Machinima.com

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Machinima.com

URL	http://www.machinima.com/
Type of site	Machinima news site, download site, and virtual community
Registration	Optional
Owner	Machinima, Inc.
Created by	Hugh Hancock

Machinima.com (pronounced [mə.ˈʃiː.nə.mə] or [mə.ˈʃɪ.nə.mə]) is a website, operated by Machinima, Inc., that aims to be a hub for machinima, the art of creating animated videos in real-time virtual 3-D environments. The site features machinima-related articles, news, and Internet forums. Machinima productions can be submitted for possible redistribution after staff review.^[1] Founded in January 2000 by Hugh Hancock of Strange Company, the site helped to bring attention to machinima and to encourage productions based on game engines other than those of id Software's first-person shooter computer game series Quake.^[2]

Contents 1 Content 2 History and impact 3 Notes 4 References

[edit] Content

According to the Machinima.com home page, the site hosts more than two thousand machinima productions, which have been viewed a total of more than 4.5 million times. Productions are organized by channels, which group the films by game engine, and by series, for episodic works.^[3] The site contains articles, interviews with people involved in machinima, and tutorials on the creation of machinima.^[3] Visitors can submit news items, which are moderated and posted by the site staff.^[4] Community forums, powered by the phpBB software, are provided for the discussion of machinima.^[5]

[edit] History and impact

In December 1999, id Software released Quake III Arena. According to Paul Marino, executive director of the Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences, film makers who had been using prior versions of the Quake series to record animated vidos, then called "Quake movies", were initially excited, but the enthusiasm dampened when id announced that, in an attempt to curtail cheating in multiplayer games, it would take legal action against anyone who released details of Quake III's networking code, which was included in the game's game demo file format. This precluded the use of custom demo-editing tools that had facilitated the creation of videos that used the older Quake and Quake II demo file formats, slowing the release of new Quake movies. Another contributing factor to this decline was that the self-referential nature of the gaming-related situations and commentary of Quake movies was losing novelty. Marino explained bluntly that "the joke was getting old".^[6] Therefore, the Quake movie community needed to reinvent itself.^[7]

In January 2000, Hugh Hancock launched Machinima.com, a resource for video makers who used computer and video games as a medium. The site's name was foreign to the Quake movie community. The term machinima was originally machinema, a portmanteau of machine and cinema. However, Hancock had misspelled the term in a previous email, and the new name stuck because he and Anthony Bailey, who had worked on Quake done Quick, liked the now-embedded reference to anime.^[8]

The site opened with multiple articles, interviews, and tutorials, and was soon able to acquire exclusive releases of new productions. One such work, Quad God, was the first to use Quake III Arena^[8] and the first to be released in a conventional video file format instead of a demo file format exclusive to a certain game. The switch to conventional media offended some machinima producers, but Quad God helped to introduce machinima to a wider audience^[9] and to solidify Machinima.com's launch.^[8] Matt Kelland, Dave Morris, and Dave Lloyd called the release of Quad God "a key moment in the development of machinima.^[9] In turn, as Machinima.com became more popular throughout 2000, other game engines, such as that of Unreal Tournament, became the basis of new productions and the focus of new software tools for machinima.^[8]

On 30 January 2006, Hancock announced his resignation as editor-in-chief of Machinima.com and that control of the site would be transferred to the staff of Machinima, Inc. Among the reasons cited for the change were differences in approach to the site and a desire to devote more time to Strange Company's 2006 machinima production BloodSpell. Hancock called the decision "possibly the biggest step I've taken since I founded Strange Company nearly nine years ago".^[10]

[edit] Notes

[edit] References