OC Remix: A Digital Archive of Fan Composed Video Game Music

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Introduction

OverClocked Remix (aka OC Remix or OCR) “is a community dedicated to the appreciation and promotion of video game music as an art form” (Wiki: About Us); specifically, it’s a website that hosts original remixes of video game music, featuring active discussion boards for fan composers as well as for anyone visiting the website. Anyone with an Internet connection can download remixes for free and without registration. If you are a fan of video games and have never heard of it, then we encourage you to check out the website and search for music from your favorite game: link to OC Remix homepage.

The community is also quite active on the Discord chat social media platform. Upon joining the community, one is asked about their background with music production and what instruments they play, as well as their digital audio workstation (DAW) of choice. These technical specifics indicate that the particular goal of this community is to foster digital music proficiencies and discussions, specifically within the realm of video game music.

Context

Much scholarly work has been done on fan communities and fanfiction, and even on digital workshopping. However, almost none has been conducted on the video game music remix community, and certainly none on OC Remix specifically, despite its near-thirty years of digital service. Thus, we set out to answer a series of questions relating to fandom communities concerning the goals of the community and its practices, the relevance of the specific digital platform, the cultural values reflected, the social-cultural-historical context of remixing/ReMixing, and how all this fits into existing scholarship.


According to Gainer and Lapp, “Remixing originally referred to the practice when DJs pulled from various audio sources and mixed the different tracks together to create a new song. Remixing is seen as a creative process that draws on prior knowledge and textual understanding” (58). While Gainer and Lapp go on to acknowledge that remixing has been co-opted by other art forms, OC Remix is specifically concerned with audio remixing. It differs from fan fiction communities in that digital music composition requires knowledge about audio creation as well as mixing and editing skills; that is, a different knowledgebase than is required for fanfiction. Furthermore, digital remixes require different technical infrastructure, including more online storage, as well as volunteers who “seed” or host the community created music on their local computers via BitTorrent, a file-sharing software. Yet, they are welcoming to newcomers who don’t have digital music composition skills, as evidenced by their workshopping pages as well as “office hours” by more experienced composers. In practice, the community exists to help develop proficiency in electronic music composition.


Therefore, despite the superficial differences, OC Remix is quite similar to fanfiction communities as defined by Rebecca Black. As Black notes, “Through such multimodal activities, youths engage in creative manipulation of popular cultural and textual artifacts, drawing from a mixture of text, image, color, and sound as a means of representing themselves and communicating in online spaces” (690). Additionally, participants in online communities are “developing effective collaboration and communication skills as they read, revise, discuss, and critique each other's work” (695). Like fanfiction communities, OC Remix is about creativity within bounds as well as a continual quest for improvement.

Key Actors

Founded in 1999 by David W. Lloyd, or, djpretzel, the OC Remix website is a digital platform for both listeners of video game music and contributing artists. Lloyd originally curated all of the submissions to the site, but in 2002 “after a community poll of ReMixers chose the most acceptable solution, djpretzel established the judges panel to decide (with his oversight) which submissions best fulfill the vision for OCR” (Wiki: Judges Panel). 

The list of current submission judges includes eleven volunteers. On top of that, the website has a single webmaster as well as a supporting staff of volunteers that are responsible for moderating the forums, translating content into French, Japanese, and Spanish; as well as volunteers managing media relations and data management. While the site doesn’t display a total count of downloads or contributors directly, a Reddit AMA from 2016 states that they get nearly 1000 submissions a year. “The bar is set very high for aspiring OC ReMixers, with only 10-15% of all submissions actually making it through the entire process” (Wiki: About Us).

User u/ocremix states that the site “never tracked downloads because it tends to get into a popularity contest and either inflate or crush the ego of the artists” (R/IAMA on reddit).

While there's no official number of active contributors, it's safe to estimate possibly over a thousand unique artists have submitted music over the nearly three decade history of ocremix.org, with a smaller core group that contribute regularly. The image below shows the judges panel collaborating on a final decision for a submission.


Social Media Presence

The website now serves as home for a vast digital archive of community created music in MP3 format, but it also links out to social media websites including Bluesky, YouTube, SoundCloud, and Discord, in addition to a forum. While the forum has been active since the early 2000s, Discord seems to be the current preferred area for online collaboration, boasting well over 2,000 members.

Offline Presence

While no longer as relevant in the age of high speed internet, streaming on-demand media, and mobile data plans, OC Remix once had a substantial offline presence in the form of free MP3 downloads in the early days of the internet. Contributing artists and fans could use OC Remix’s repository as a way to build up their MP3 collections, and fans could freely share their downloads. Downloaded music was highly portable two decades ago with the advent of MP3 players and iPods.

Impact of Movement

The main navigation on the website has links sorting the hosted remixes. Besides sorting alphabetically and by date of upload, a visitor can sort by “Most ReMixes.” The title song for the original Legend of Zelda is the song most remixed (31 remixes) and Super Mario Brothers from the Nintendo Entertainment System and Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time are tied for second most community remixes (30 remixes). One can also sort the website’s vast library by “people,” which includes the individual fans who contributed an original remix to the website, as well as by “organization,” that is, the parent company that released the game for which the music has been reimagined. Visitors can also click on an original composer’s name while browsing the website to find additional pieces by that composer.

One fascinating example is the page dedicated to Nobuo Uematsu, the renowned composer for many of the community’s most beloved musical scores from the Final Fantasy franchise of video games. The page has a comprehensive list of video games where Uematsu contributed music for the franchise, and there are links to OC Remix albums of fan generated remixes.

Nintendo and Square are the two organizations with the most remixes on the website. The number of different remixes the community has contributed for these companies’ iconic songs suggest that this particular fandom holds reverence for classic video game franchise’s original musical scores. Additionally, since the community remixes copyrighted musical scores, it functions under the umbrella and sponsorship of Game Music Initiative, Inc, a 501c3 non-profit charitable organization. Fans can support the community financially through purchasing merchandise on its webstore or through Patreon donations. The Patreon page shows that there are 1,004 members donating a total of $1,049 every month.

Critiques of Movement 

Despite existing in the legally gray area of remixing copyrighted materials, OC Remix has somehow avoided the criticism that Napster and Limewire received, even by video game music industry professionals–the individuals whose work the site’s users so readily edit. In fact, professional video game soundtrack composers have made accounts on the site to upload their own remixes, including The 7th Guest composer George Sanger (Mackey et al).

Conclusion

In November 2023, djpretzel officially stepped down from his role of de facto leader of OverClocked Remix, stating personal and family reasons. The OC Remix music fandom continues, still engaging in various community-building practices that showcase its unique culture centered around video game music. The community is still vibrant after over two decades, and members participate in collaborative projects like themed album releases and remix competitions. As of October 2025, there is a competition posted in the discussion forums in which the community is breaking up into teams to remix music from the Megaman franchise.

In this article, we presented the first scholarly analysis of the website OverClocked ReMix, placing that particular online fan community not only within the broader context of online fandom and fan creation, but within the music remixing/online hosting realm. Further research could delve further into the specifics of the hosted remixes, as well as into user demographics and even into djpretzel’s distinction between ReMix and remix.


Works Cited

Black, Rebecca W. “English-Language Learners, Fan Communities, and 21st-Century Skills.” Journal of

Adolescent & Adult Literacy, vol. 52, no. 8, 2009, pp. 688–97. JSTOR,

http://www.jstor.org/stable/27654331. Accessed 10 Oct. 2025.

Gainer, Jesse and Diane Lapp. “Remixing Old and New Literacies = Motivated Students.” The English

Journal, vol. 100, no. 1, 2010, pp. 58-64. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20787692. Accessed

18 Oct. 2025.

Mackey, Bob and Larry Oji. “OverClocked ReMix’s Top Ten Tracks.” 1UP.com, Ziff Davis, 31 Aug.

2012. Archived 24 Feb. 2013.

“R/IAMA on Reddit: We Are Overclocked Remix, Releasing 3,000+ Free Video Game Music Fan

Remixes since 1999. It’s Fair Use Week, We Promote VGM as an Art Form, and We Embody the 

Spirit of Fair Use! Ask Us Anything!” Reddit.Com, 

www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/477lni/we_are_overclocked_remix_releasing_3000_free/. 

Accessed 19 Oct. 2025. 

“Wiki: About Us.” OC ReMix, ocremix.org/info/About_Us. Accessed 18 Oct. 2025. 

“Wiki: Judges Panel.” OC ReMix, ocremix.org/info/Judges_Panel. Accessed 18 Oct. 2025.







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