GPC
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The German Penspinning Community is the surviving community for German spinners. It was the first German community made, and remains active to this day.
History
In Summer 2005, Robert discovered pen spinning and found Pentrix. Deciding to create a German website with his friend Bobbycartuner, they created penskills.de.vu in November 2005. Later, they decided to change to a forum model, taking the forum down that same month and rebuilding it as the German Pen Spinning Community or GPC.
The board became relatively popular early on, with a hundred registered users by 6 months in. In July 2006 they released GPC 1st, their first collaboration video, edited by Le0n and Robert. The first offline gathering for Germany happened that month as well in Neuss, with spinners from the Netherlands and Denmark also attending.
Robert and Le0n were also involved in the short lived EuRaPen board until it closed, as part of the moderation team representing the German community.
German spinners first participated in a tournament when UCPSBT 2007 was announced, and hosted their own tournament the following month: the Bundesvision Penspinning Contest, which was won by Le0n. German spinner Pudels Kern also won the BIC Pen Spinning Awards that were held in Paris.
Early collaborations between boards were made, with FPSB + JEB in the "Fusion"[1] video released in November 2006. This was later followed up with GPC + FPSB videos in 2009[2] and 2016[3]. There was a collaboration between GPC + SweSpin[4] in 2007, with the video being finally published after a series of controversial disagreements where GPC claimed to have officially pulled out of the arrangement.
Robert had the benefit of appearing on TV numerous times, on news programs for the German TV channels RTL, Sat1 and Kabel1. He also did advertisements for E-plus, Fujitsu, Faber Castell, Mentos, Duplo, 5 against Jauch, Guinness, Wrigleys and Ültje. On top of this, he appeared in German magazines such as DB, dpa and Zeit. With this much attention, he organized jobs for other spinners in Germany, and negotiated fair payments for their appearances. In 2008, at the peak of this, a 14 minute segment on the German evening TV program Galileo broadcast the De-Gather live tournament, focusing on Minwoo as he progressed through the event and defeated Eriror to become the champion.
The intense media attention resulted in numerous high profile videos, such as GPC 2nd[5] which garnered over 235,000 views on YouTube.