"It got to the point where it was getting to about 90m views and I'm thinking, this is going to overtake Angry Birds," Dominic remembers. Then, another spike in April 2013, when it was getting around 200,000 views a day. It was getting over 200,000 views a day at this point. We'd check it every couple of weeks and watch it go up and up and up."īut it wasn't until the middle of 2012 that the video blew up with a huge spike in views. What's going on? It became a joke to refresh it every so often. Come back a couple of weeks later it's like, oh, dude, it's like 31. He and his friends would laugh about the video's rapidly increasing viewer count. Clearly, something unexpected was going on.Īt the time Dominic was studying games programming at Huddersfield University. A few months later, he noticed it had a couple of million views. It wasn't until he started uploading more videos to the DarkZeroTV YouTube channel that he noticed Cars 2 HD Gameplay Compilation had an increasing number of views. Nearly four years later, it has just over 120m views.Īt first, Dominic didn't keep a close eye on the video. It's just a compilation of gameplay." Dominic Sheard, creator of the Cars 2 HD gameplay comparison video.ĭominic's video was uploaded to the DarkZeroTV YouTube channel on 7th August 2011. "What is it then? Well, it's footage of Cars 2 the game. There are no bells and whistles, or fancy editing going on here: Cars 2 HD Gameplay Compilation does exactly what it says on the tin. An attention-grabbing title can catch viewers' eyes in the short-term, but a smartly-worded, "search engine optimised" title, designed to mimic a phrase someone might bung into YouTube or Google, can catch viewers' eyes for years to come.ĭominic went for a "say what you see approach" with his Cars 2 video title, and came up with "Cars 2 HD Gameplay Compilation". "I got some different cars and raced them around, and then just joined them together and threw them up."Īnyone who works on YouTube will tell you the title of a video is as important as the content. "I thought, let people see the track design and the weapons, the vehicles," Dominic says. The plan was simple: capture the opening cutscene, a few races, and put them together to form a 20-odd minute gameplay video that would support DarkZero's Cars 2 review. Dominic thought it a good idea to test out a new capture kit he had bought, so set about recording footage. To support the 2011 release of Pixar's Cars 2 animated film, Disney sent DarkZero the Xbox 360 version of the video game tie-in, developed by Avalanche Software, for review. By night and at weekends he runs and writes for hobbyist video game website .uk, reviewing games such as Samurai Warriors Chronicles 3, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and Cars 2. During the day he works for a manufacturer of coffee and tea, creating reports with business intelligence tools.
#Cars 2 video gae software#
Martin Jarvis can rest easy – his involvement with Cars 2 will leave his credibility intact.Dominic Sheard is a 30-year-old software programmer from Mirfield, West Yorkshire, (the home of Star Trek's Captain Picard, he tells me over Skype with the air of someone who has pointed that out a great many times over the years). Years of bitter experience have taught us to give licensed games a wide berth, but this is an exception to the rule, with both slavish fidelity to the film's plot and gameplay that has more polish than a Porsche's bonnet. More akin to Mario Kart than Gran Turismo, stage after stage is packed with cartooney, crash-bang-wallop and the fun is accessible for multiple players whether online or in the same room. All they care about is revving engines and squealing tyres, which this game delivers in large doses. The target audience won't give a flying flugelhorn as they are nine-years-old, probably male and definitely hyperactive. Is this the moment where licensed video games become a proper art form or was the pay good? T he vocal talents of veteran actor Martin Jarvis, whose velvet purr can be heard narrating Just William or Jeeves in Manhattan on BBC Radio 4, pops up here on Disney/Pixar's Cars 2 doing an impersonation of Michael Caine (playing an animated Aston Martin).