Robotic Liberation by PWP (VIC-20)

Ville-Matias Heikkilä (viznut) · 139K views · 2006-06-09 · 3:24

Open on YouTube ↗

If playback is restricted in your region, try opening the original video. Use Mark watched to add it to your marked videos.

Overview

Robotic Liberation by PWP is a music video demo performed entirely by an unexpanded Commodore VIC-20 and a 1541 disk drive, using only a few kilobytes of RAM and a 16 KB disk. It uses demoscene effects to tell a story.

On Hacker News

HN recommends it as a showcase of what skilled demoscene programmers can squeeze out of extremely limited hardware.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2010–2015

Topics

Demoscene & retrocomputing Music performance & songs

What people said

msarnoff · 2015-11 · Recommendation
The video was posted by an awesome demoscene dude named viznut. Check out the rest of his channel. Experimental music from very short C programs: [LINK] Robotic Liberation (VIC-20 demo): [VIDEO]
Read the original HN comment ↗

Leynos · 2010-12 · Recommendation
Videos of some of the demos described here: Robotic Warrior [LINK] Robotic Liberation [VIDEO] Impossiblator [LINK] I like that the demo effects are used here to tell a story in addition to being a pure display of coding prowess.
Read the original HN comment ↗

neumann_alfred · 2012-12 · Joke / meme
NOBODY expects the robotic liberation! [1] [1] [VIDEO] (I am aware this will rightfully get modded down but sometimes a man has to do what a man has to do)
Read the original HN comment ↗

Sources

Video by Ville-Matias Heikkilä (viznut), played through YouTube.

HN Library · Source license

Data and selection notes

HN summaries and labels may contain AI errors. HN dates refer to discussions, not video publication.

HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

Views, duration and playback status refresh separately from the published catalog. When an update fails, existing data remains visible.

Selection checks

SaaS & AI candidates: Topic keywords do not match
Editor-approved picks: Editorial review is required

Rule matches identify candidates. They do not guarantee video quality or financial results.

About the library and its sources