Money Creates Taste

Money Creates Taste is a homebrew demo by Warehouse released on 24 April 1999. It’s a demo that showcases a few rotating 3D models with a somewhat sombre atmosphere. It was released to compete in the Presence of Min ’99 competition, where it won 4th place.

You can get the ROM from its download page by using the password tastecreatesmoney.

About Money Creates Taste

This N64 demo has a fairly basic structure. It consists of 4 scenes that run for about 30 seconds each before looping around back to the start.

The first scene is the title screen, which just shows the title off-centre with a very grainy filter on it.

The second one looks like a 3D image of a 4-pointed cross with rounded off ends, rotating in front of a background that looks like the title screen. It looks a little bit like a diagram of electron orbitals to me.

Scene number three has three 3D models of what reminds me of the Venus de Milo rotating around the screen. They are in front of a static image of graffitti artist Lady Pink with a tank top that has “Abuse of power comes as no surprise” written on it, by photographer Jenny Holzer.

Next up we have some 3D bubbles moving around end merging in a manner similar to a lava lamp. The background is another static-y image that reads “Protect me from what I want”, which is another slogan by Jenny Holzer.

The final scene is the credits. It shows four faces on the bottom-left, with a line connecting them to their name. It has Count0, Nep-CML, METAL, Steve, and Vic. I believe that this is the only demo that I’ve seen that has photographs of its creators.

The music is by Metal aka Torben K. Hansen from vibrants.dk.

Review and conclusion

The demo does have a lot of references to Jenny Holzer’s truism series. Even the title “Money Creates Taste” is another one of her slogans. This in combination with the eerie music does give it that angsty 90’s Gen-X vibe.

Money Creates Taste is one of the more amusing demos of its category, even if only for its weirdness and style. I do get the feeling that the Warehouse team really wanted to make this more than just a simple demonstration of what they can practically achieve, but rather add some artistic vision to it, whatever you might consider that to be.