Back in the wilds of 1996, when the world was so fresh that people still thought “dot-com” sounded neat, Quake emerged from the tortured brains of id Software, and it was good. Quake inspired other things, including the rise of the 3D accelerator, the growth of the mod scene (which had started with DOOM), and Daikatana, which wasn’t so good.

Quake was one of the first 3D games to provide a genuinely 3D world, rather than a cheap 2.5D fake like virtually everything that came before it. It also sparked the mod community; people could, and did, edit almost everything that made it a game. Quake also had the curious ability to record games as replayable demos.

It’s obvious, in retrospect. Essentially, moviemakers now had a real-time 3D environment they could customize at will—virtually unheard-of outside the realms of $300K Silicon Graphics stations—with the ability to film any action they wanted to put into it. Looked at from a certain direction, Quake, and every other 3D game that has followed, is a completely customizable, completely controllable virtual movie set: the indie film director’s wet dream.

It took a certain unusual combination of game geekery and film obsession to spot that back in the beginning, but the people who did so fell upon this new opportunity like starving dogs who’d sneaked in the back door of a restaurant. Early films were primitive, but they rapidly gained sophistication, moving from the Quakester antics of Operation Bayshield to enormous projects that completely remade games, such as Hardly Workin’ and my own Eschaton series. Now, bigger projects such as Red vs Blue, made by a bunch of guys with some spare time and copies of Halo, have started to earn real money.

Machinima is starting to gain mainstream acceptance. The release of games like DOOM 3 and Half-Life 2 provides engines with near-to-film graphics capabilities. Now, anyone with some dedication and access to modern computer games can make his own action, science-fiction, or whatever movie, in his spare time.

By anyone, I mean you.

You may never become a famous machinima director (or even pick up the virtual camera), but that doesn’t mean that the medium is forever out of reach. We’d be nowhere without an audience. With that in mind, here are a few of the top machinima available today that you can download and play almost anywhere. (You can find all of them and more at http://www.machinima.com/films.php.)

I’d imagine that our little whistle-stop tour through machinima has done little more than whet your appetite for information on machinima or encourage you to hastily flip forward. Where can you learn more?

The first place you should look is further on in this very book. We have more hacks devoted to this process, including choosing the right engine ( [Hack #64] ), filming your story ( [Hack #65] ), recording the footage ( [Hack #67] ), and making the most of your keyboard controls ( [Hack #66] ).

Next, you’ll probably want to surf onto the Information Superhighway and bathe in the pure spray of content therein. Machinima.com (http://www.machinima.com/) has over 10,000 pages of machinima-related content, including news, articles, films, utilities, and the most active machinima forums on the Net.

Finally, the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences (http://www.machinima.org/), which runs the one and only Machinima Film Festival in New York City, also has an excellent site with frequent details on machinima events.