Earlier this month, a demoscene group called The Twitch Elite released a new Neo Geo demo at Revision 2025 — "the world's biggest pure Demoscene event" — and it's seriously been blowing our minds with some of the amazing "3D" effects on display.
The demo, which is called Vaporous, is the work of h0ffman (who you may know from his Neo Geo port of Shinobi and his work-in-progress port of Golden Axe), alongside the coders hooverphonique, gigabates, and emoon, and the graphics artist Made. It achieves some incredible 3D-style effects on the 2D sprite-based hardware, doing so with the use of pre-rendered 3D sprites, and a clever implementation of Neo Geo-based hardware tricks such as sprite shrinking.
Looking at the demoscene resource, Pouët, it seems to have come second in the "oldskool" competition, losing out to Fairlight's C64 demo The Trip, and has caused a little debate about whether the Neo Geo should be included alongside less powerful sprite-based consoles, like the NES, C64, etc.
As a result, h0ffman jumped into the comments to clarify that this is actually the third Neo Geo release so far to appear at Revision, but ideally, he would love to see the Neo Geo get its own unique category in the future to help the scene grow and provide some separation from those older machines.
"For those of you not considering this an 'old school' platform, yeah I get it," he wrote. "We're on one of the most powerful sprite-based systems within this category / generation. But I checked the rules with the compo organisers long before Revision and felt that it was more at home here than in the wild. Besides, we are at least the 3rd Neo Geo release at Revision within an Old School category, it's just you can't find them.. can we get a category now please?"
If you want to run the demo yourself, it's available to download here. If not, you can view the full demo below on YouTube, as well as an insightful commentary video from h0ffman going over some of the techniques employed in significantly more detail: