

Gill has a day job, but has three off-days per week and will often spend as many as five hours in a day working on a mod.
Nba 2k14 mods for ps3 mod#
I put my little touch into it." According to Gill, it can take an hour for him to create a face model, like the ones for the Space Jam characters a complete mod may take a week of development. "They did their little parts, and I finished it. That's what got the ball rolling for Gill, and he put it all together from there. Earlier this year, a different user on the forums reached out to Gill saying he had created a special Space Jam court. He did create a few of the Looney Tunes characters, and the other modder eventually released a version of the mod for NBA 2K13 with incomplete rosters. That person had already designed models for some of the Monstars, but Gill wasn't initially interested - he was busy building superhero mods, because his young son loved those comics characters. There, someone else actually pitched him on the idea of a Space Jam mod. Gill, for his part, gave ample credit to other members of the active mod community on the NLSC, a long-running fan site for basketball franchises like NBA Live and NBA 2K. "But MGX actually made it perfect, like, he rendered the advertisements going on and then the - every detail, wherever you look." That's what usually modders do," said Khan. "If MGX wanted, he could've just made a really basic - just the players. But most of what's special about the video is the mod itself, Khan noted. Capturing the game footage itself was a rather laborious process: Khan played a few games between the Tune Squad and the Monstars, recording gameplay from a few different in-game camera angles to lend the final product a cinematic quality. To that end, Khan amped up the production value for the Space Jam mod video, incorporating footage from the film itself as well as its theme song from Quad City DJ's. You don't watch sports, you can still like the video. "We have to make a video that can reach - that's going to be watchable by not just gamers, not just sports people. Another is a sports in-joke, devised by Khan and developed by Gill, in which Miami Heat star Chris Bosh morphs into an 8-foot-tall raptor in NBA 2K13. One puts Thor into Grand Theft Auto 4, where he unleashes a dragon shout from Skyrim. The most popular clips are cleverly conceived with viral intent, sitting inside Venn diagrams combining various spheres of fandom. The MkEliteWorksX channel contains numerous videos of mods, many of which have hundreds of thousands of views. Khan happened upon the mod and used it to create a video that he published on his YouTube channel in April 2012 it has tallied nearly 2.73 million views since. A few years later, he put together an NBA 2K12 mod that pitted Marvel's Avengers against DC's Justice League and posted it on the forum.
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Gill began playing the NBA 2K series back on the Dreamcast, and started modding with 2008's NBA 2K9 after discovering a forum of die-hard fans of basketball games. But he mostly handles the video side of the equation, while Gill does the modding they both acknowledged each other's expertise in those respective areas. Khan, a computer science major, is a budding modder himself. "He said, 'You're very creative and I believe that what you can do, it would go viral, because you're doing something different that can be explored that nobody seen before.'" We Facebooked each other, and we just talked about what would be interesting to do," Gill recalled. "I subscribed to his videos on YouTube and he subscribed to mine, and we just linked up. According to Khan, the video racked up more than 1 million views in its first three days online. A while back, he teamed up with Gill, a 40-year-old modder based in New York, and the Space Jam mod is the most recent hit in their partnership.

MkEliteWorksX is the moniker of Muhammad Khan, a 21-year-old senior at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. Gill didn't have much to do with the video itself it went up on the channel of YouTube user " MkEliteWorksX," an individual who regularly posts gaming-related clips, including a variety of NBA 2K mods. "The funny thing is, I didn't expect it," said Jermaine Gill, a co-creator of the Space Jam mod, in a phone interview with Polygon. And the subject of the mod itself, the 1996 film Space Jam, is one that awakens a powerful coefficient of virality: the collective childhood nostalgia of the Millennial generation. NBA 2K14 itself had become a tremendously popular game by then, and searching the title on YouTube yields dozens of fan-created videos before official trailers come up. If you're in the business of analyzing what makes a video go viral, the Space Jam mod for NBA 2K14 that became a YouTube hit in mid-February could serve as an interesting case study.Īt a running time of more than 11 minutes, it's much longer than a typical viral clip, but it has a few important things going for it.
