Secret Origins #2

As far back as i can remember, there’s always been a central website uniting the combo video niche within our community. When i first found the tournament scene, gamecombos.com served this role. Eventually it stopped being updated, as all free websites do – and everyone temporarily transitioned to IRC (#gamecombos on EFnet).

Not long after, tragic, eKiN, and i collaborated on a startup website called Video Opera which replaced GCC. Unfortunately that didn’t end well, for reasons i’d rather not delve into. Suffice it to say, it went down and there was nothing i could’ve done to restore it.

However i wasn’t ready to give up on what i had hoped VidOp would become. I thought the core premise deserved another chance, so i registered combovideo.com and began planning for a new beginning. A couple of weeks later, i realized it would be a good idea to register combovideos.com as well. Turned out it was already taken, hosting a rotating gold CV graphic with the words “Coming Soon” written underneath.

Since i had no idea who was behind it, i decided to be patient and hold off until it launched. That’s when i found out it was established by BlazeD from DarkTemplarZ, an oldschool combo group. Sure enough, CV seemed promising at first, and even wiped out the last remaining traces of the combo community’s IRC presence.

Unfortunately, CV had no answer for youtube and slowly began to die. This downfall was compounded by a string of poor moderating decisions which alienated half the active community in favor of protecting one guy. He was clearly using cheat codes and doing a terrible job of hiding it. Since he’d become their main source of original videos, they continued supporting him – hurting their credibility in the process.

Fast forward to today, and there is no functioning central website connecting the entire combo making community. YouTube is convenient for raw file hosting, but awful for everything else. The only way for a new video to gain exposure is by getting announced on Shoryuken and its many clones, but they rarely even get the author’s name right. They never bother explaining what makes the video special or where it fits into continuity.

Of course, there’s no separating combo makers from the greater community. I certainly wouldn’t be making Street Fighter videos if i didn’t love the fighting game community. We appreciate it whenever our videos are mentioned anywhere or spread through word of mouth. But it also sucks to see a good video slip through the cracks or not get properly recognized for its groundbreaking innovations.

Those are the issues and concerns that ComboVid hopes to address. There’s a lot more work to be done before we reach that goal, but hopefully i can get pretty close before getting totally burnt out. As for how i personally ended up here, i’ll ramble about that some other time.