Strawberry Stacking

Have you ever heard of strawberry stacking? If you never attended demo parties in Europe, you probably did not.
What is it, you ask? It’s, quite obviously, stacking one strawberry on top of another, with goal of making a tower that can stand at least 5 seconds on its own.

It is not known when or where exactly the practice originated, but what we know is that it happened on several of Europe’s demo parties in 1993.
The story says that after organizers provided large bowl of strawberries, some half-drunk attendees for some reason tried to place one strawberry on top of another.
When one finally succeeded, he tried to place a third one. The tower collapsed, but the challenge remained, and others tried to make taller tower.

Event spread during the 90s all over Europe’s demo parties, and one winner remained, DracoX managed to make a tower of 8 strawberries at Remedy party in 1997.
During the 2000s the practice was almost gone, until resurrected at Forever party in 2013.
DracoX’s record remained unchallenged for many years.

That changed at Revision 2024. Organizers thought that it would be fun to organize strawberry stacking competition.
Many people managed to stack 5 or 6, but then Zarko Zivanov (demoscene ID zzarko) came and managed to stack 11!

“To this day I have no idea how I managed to do that”, Zarko says.
“I just presented TimTris, my tetris clone for TIM-011, and after the adrenaline rush to finish the last pieces of code faded, I felt really calm and relaxed.”
Zarko continues: “My friend Marko asked me if we should try ourselves at strawberry stacking, and I said ‘Why not’.
I have heard about this before, and even tried it at home, but never managed to stack more than 6.
So, I approached the table with strawberries, and started. One, two, three, that was easy.
When I reached six, I thought ‘that was it’, then I tried seventh, and made it stand. Then 8th, 9th and 10th, and tower still remained stable.
I was out of my mind! Then I tried 11th and carefully moved my hand away and tower stood still for the whole 7 seconds before collapsing.
The crowd around went wild and I was crazy excited to have managed that.”
Asked how he feels to be a world champion in strawberry stacking, Zarko replied:
“Something like that can only happen in the atmosphere of a great demo party, nowhere else.
I am aware how silly that whole competition is, but I must say that holding a world record, even in something like this, is extremely satisfying.”
Through the laugh, Zarko added: “And maybe the best thing is that you can eat all those yummy strawberries!”