - and I can report that it is an enormous improvement on every other arrangement I have tried. My room was a floor or so below ground level, which suited me perfectly: dark, quiet, and a walk of moments from the compo screen. No thoughts on planning the trip back. You simply go to the party, and later you simply go back.

Gates opened at 16:00 for the traditional business of claiming a table, which at an Atari party means claiming a table and a mains socket, ideally one not shared with anybody running a CRT. I did none of that. I went over for a look, said hello to Grey, and spent a while doing the thing everybody does on the first evening - scanning the room for people whose faces seem familiar.

I did not find too many.