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I love Mario Shrooms, so I made some custom 'shroom images, edited from the Super Mushroom graphic (seen below) from the New Super Mario Bros. game for DS

To see a collage of custom 'shrooms I made
Click here.
From left to right the 'shooms are of: A Metroid, Arnie Jack 'O Lantern, Mickey Mouse, Mario's Birthday Cake, Be Right Back 'shroom, A Toad House, Have a "Noice" Day.

Donald Duck:

Spider-Man

Samus Aran

T-800 (Terminator)

Freddy Krueger

Jason Voorhees

To see tons more made by my forum members CLICK HERE!

VGDC's origins began back in 2000 when I got introduced to Macromedia's Flash animation program. My cousin sent me an email telling me to check out this site called Newgrounds.com. It was there that I first viewed some video game parodies. They were done by a guy named Clark Lybeck and he had a site called Nintendo Classics. I went to his site and checked out all his movies, and found they were all very similar to short movies I made back in 1991 with the SNES animation game "Mario Paint." Mario Paint was very limited in features, so I would use my VCR to link my small clips into longer movies. (Wish I still had those tapes so I could prove I was actually doing these over a decade ago.) Since I already had Photoshop down, and a Video/Audio program called Premiere mastered, all I needed to learn was Flash and play with some emulators, which are programs that allow you to play old console games on your computer. So I got Flash and some emulators and began doing the tutorials that were included with the Flash program. I also checked out some sites such as Flashkit.com and Flashplanet.com Also through Newgrounds I met a guy named Rob Foor of Razoric.com. He really helped me with my biggest questions, and helped me learn alot of Flash.

I submitted my first movie, Mario Gets Lucky, to Newgrounds on July 13, 2000. To my surprise it was voted number one movie of the day. The feedback from this simple movie motivated me to begin work on a few other movies, each one doing well. Once I had a a bunch of movies, I decided to create my own website to showcase them. Video Game Director's Cuts was born. The first VGDC layout is shown below. You can still view the entire site at http://www.geocities.com/videogamedc/VGDC/vgdc.html

Since I didn't have a host at the time, I went with geocities.com, a free hosting service. I stayed with geocities for a few months, making more movies, and submitting each to Newgrounds. I really wanted to get my own hosting, and my own domain name. I remembered that Nintendo Classics was hosted for free by a company called Troma, the same company that created the "Toxic Avenger" movies. They also hosted Newgrounds. I contacted Tom Fulp, the creator of Newgrounds and asked him if I could get hooked up with free hosting and become part of the NG network. The NG network is a community of high quality sites and entertainment all linked to NG. After I bugged him for a while, and proved to him that my high rated movie were an asset to the NG community, Tom finally gave in and hooked me up with Troma. I bought my domain name "Videogamedc.com" after I found out that "VGDC.com" was already taken. I also redesigned the site for my new domain launch. Somewhere around November 14, 2000 the following flash design debuted.

After a few months of that site design running, I streamlined the site to 4 main sections. VG Movies, Video, Other Movies, and Fan Flicks. Each page had a seperate color theme, with a little animation running along the top header. I continued making more and more movies, and even gave up on a few because the original ideas I had for them weren't comging out as interesting as I had first hoped.

So now we come to present day. After almost 2 years of the same site design I finally got sick of looking at it. Not only did I feel it looked generic, dark, and dingy, it was also a bitch to update. And since I posted all the news and new stuff right on the flash, I had little room to post anything. I finally decided to create an almost all html site, where the updating would be easy. Unlike most high traffic sites, such as Newgrounds, my site is simply a hobby. So I needed to come up with a design that wouldn't take over my life. Something simple and easy to manage. My buddy Rob Foor of Razoric.com once had an all flash site like mine, and he switched his over to an html site. So when designing the current VGDC design, I used Razoric.com as inspiration. Don't you feel special Robby? I still kept a few flash elements, such as the button bar. I also used flash for the music button. When I launched the current site design, I had no music incorporated into it. When I woke up the next day, I couldn't believe how many emails I received from people begging for the music to return. So I decided to bring back the music and the on/off button for it.

Today VGDC is the known to some as the "King of Video Game Flash", with the "Rise of the Mushroom Kingdom" series being one of the most popular VG Flash series on the net.

VGDC has been featured in countless magazine and internet articles, and in May of 2005, I was on an episode of G4TV's Attack of the Show to talk about the site. View the clip here. Well that's the history of Video Game Director's Cuts so far.