Machinima

» see machinima.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

machinima the word reached me before machinima the company did. somewhere around 2005 or 2006, in the early youtube years, i watched short films made entirely inside game engines: halo characters acting out comedy sketches, quake demos cut into music videos. that was machinima, lowercase, the art form, where you used a video game as a camera and a stage. i did not follow the american youtube network that took the name and turned it into a business. but the underlying thing, making films out of games, was close to the world i actually lived in, counter-strike in internet cafes and game footage traded around forums.

the company was a different animal from the art form. machinima.com was founded in 2000 by hugh hancock, a scottish filmmaker who helped coin the term and ran it as a community hub. over the 2000s it turned into machinima inc, a los angeles operation that signed up thousands of gaming youtubers under one banner and sold ads against their videos for a cut. by 2012 it was one of the most-subscribed channels on all of youtube. by the mid 2010s the flagship channel had passed twelve million subscribers and the network's videos pulled billions of views a month.

machinima also collected some of the era's ugliest creator-economy stories. in 2013 it locked some youtubers into perpetual contracts that were hard to escape. in early 2014 it ran a campaign paying creators to praise the xbox one in their videos, tagged xb1m13, without disclosing the payments, which earned the company an ftc settlement in 2015. the relationship with its own creators curdled over the decade even as the view counts stayed huge.

warner bros bought machinima in 2016. when at&t acquired time warner in 2018 and folded it into warnermedia, machinima got shoved into a new unit called otter media. on january 18 2019 every video on the machinima channels was set to private at once. no archive, no warning. just gone. two weeks later otter media laid off the last 81 employees and the company was over. i was on the other side of the world from all of it, but i felt the specific dread of watching a piece of early internet history get switched off by a holding company that did not care what was on the tapes.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

machinima rode the exact wave that made youtube into a business. in the late 2000s and early 2010s, gaming was the single biggest content category on the platform and there was no infrastructure for the creators making it. multi-channel networks like machinima offered to handle the ad sales and rights management in exchange for a slice of revenue. for a few years it worked. machinima's inside gaming and its trailer drops made it appointment viewing for a teenage gaming audience that television had no idea how to reach.

~ the day the videos went dark ~

the actual death was abrupt in a way that still bothers people who care about internet preservation. there was no announcement that the archive was coming down. on january 18 2019 the videos simply flipped to private, thousands of them, including footage that existed nowhere else. some creators had local copies. a lot did not. the machinima channels, which had been a running record of what gaming culture looked like for nearly twenty years, became empty pages. otter media made the call as a brand-consolidation cleanup. for the people whose work lived there it was a deletion.

~ what got buried with it ~

machinima's death is a lesson about renting your archive from someone else. the creators did not own the machinima channels, the company did, and then a holding company owned the company, and when that holding company decided the brand was redundant it had every right to switch off the lights. red vs blue survived because rooster teeth kept control of its own work. the machinima-hosted creators who had handed their catalogs to the network mostly lost them. hugh hancock, the man who coined the word and founded the original site, had died in february 2018, about a year before the company that carried his term erased its own history.

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