Thunderdome: how a party became a brand

01Three friends and an exam

ID&T is three initials: Irfan van Ewijk, Duncan Stutterheim and Theo Lelie, school friends barely twenty years old, who in 1992 decided to throw a rave. The first one, The Final Exam, took place at the Jaarbeurs in Utrecht on 20 June 1992. When the crowd went home, the organisers picked up brooms.

“The party finished at seven in the morning and we were still busy at 11 that night,” Van Ewijk told The Guardian decades later. They were about to build one of the biggest dance companies in the world, and they did not know it yet. Their second event was the one that changed everything. They booked an ice rink.

02An octopus on the ice

On 3 October 1992 Thunderdome opened at Thialf, the ice skating arena in Heerenveen, in Friesland. The bill had four DJs who were not famous yet, and the decor included a colossal octopus fairground ride that the organisers feared might crash through the ice. More than 30,000 people came.

Dano of the Dreamteam was one of the DJs. “I remember when I put on my first record, my hand was shaking like a little child,” he said in 2019. He did not stay nervous for long. In 1993 Thunderdome toured the big Dutch halls, from Leeuwarden and The Hague to Groningen and Utrecht, and then it went abroad: Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, even Australia. In September 1997 it landed at the Number One club in the province of Brescia.

“What happened in Holland, the whole world wanted in a finger snap,” Dano said. He was not exaggerating by much.

03The CDs that paid the bills

The parties made the name. The compilations made the money. The first CD carried a title that left no room for doubt: Thunderdome, F*ck Mellow, This Is Hardcore From Hell. Within the first year ID&T clashed with the label Arcade over the rights to the series, and then ended up making it together with them.

Van Ewijk remembers the meeting: “When we had the meeting I was celebrating my birthday, so I came in with a cake as if the deal was already done, which pissed them off so hard.” It worked out anyway. The CDs went out across Europe and seeded the sound in places no tour could reach.

They also saved the company. According to Duncan Stutterheim, the Thunderdome compilations kept ID&T financially alive and allowed it to pay back its debts within two years. Hardcore paid for a lot of what the Dutch dance industry became later.

04The wizard nobody asked for

The white wizard with clenched fists is the image thousands of hardcore fans carry tattooed on their skin. It was not drawn for Thunderdome. The character comes from Mode 2, the graffiti writer of the London crew The Chrome Angelz, and appears next to his famous Crime Time piece in Spraycan Art, the 1987 book that showed the world how far graffiti had travelled. In 1992, the Dutch Graffiti Library records, ID&T used it as the Thunderdome logo without permission. Mode 2 chose not to make a fuss. The Dutch writer Angel answered for him in 1997 with a piece called Thunder Thiefs.

The rest of the look came from ID&T’s house illustrator, Victor Feenstra, an airbrush artist who came out of graffiti, and from the horror films and fantasy paintings everyone was watching. “It had to be rough, tough and striking. Hard and scary and dark as the music itself,” Feenstra told Boiler Room.

Borrowed or not, the wizard became family property. At the 2019 edition there was even a tattoo station inking it on the spot.

05The crash and the secret

In the mid 90s it looked like it would never stop. Then came overexposure and parody. “We thought it was normal that every record sold 100,000 copies. When the hype broke loose, with Gabber Piet and so on, it collapsed within half a year,” Stutterheim told VICE (translated from Dutch). Gabber Piet’s Hakke en Zage, a 1996 parody of the dance, went to number 2 in the Dutch Top 40, and the gabbers heard it as pure mockery.

Thunderdome kept going with a darker, rawer sound. DJ Promo, one of the artists who helped rekindle the scene after the crash, programmed Thunderdome in the early 2000s. Then, on 15 December 2012, Thunderdome XX at the Amsterdam RAI was billed as the very last one. The farewell press release said: “It’s time to let Thunderdome become what it always has been: a legend.”

Not everyone at ID&T agreed. Francois Maas, an employee since 1999, kept the brand alive in secret with fan days and meetups, helped by an intern, Nick Hoppezak, who had joined the event’s radio team at the age of eleven.

06Thunderdome never dies

In the summer of 2016 a plane flew over a festival crowd with a banner: 25 Years of Thunderdome, see you in 2017. According to Maas the comeback at the Jaarbeurs on 28 October 2017 sold out in 30 minutes, and around 40,000 people came. Two years later the 2019 edition, An ode to Gabber, drew 50,000, a record for an indoor hardcore event, with a gabber museum of limited edition sneakers and Australian jackets, a gabber barber and that tattoo station. A documentary, Thunderdome Never Dies, hit Dutch cinemas the same autumn.

The 30th anniversary, delayed by the pandemic, came in December 2022. In December 2024 Thunderdome went to Antwerp for two nights, Omega and Alpha, at the Sportpaleis, an arena it had already filled in 1996 and 1997. In 2025 it was back at the Jaarbeurs, sold out, with a crowd from dozens of countries.

On 11 and 12 December 2026 it returns to Antwerp, to the arena that has been called the AFAS Dome since 2025. Friday is a tribute to the golden era of the sound. Saturday puts the past, the present and the future of the genre on one bill. “In the beginning it was one big happy family,” Van Ewijk once said. The family just needs a bigger room.