Allowing communities access to copyright

I was once tasked to conceive and develop an engaging gaming site for a well-known chip manufacturer to highlight that their processors made games run really, really fast. As part of a ‘community’ building plan they wanted to give away some ‘hardcore gaming rigs’ as you do and will when you generate the GDP of a small country.


We had the idea of hosting a video game mash up competition. However, our site was a new comer to the gaming community and we didn’t have enough dedicated fan boys/girls to make it happen at that early stage.

Gametrailers on the other hand, had and has a massive community that they have built via traditional routes like enabling forums, the ability to comment on videos, exclusives and they often have mash up competitions too.

The creator of a popular mash up video, or rather a series of popular videos, submitted his works outside these competitions, seemingly for the sheer love of it or maybe it was just for the ‘bragging rights’ of his fellow Gametrailerites, which is a bit like trying to get recognition from an ape for inventing Pot Noodle.


Monty Oum (nice name) has created Haloid (a mash up of Halo and Metroid), Dead Fantasy 1 and 2 (a mash up of characters from the Dead or Alive/Final Fantasy series) that combined has in excess of 6 million views and that’s just on Gametrailers.


There is definitely something to be said for allowing a fan community access to copyrighted materials enabling them to create something new that essentially does all the ‘holy crap, that’s cool’ leg work for a brand.