Let’s start with a flashback. For me it was 2003 and after a grueling 4-hour multiplayer session of Halo on XBox, my friend Danny decided to call an intermission and pull up the latest episode of a online-only series from a couple of guys in Austin, TX. It was Red vs. Blue (see episode 1 below), not only one of the first web series that would hook me, but an introduction into the world of machinima. It was an enlightenment for me—an entire story ’shot’ within an off-the-shelf copy of a video game (Halo). And for the few million that would end up watching it, Red vs. Blue would become an essential step in machinima’s popularization as a viable entertainment medium.
Burnie Burns and his Rooster Teeth crew weren’t the first to shoot their stories inside video games. A few years earlier, Hugh Hancock had launched machinima.com, and with it coining a term for the new medium, a misspelled contraction of machine + cinema (machinema). The site would serve as a home to this experimental new craft, and attracted the occasional bits of mainstream attention like ILL Chan’s machinima film Hardly Workin’ that took home ‘Best in SHO’ award at Showtime Network’s 2001 Alternative Media Festival. And taking it back even further, 1996’s Diary of a Camper, which used the popular FPS game Quake, is often credited as the first machinima film with a narrative story. It would spawn a whole movement of creating these so-called Quake movies that served as the precursor to machinima series.
(For a much deeper dive into the history of machinima, there are two books worth checking out from two of the early godfathers of the medium: Paul Marino’s 3D Game-Based Filmmaking: The Art of Machinima, and Hugh Hancock’s Machinima For Dummies)
