Matt Harding


Matthew Harding is an American traveler, video game designer, and Internet celebrity who is 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 received widespread coverage of his travel exploits in major print and broadcast media outlets, and was hired by Visa to star in their Travel Happy campaign in 2008.
He is originally from Westport, Connecticut.

Video-Game developer

He began his game industry career working for a video game specialty store called Cutting Edge Entertainment. Harding later worked as an editor for GameWeek Magazine in Wilton, Connecticut, and then as a software developer for Activision in Santa Monica, California and then Brisbane, Queensland.
Harding claims that a sarcastic joke about the popularity of shoot 'em up games led Pandemic Studios to develop the game Destroy All Humans!, on which he received a conceptual credit. He said, "...didn't want to spend two years of my life writing a game about killing everyone...". He quit his job and began traveling, leading to the production of his first video, which was uploaded to YouTube in July 2006.

''Where the Hell is Matt?'' videos

Where the Hell is Matt? is an Internet phenomenon that features a video of Matt, aka Dancing Matt, doing a dance "jig" in many different places around the world in 2005-2006. The background music in the video is the song "Sweet Lullaby Dancing Remix" by Deep Forest. The video garnered popularity on the video sharing site YouTube. There are now five major videos plus outtakes and background videos on YouTube.
The titles in the five major videos are all titled Dancing without the year in the videos; Harding labels them as Where the Hell is Matt? on YouTube. The 2012 YouTube titles have also been titled Happy People Dancing on Planet Earth as well as Happy New Year! Peace on Earth in 2013.
However, some of these locations are repeated in different videos, such as San Francisco, New York City, or Papua New Guinea. Therefore, as of the filming of Dancing 2012, Matt had visited approximately 94 countries, 20 states, Washington, DC, Guam, Puerto Rico, 4 Canadian provinces, and Antarctica.
The website has since replaced the word 'hell' with 'heck'.
In 2007, Jawed Karim, one of the founders of YouTube, stated that Harding's video was his favorite on YouTube at that time.
On November 2008, Matt and the vocalist Palbasha were interviewed by KFAI radio in Minnesota. The interview focused on how the "Dance 2008" project came to include Palbasha.

Video-Game Development Credits

Harding's development credits include: