The Art of Machinima

Meteoric Rise to Slow Decline

It was more than just a glitch

"Another Halo video", he thought, and went to click straight past it. He wasn't much of a Halo fan, didn't see what all the fuss was about. It's just another shooter, more aliens, yeah that long distance view of the ring is nice but really, is that enough? Then one of the blocky characters on the screen started talking about the meaning of life and the search for god and he paused. "What?"

An hour later he was still laughing as a clever script and sympathetic character writing played with genre assumptions, mocked the core conceit of the game, and in short three-five minute episodes, changed everything.

Machinima was the love-child of video gaming and film-making, conceived on a dial-up internet in the middle of the 1990s with 90s technology but coming of age in the first decade of the new millennium. These creators would go from simple beginnings to film directors managing multiple cast and crew, special effects teams and writers to create their vision. Instead of Hollywood sets, there was the pixelated 3d environments of popular games. Scenes could be scripted to run automatically or "acted" by "puppeteers" controlling the characters, while others acted as film crew and recorded the shots the director was looking for. Rather than replaying the same levels, endlessly consuming, these pioneers turned those early game systems into full fledged movie making tools and invented an entire genre's worth of techniques to do it, borrowing lavishly from the history of cinema to do so.

Red vs. Blue wasn't the first Machinima made; people had been making short cinematics with games since the late 90's, using games like Quake and Half-Life. Red vs Blue was different however. The writing was tight, funny, and perfectly aimed at its audience. The characters had real heart and real growth arcs over seasons. Attention was paid to camera shots, transitions, and timing and despite the primitive, by modern standards, graphical engines, they managed to portray real emotion with their 'actors'. It was a breakout hit that went viral in a time before things went viral and solidified the Machinima craze that would last more than a decade.

The seeds were planted in pixels

It had started years earlier, in the mid nineties. ID Software had nearly single-handedly invented the first-person shooter with Wolfenstein, Doom and then Quake, and had shaken up the gaming scene by changing our conception of what a game could be. This was pure twitch and adrenaline, and with a focus on network multiplayer pre-dating easy access to the internet for most people, leading to school network labs and office computer pools being quietly suborned for games, and the invention (or at least popularisation) of the LAN party.

Beyond the innovation of the games themselves however also came innovation of the tools. Some obsessive fans weren't satisfied merely with playing the games story campaign (what there was of it) or endlessly blowing their friends into entertaining chunks, but wanted more. Like all creatives, they had a spark, and these games fanned it to life. Soon there were modding tools built and being passed around. First level creators, so the community could have endless places to kill each other. Then full blown total conversions that replaced graphics and sounds and used the underlying technology to essentially create a different game. Fan made conversions to popular properties were soon making their way from hand to hand, such as moving Doom to the claustrophobic corridors of the Alien franchise, complete with face-hugger eggs and sound bites from the movies. And of course, inevitably, there were versions with naked people in them. As wildly creative as any new art form can be, the must also follow fairly predictable paths as well.

One new thing that got this DIY community excited was the inclusion in Quake of gaming recording tools, allowing gameplay “demos” to be recorded in a custom scripting format and then distributed. Anyone with a copy of Quake could load one of these script-files and play back the same scenes as witness by the original recorder. Soon people were reliving their favorite matches, handing out reels for bragging rights, and sharing them like sports replays, foreshadowing the eSports movement that would begin years later.

Gaming goes from play to playwright

Then a different sort of demo file began making the rounds. In 1996, a small group calling themselves "United Ranger Films" released a short recording, it was only a minute and a half long,and not particularly dramatic by today's standards, but in 1996 the creative ground was dry and just waiting for a spark. "Diary of a Camper" was that spark. Considered by many the first "true" Machinima, Diary of a Camper involved a small handful of "actors", text-based scripted conversation that appeared on the screen using the built-in Quake multi player chat, and a single free-floating camera to film it all. It was brief, action-packed, and ended with a dead John Romero. It was huge; no-one else was doing anything quite like this. Suddenly, from this small project, enthusiasts everywhere realised that with some simple screen capturing and a few friends they could write their own stories inside their favourite games, and the hobby scene exploded.

It can be hard to remember a time before Google dominated the world through YouTube and before direct creator accessibility was so commonplace. This is part of what drove Machinima forward; never before had everyone had such easy access to tools that made it relatively simple to create complicated animated creative works and share them with each other amongst their community. Lots more followed and enthusiasts building their own tools to provide more control over the process. Soon they had discovered how to decompile the "demo" files that controlled the quake playback and convert it into an editable text file. Tools followed to allow editing these in a non-linear way, allowing a great deal of flexibility in what was shown. "Quake movies" as they became known were a cult smash and soon there were sites devoted to them on the nascent internet. Around this time, 1998, a small group called "Ill Clan" released their seminal Machina, "Apartment Huntin'", which would go on to be the first Machinima ever featured on Wired's "Animation Express".

Everything was going strength to strength right up until the late 90's and the release of Quake III. A focused online multiplayer game, ID Software decided they didn't want to risk the network code, which they considered their commercial edge, being leaked to competitors. As the demo files used by the Quake movie-making community included networking information, the user-built tools would need to understand and expose that code in order to be upgraded to work with them. ID Software warned that if this happened, they would pursue legal action against the community, instantly putting the breaks on this new form of creativity.

Though they could continue using Quake 1 and 2, some of the joy seemed to go out of the process after the bucket of water that was ID Software's decision and new releases started to slow significantly. The joke had gotten old, some said, and it looked like it might finish before it truly took off.

Machinima.com: The Wild West

In January 2000 those that remained in the Quake movie community were surprised by the unveiling of Machinima.com, a site determined to keep the art of Machinima alive, to grow and broaden it, and to be the premier destination for the entire community - which, for quite a time, it was. With Machinima.com providing a central destination soon there were new tools targeting different games. Quake movie was no longer an accurate description as Unreal and Half-life became more commonly used, so the more general name of Machinima stuck.

This was a wild time for the Machinima movement, reenergised with a new sense of community and a flood of new tools making it possible to work with new engines, the flood of production began again. Ill Clan returned with a follow up to Apartment Huntin' called "Hardly Workin'", this time using Quake II and all original assets, once again to great acclaim from the public. In late 2000 the famed film critic Roger Ebert critic, wrote an article called "Ghost in the Machinima" where he referred to it as a new art form, and compared it favourably to cinema. Later the next year, Ill Clan made history again when "Hardly Workin'" became the first Machinima to win an award, taking "Best Experimental Short" and "Best of Show" at the alt.sho.com Showcase.

This was early internet days still, the push of content creator monetisation, engagement-by-design and virality were still some way off in the future. What Machinima had instead was a *scene* in the classic sense. A group of people brought together by the love of the medium and in a new form of expression with few preexisting rules and expectations, the creativity on show was wild and raucous. Machinima wasn't just Quake any more, as Unreal, Half-Life, Halo and even the Sims became fodder for the virtual film studios of Machinima.

By the time Red vs Blue premiered in 2003 an entire new artistic movement was in full flow, one slowly being recognised by the mainstream press and the rest of the world, with articles appearing in Entertainment Weekly, even the from page of the Wall Street Journal. There seemed to be no limit.

Comedy was king, but don't sleep on the drama queens

Given its start it's no surprise that comedy has always been a big part of Machinima, and a large part of what is remembered most about it today. The key component that made Machinima so special however was its accessibility. The games, and the engines inside them, were readily available and the tools to make the movies were made by and for the community themselves. Machinima.com was host to a library of tutorials, inspirational works and a community of people willing to talk about their favourite art form. It was easy to get in to, and once in, there were few restrictions on what you could create. Freed from constraints of Hollywood budgets and the realities of physics, people could (and did) create and film as weird as they wanted to. As with all things experimental some caught on and others were forgotten, leading to a diverse range of genres and general types of Machinima.

Comedy: The original and key genre underpinning much that was done in Machinima. From Apartment Huntin to Red vs Blue and beyond, humour and the subversion of expectations was always a key part of the art. Familiar forms were adopted from television and movies with episodic linear narrative structures, sketch comedy and longer works.

Drama: From its earliest days, before the name Machinima was commonly used, these were thought of as essentially a new and novel way to make cinematic art. Unlike games themselves this seemed easier to embrace by the arts community, who may have seen something almost poetic in an interactive art transformed back into a more narrative focused, passively consumed medium. Eventually, in 2011, French Filmmaker Mathieu Weschler would bring this to its logical conclusion when he released "The Trashmaster", a full-length feature film made entirely in Grand Theft Auto IV, itself themed as a reimagined New York City. It released to general critical acclaim, took two years to create, and solidified Machinima as a viable artform alongside Cinema.

Dance!: Not all works were so serious however, for a time Machinima dance videos of game avatars synchronised to popular songs were a huge trend. Many point to the video "Dance, Voldo, Dance" involving two players performing a synchronised dance in the game Soul Calibre to a rendition of Nelly's "Hot in Herre" as the beginning of this trend, but it was quickly taken up with videos made in many different games, particularly popular with MMO's such as World of Warcraft, as the developers often included dance animations in the game itself.

Documentary: It wasn't long before enterprising filmmakers began to explore creative and less standard narrativist forms of film, such as documentary filmmaking. Filmmakers like Alex Chan, who used the game engine in the game "The Movies" to create a film called "The French Democracy" in 2005, commenting on civil unrest in France at the time. The film gained wide mainstream attention and inspired other political machinima. L.M. Sabo developed the "Machinima Verite" style of machinima-making, based on Cineme Verite elements and replicating them in Machinima documentaries. Joshua Garrison created an extremely controversial documentary when he used Halo 3 stage a virtual re-enactment, along with voice-over explanation, of the Virginia Tech massacre.

PXL This 17, including Cataclysm by L.M. Sabo at the internet archive

Machinima was a true blending of media, blurring the line between the still young styles of interactive game storytelling and the traditional techniques of film-making. One could argue that this blending not only led to it being accepted as an art form more readily than the games itself but also helped move games along that path, towards the modern era when interactive works of undeniable artistic merit have won the hearts of all but the staunchest critics.

Unlike film however Machinima was a transformative medium at its heart. It got its start by creating something entirely new from already existing assets. Transforming not only the intent of the original work but the form itself from interactive dynamic to scripted narrative. Though this led to an incredible growth in creativity (and is, arguably, the way in which all modern culture originated, long before our modern ideas), as Machinima gained in fame and visibility, not everyone was happy with what they perceived as their work being co-opted, or even stolen, by others. This situation became even stickier when some people began to monetise Machinima, such as Rooster Teeth with Red vs Blue, through selling site subscriptions. ID Software was not the only one to threaten lawsuits over these years.

The Players were the producers

Central, perhaps, to the movement that was Machinima was the simple sense that it was a medium for the masses. As it exploded into the mainstream there was very much a sense that this wasn't something being done by celebrities in Hollywood, or Auteurs in the European movie industry. These seminal hits that were being discussed world-wide were being developed by players just like them. They were team-mates, friends, family, making stuff in their free time that was becoming much bigger than any of them had expected.

It didn't take long for game developers to notice what was happening with their games either and not all of them took the road that ID Software chose to walk. Many saw potential; potential for marketing and potential for community engagement. Many of them were also fans of the art form, and enjoyed seeing what the community could come up with. The Machinima community proved to be an enthusiastic and highly committed adjunct to the regular player base, a source of ideas, assistance and in some ways a barometer of the playerbase. In a time before community leads and social media managers, some Machinima creators served a similar purpose. Some developers leaned into the Machinima efforts and went the extra mile to provide tools and information about their engines directly; when Epic Games first released a free version of the Unreal engine for non-commercial use, it was partly with Machinima in mind. It wasn't long before the skills of these creators attracted the attention of studios as well and quite a few prominent hobbyists have been hired by the companies whose engines they used for their art. The influence of this resonates still today, as companies like Paradox Interactive still have a tradition of working with modders and the community.

YouTube eats its forebears

It's difficult to point to a single thing that led to the decline of Machinima but if you had to pick two, it would be the advent of the YouTube era, and the later-stage behaviour of beloved community heart, Machinima.com. The communities around Machinima were birthed from a time before algorithmic feeds and social media and were formed around the classical film conventions. Much like an industry, the community viewed themselves as a cohesive whole, organised community events such as film festivals, and even had an Academy of Machinima Arts and Science, a somewhat stranger twin to the motion picture industry Oscars.

YouTube encouraged a different form of video. With viral content and personal branding pushing monetisation models and disincentivising the broader, community based focus of the Machinima heyday, much of the gaming content creation community ironically turned back to where it all started - gameplay videos. Where once it was Quake recorded demo clips being passed around, now it was recorded Let's Play's and livestreams earning much of the attention. With money to be made and less effort in scripting and production, the incentive to move on was huge.

This might have been overcome, but at the same time Machinima.com made a change as well. Leaning into the YouTube era they expanded beyond Machinima and started chasing and hosting other types of game related video. As they grew the network, creators also found that the contracts they had signed to become part of the growing Machinima.com brand had some quite draconian terms, locking them in and preventing them from creating content elsewhere. Under pressure, the community found itself without the support of the place they had once considered the heart of the community and competing on their own platform with viral YouTube stars lured into the "network" of channels Machinima had set up. The film festivals and awards that had brought the community together had long since disbanded. By the time several changes of ownership led to Machinima.com’s ignominious closure in 2019 (taking with it more than a decades worth of content, some of it never to be seen again), many of the community had turned against them and the community itself had fragmented beyond repair.

The Future we didn't get

Machinima seems like a lost trend now, an art form that was born, flourished, and then declined all in the space of two decades. It still exists, both in old videos and remakes but also with new creators still working independently on YouTube and elsewhere, but the movement that looked for a time like it would set up next to cinema in world culture is no more. Partly due to politics and changing conditions that we have discussed but also partly because of the march of tech progress as well. In the mid 90's, 3d design technology was both difficult to use and incredibly expensive, aimed at professional studios. Even in the early 2000's it was not always easy to learn 3d design or animation. Now, in 2025, there is a world class 3d modelling and animation software, Blender, available to anyone for free. Those who took Machinima the furthest were already experimenting with replacing game assets with their own, both to avoid copyright issues and for the pure joy of creation. It was a small jump for many of those to continue on into other industries and turn their talents to traditional and digital animation, to game development, and other pursuits.

Dreams of Machinima one day having an Oscar and being accepted in Hollywood may have died but for a brief glittering moment the gamers got to be directors and they reinvented much about the way stories could be told. In doing so, they helped push games further as an artistic medium than they might otherwise have gone. By its very existence the Machinima community showed just how much of an appetite there was for self-directed creativity and allowing people the opportunity to make use of the tools to create, rather than be forced by "guided" fun. It's no accident that one of the few surviving bastions of Machinima content are Minecraft servers the world over; an entire culture of creator-players that didn't exist in the closing days of the 20th century perhaps has these pioneers to thank for showing the way.

It wasn't all sunshine and roses along the way. In this short overview we chose not to dwell too much on the legal and ethical implications of the "transformative" art, but they were there, and they were serious for people at the time. The saga of Machinima.com and how it ultimately failed would make a good documentary in itself and perhaps is just waiting for the right Machinima film-maker to come along to direct it.

Ultimately though, Machinima showed us and more importantly showed game designers that game worlds weren't just for playing, they weren't just for pre-made, pre-packaged content. They could *be* the stories and more, tools used for creating hundreds more.

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