As a gamer, crossovers or "dream matches" are come first in my list my favorites—the likes of Marvel vs. Capcom, Warriors Orochi and Super Smash Bros. So while I'm waiting for Super Smash Bros. 4 to come out, I'm currently re-playing Project X Zone.
Anyway, I move on to my main purpose for writing this entry.
I made my wallpaper tribute to NXC (shown on the right) and posted it on my DeviantArt page in 2007, back when I was still using the online handle "raijin-akuma". I thought against using watermarks back then, so I didn't. Between that time and seven years later (the present time—and counting), whenever I key in the phrase "Namco x Capcom wallpaper" in some image search, I can still see my wallpaper popping up, the link to my DeviantArt page being the top search result.
And there are a lot of internet users who loved the wallpaper, that they saved it for their own use and uploaded them in their own sites. Almost all of them didn't give any due credit to me. (And while we're at it, all credits for the individual artworks go to NXC's illustrator Takuji Kawano.)
Back then, intellectual property and copyright issues were not such a big deal to me; now I know that they should, especially since my current work has something to do with these things.
I could go asking all those site owners to create a link to those image duplicates and direct them to my page as the image source, but that would be impractical. What's done is done, after all. Then again, two of my posts in 9GAG went viral, and I don't think I got proper credit for those, either. (Well, what did I expect?)
If it's any consolation, though, I think all of those sites who shared this picture don't have an inkling of an idea that Heihachi's picture in this wallpaper is from his character artwork in SoulCalibur II; I just put him in because he's a playable character in NXC and it was also Kawano-san who drew his character artwork and all the other character artworks for SCII.
And even if everyone agrees to disagree with me here, the idea for this wallpaper is still my intellectual property.
Now, you know.
I guess what I'm going to do next is search through all of my old files and look for the .PSD file of this image, so at least I'll have a physical proof that I made this thing, and I'll put a watermark on it now before it could be spread more.
And since I think I've learned a lot more on how to use Photoshop, I might as well update this wallpaper as a tribute for its 10th anniversary next year. Then I go back to playing PXZ.
Alvin has spoken.
09/15/2014 UPDATE: So I took time to look for the PSD file of my old NXC wallpaper from my file stash one day, and I came to a conclusion that my old self was careless enough to not secure it in one of the discs I brought to my current place. I'm still hopeful that it's in any of the discs I left in my room back in Bulacan, but to see if those discs are still readable is another issue.
Congrats, me.