ACiD Artpacks Archive - NicheInterests/mistfunk GitHub Wiki

Following an uneasy period of the [Hornet] Archive at ftp.cdrom.com running hot and cold on hosting artpacks (due to more recent [cybercrime] connections among ANSI artists, who promoted warez boards and crews and provided [nfo] art, than demosceners, who only invented the [intro] to glorify crackers and couriers) in an /ansi/ subdirectory, Hornet cut the ties in March 1996 and left the artscene out in the cold. At a summit (well, a linguini dinner) a month later (April 7, 1996) between RaDMaN (ACiD), Prisonernumberone (Fire) and Snowman (Hornet) it was agreed to give the artscene enough room to hang themselves, granting them the opportunity to manage and maintain their own FTP site.

A directory opened June 15 1996, and later that year artpacks.acid.org opened a web frontend. In July 1997 they turned the scene upsidedown for six months by demanding that artpacks hosted at their FTP site be saved in the slightly more efficient .RAR archive format, as they were running out of room.

ACiD's administration of the artpacks directory, nominally presided over by Shivan Bastard, wasn't without unprecedented conflict: notably, after being given the heave ho themselves, their directory was reluctant to accommodate BBS modification releases (such as eg. ACiD's own ACiDic division released on the regular), lit packs (resulting in some overheated rhetoric from Schtroumph of Cenobite) and artpacks containing large-filesize tracker music (such as Mist Classic often had on offer... neatly, the music-filled artpacks would also be rejected by Hornet for being too artscene-y. As a result, some of these releases got lost for a long time!)

By 2004 the ACiD Artpacks Archive was likely seeing very little further use on either the upload or download end, and its administrators were likely keen to move on to sunnier pastures, so the contents of the FTP site were burned to a DVD and sold to collectors with Lord Jazz cover artwork as "[Dark Domain]: the artpacks.acid.org collection". This Dark Domain DVD served as the seed that grew into the collection at the heart of Lord Scarlet's initial [Sixteen Colors] archive.