Bloggers Showing Appreciation for Developers Showing Appreciation for Fan Content Creators

Let’s forget for the moment that in my time zone this is now coming beyond appreciation week. Instead focus on the absolute appreciation fest going on here. Surely it will count as at least a couple of on topic posts for the week, to go alongside my… er. One other. *cough*

Apparently I’m also going for half of my word count in the title today. If you’re here on mobile — I apologise.

Anywho. The other day, when I posted on game hype and how I definitely don’t do it any more and definitely did not squee like a child over the Kerbal Space Program 2 trailer? Well, I didn’t know the full story behind the credit given at the end of the trailer.

I’ve dug into it a little more since and it is actually a really cool story. The KSP 2 trailer is an homage to Shaun Esau’s fan project video ‘Build Fly Dream’ from 2013. Back when KSP was still a fledgling Early Access product with essentially coloured backdrops for textures and hadn’t yet smashed sales out of the park.

Shaun’s fan trailer hit over 1.1 million views and has been given title of best fan trailer ever in some quarters.

The KSP2 trailer maintains the same feel as the original — mixing the serious and the absolute chaos that can occur when things go wrong (which is no small part of the fun).

Some scenes pay direct respect to Shaun’s original work, while others just share in the theme. But over the top, they even paid for and licensed the same music which is just the pièce de résistance for me.

If you missed the original post, here’s the official Kerbal Space Program 2 trailer again — it’s beautiful enough that I don’t really need much of an excuse to post it again.

Beyond the differences in visual fidelity (which is hardly a contest between footage from the 2013 version of KSP1 and cinematic rendering 6 years later, let’s be fair) the main improvement I see in the KSP2 trailer is giving the ‘chaotic’ shots some time to breathe and allows us as viewers to really revel in the madness unfolding.

The credit given to Shaun’s video at the end is really touching though. It isn’t often that you see successful developers so openly acknowledge that the work of someone specific in the community has directly lead to additional sales and success for them.

Well done everyone involved. :)