Today is the one-year anniversary of C3’s first release, “The Rapture”.
When Harmonix first announced that DLC would come to an end, a small group of people knew something had to be done. The idea was to give one more week of DLC, one more week of songs to play before bidding Rock Band goodbye. Farottone, espher, Nyxyxylyth, and TrojanNemo set out to put together a memorable event. They reached out to the GHtoRB3 group and a few standalone customs authors to solicit contributions for one last megapack. Yes, just a pack; as not many people know, this wasn’t supposed to be a weekly thing right away.
The original proposal was to just have a great last week of songs:

“April 9th will be the first Tuesday with no official DLC, so I was thinking about doing something special. I’m thinking about a coordinated release frenzy” –farottone, March 2013

Weekly DLC? Come on, who’s crazy enough to commit to that? Well, one year later we have our answer. Once we started talking about a pack, it was obvious how great it would have been to come up with weekly releases and do for the customs community what Harmonix had done for the general public for years…

“I almost think it’d be nice to try and do weekly releases (at least 3 songs/week, like official DLC, across the community) […] it’d be kind of nice to pick up the torch and keep “weekly” DLC available as a thing” –espher, March 2013

It was supposed to be a huge single event but it turned out to be the start of an amazing journey. The Rapture, the beginning of C3, is to this day the largest pack we ever put out, thanks to the amazing commitment of those people at the start. A journey that began exactly one year ago, and a journey that couldn’t have happened without people we found along the way.

Did you know that…?
Nyx is the one who came up with the name Customs Creators Collective (abbreviated to C3) to use in the logo

pksage is like Buffy’s sister. In one episode he wasn’t there, and in the next it’s like he’s been family from the beginning. Sometimes we look back and it’s hard to pinpoint the moment when he joined us because it’s so difficult to imagine C3 without him. It would be difficult to explain all he did and does in terms of content, management, and gaming philosophy without forgetting something. So we won’t, the best explanation for what he does is that we’re here one year later putting out arguably some of the best content we’ve ever done.

Did you know that…?
espher first suggested we do weekly releases to keep people’s interest active over time

The C3 authors are a bunch of amazing human beings we had the fortune of randomly encountering. We are not gonna name a single one of them because we would do a disservice to anyone not mentioned. You all see the songs released every week, but you don’t see everything that happens behind the scenes. The hourly discussions we have on what to work on, the back and forth on how to author even just half a measure of an instrument, the playtesting, the painful job of looking for multitrack audio, keeping consistency with previous album art, genres, artist names… If you think the _rb3con file you pick up on Friday is amazing, just remember that it’s the tip of the iceberg of the work these guys do.

Did you know that…?
Farottone’s original email to Nyx, espher, and Nemo about a final week of DLC songs was sent on March 1, 2013

And then there’s the reason why we’re still so excited for next Friday and then the next Friday after that, even a year after the Rapture: You, the people who stuck around because Rock Band is awesome. For every “meh” we get from some random dissatisfied player we receive 100 enthusiastic messages. Almost all of our authors have been personally thanked, and some of your messages have really touched us. You keep us working toward our goal, you recognise the sacrifices our authors make, and you appreciate what we do so much. It’s safe to say that, back on March 1st, 2013, none of us expected this kind of amazing response.

Did you know that…?
The great intro and outro animations you see in the weekly preview videos were all done by TrojanNemo

Finally, let me, farottone (who usurped pksage’s copywriting throne only because I can tell the story from the beginning), acknowledge the most amazing people I can think of, those four guys who started it all. Nyx is our source of balance and knowledge: he’s kept us straight since the beginning and he’s been the go-to guy for so many authoring standards issues. espher is the father of the Rock Band Harmonies Project (RBHP), which is an incredible project for one man to take on. So many people can now play harmonies and keys on hundreds of legacy songs just because of him. Nemo, wow… I mean, we would still be compiling song packages by hand and mainstream users wouldn’t have any PC song management tools if it wasn’t for him. His tools alone qualify him for the Rock Band custom songs hall of fame, not to mention the amount of songs he’s given the community. And, as far as I go, I’ve taken from this much more than I gave, so I couldn’t be more happy to be part of C3. (pksage note, who usurped the usurper for some editing: farottone has single-handedly authored over 140 of our ~500 non-GHtoRB3 songs. He is the fuel that propels the C3 engine forward.)
In two days we’ll be releasing our one-year anniversary pack, and I never thought we’d be able to write that sentence. Let’s see if we can write something in this space in a year about our second anniversary. Now that would simply be amazing…