The Politics of Production and Fandom

In 1995, one of the greatest games of all time debuted on the SNES. A beautiful storyline surrounding a time traveling main character, a brand new hybrid action adventure-RPG game engine, coupled with beautiful state of the art graphics for its time, Chrono Trigger quickly gained a massive fan base in Japan and subsequently the US. It spurned a sequel for the Playstation in 1999, and a massive online community that still discusses, plays, and makes new content based on the old SNES game.

The team that designed the original game was called the Dream Team. Harnessing five of the best in their field, Chrono Trigger was what some could call a super project. The team consisted of renowned producer Hironobu Sakaguchi along with famed video game composer Nobuo Uematsu, as well as two team members of the already popular Dragon Quest team, Yuuji Horii and Akira Toriyama.

For years, people have talked about remaking this classic game with today's new technology. There have been no official plans to remake the game for a new generation. Having built up such a loyal fan base, it is only natural that those fans would make new content based on the old game. Cue, Chrono Resurrection, a fan based non-profit remake of the original game. They had it in their mind to remake the entire game into 3D for the benefit of the fan community. They released this video:





This was the last video that they ever released, as Square Enix (makers of Chrono Trigger), sent them a cease and desist order. The project was shut down and all of the work that had been completed for this project was done for nothing more than a good looking video. In the end, the big media corporation had the final say, and the copyright stood.

This is a good example of how all productions of texts have political aspects to them. Square-Enix could have chosen to not sue them, hoping that the fan project would generate good publicity for their newly merged company (Squaresoft and Enix merged on April 1st, 2003). Instead they chose to protect their intellectual property rights of Chrono Trigger and shut down the project. This is an example of how copyright law is used and also how fans can sometimes do illegal things without knowing it. Copyright is definitely a very sticky issue.