Past, present and future of video game machinima

Machinima is one of those things that becomes all the more curious with every day that passes. From the early days of fan films made in Quake, to Rooster Teeth’s Red vs Blue series made in Halo and the Strangerhood films in The Sims, machinima’s taken on a lot of forms. Even lately, as I reported shortly before becoming a full-time SG writer, games have been used to create some truly stirring and moving pieces of film, such as Lit Fuse’s Jill’s Song.

What’s next then? The YouTube-heavy, shortened history of machinima follows…

For the uninitiated who have no idea what machinima is, I’ll put it to you simply. Machinima films are those created using real-time interactive 3D graphics rather than using rendering techniques. Essentially, this means that rather than rendering everything frame-by-frame, as you see in CGI films such as Toy Story, it’s all done on the fly using whatever resources are available from inside a game. Games are pretty much the only platform that’s capable of being used in machinima production, since there’s not much else out there that lets you control motion on the fly in a 3D environment.

Diary of a Camper, the very first machinima, was created in Quake in 1996. With no voice-acting technologies available at the time, all dialogue was conveyed through the game's text chat system.

Using either whatever resources are available, for example, the machinima Combine Nation is based in Half-Life 2’s City 17 and uses the Combine character models made for the game, or by creating new ones such as player skins, levels and objects, machinima productions can practically be about anything. There have been comedies, serious films, guides to using a urinal and a Half-Life rendition of a scene from Borat. Pretty much anything is possible, especially if you use a game such as Grand Theft Auto.

What’s currently being done though? You can see the first efforts in machinima up there in the Quake-created Diary of a Camper, but that’s old news. Hit up page two for some history a bit closer to the here-and-now.