OverClocked ReMix - History

History

Lloyd began the organization under the name of DJ Pretzel's OverClocked ReMix in December 1999 as a spin-off of OverClocked, his 3D webcomic about playing and emulating video games. The format was derived from Commodore 64 arrangement website C64Audio.com (then a host for many fan arrangements); Lloyd chose to expand the focus to all games regardless of game system. Originally coded in basic HTML and sporting an orange color scheme, the site underwent a conversion to a database-driven system in 2001, as well as visual redesigns in 2001 (blue), 2002 (purple) and its current design in 2004 (silver & orange). OC ReMix was located at the subdomain remix.overclocked.org before moving to www.ocremix.org in July 2003. Both domains were hosted for several years by ZTNet, with OCR eventually becoming self-funded and switching to dedicated hosting with LiquidWeb in late 2006. Lloyd registered OverClocked ReMix as a limited liability company in 2007.

Originally, music submissions were evaluated solely by David W. Lloyd. To better accommodate the volume of music submissions and improve selection consistency, a panel of judges, composed of accomplished artists and contributors to the community, was instituted in early 2002 to assist Lloyd in music selection. Earlier in 2002, a dispute over administrative decisions, including the proposal of a judges panel, caused artists virt, prozax, and mp to leave OCR to found VGMix, and they demanded that their ReMixes be removed, to which Lloyd agreed. Other artists who left asked that their works stay, although they would not submit future works. Subsequently, some who removed their ReMixes from the site requested to return, and the request was granted with the provision that they not remove their work from the site again. OC ReMix judge Larry Oji (a.k.a. Liontamer) became head submissions evaluator for the organization in June 2006, providing initial evaluation of all submissions and freeing up Lloyd's time to develop the site.

At the time, there was a mixing scene that focused only on Commodore 64 music, with an electronica emphasis, but I love arranging, and I wanted an outlet where I could hone my skills while encouraging others to branch out and do the same. From the very beginning, the intent was to encourage games from all platforms, arranged in as many musical genres as possible. That’s what made us different – that was the 'big idea.'

The site's first fan convention appearance was Otakon 2006 in Baltimore, Maryland. In April 2008, Lloyd and Oji joined Six Apart's Anil Dash, MetaFilter's Matt Haughey, Reddit's Alexis Ohanian and FARK.com's Drew Curtis for a panel discussion on virtual communities at Internet meme convention, ROFLCon, co-sponsored by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.