Machinima, Inc. was an American multiplatform online entertainment network owned by WarnerMedia. The company was founded in January 2000 by Hugh Hancock and was headquartered in Los Angeles, California. It originated as a hub for its namesake, machinima, which uses and manipulates video-game technology to create animation, as well as featuring articles on machinima and content about film and technology. The website initially helped to bring attention to machinima as an art form and to encourage productions based on game engines other than those of id Software's first-person shooter computer game series Quake. Over time, the website's focus shifted to general entertainment programming centered around video game culture, comic books and fandom. In 2016, the company was acquired by Warner Bros. Digital Networks. In turn, Warner Media was acquired by AT&T in 2018. That December, the company would be re-organized into Otter Media and eventually subsumed by its multi-channel network Fullscreen. In January 2019, Machinima abruptly discontinued their YouTube channels, with their videos set to private. In February 2019, Machinima officially ceased operations.
History
In December 1999, id Software released Quake III Arena. According to Paul Marino, executive director of the Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences, filmmakers who had been using prior versions of the Quake series to record animated videos, then called "Quake movies", were initially excited, but the enthusiasm dampened when id announced that, in an attempt to curtail cheating in multiplayer video 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 gameplay-related situations and commentary of Quake movies was losing novelty. Marino explained bluntly that "the joke was getting old". Therefore, the Quake movie community needed to reinvent itself. In January 2000, Hugh Hancock started 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, from the words 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. 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 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, by Tritin Films helped to introduce machinima to a wider audience and to solidify Machinima.com's launch. Matt Kelland, Dave Morris, and Dave Lloyd called the release of Quad God "a key moment in the development of machinima". 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.
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