The Making of Where the Hell is Matt?
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Matt Harding is an American video game developer and Internet celebrity known as Dancing Matt for his viral videos that show him dancing in front of landmarks and street scenes in various international locations. Harding has since achieved fame through widespread coverage of his travel exploits in major print and broadcast media outlets. He came to Gnomedex to discuss with us how exactly this entire thing got its start.
Matt has gotten 2,387 people to dance with him all over the World. Well, he’s guessing at the number, but it’s probably a good guess. Basically what he does is to dance… badly… in different places all over the World. He now has a sponsor, thanks to having over 30 million views on his viral videos. In Rwanda, he danced with a bunch of kids for no apparent reason. Him dancing by himself wasn’t as interesting, but dancing with random people doing random things was very interesting.
Matt looked at thousands of emails from people all over the World, who all wanted to know why he hadn’t danced in their area. He sent out emails to all of them, telling them to sign up to receive information about when he would be dancing in their area. About 25,000 people signed up! He and his girlfriend then began to organize everything, and break it down by country and location. They would then organize events and send out email invitations.
Not so surprisingly, people would show up. And… they would dance! They’ve had 40 of these events, in cities all over the World. Sometimes they had five people, other times nearly 200 dancers would show up. But, they always had an amazing time.
At the end of Matt’s talk, his music began to play. What an amazing and emotional few moments we had when nearly all attendees at Gnomedex jumped up on the stage to dance with Matt. It’s nearly impossible to describe on ‘paper’, other than to say you had to be there to understand. For just a few moments, we put aside our disagreements, our debates and the differences between us. For those seconds in time, we were all just people, hanging out and dancing badly.
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