Michael Quinion
It used to be that the process of creating an animated film, even digitally, required long hours of labour using specialised and expensive software. Then moviemakers cottoned on to the potential of the image–generating engines that exist inside animated computer games such as Quake. Some games, especially Quake 3, allow the user access to the underlying code to customise scenes or create new ones. It didn't take long for audio–visual experts to spot their potential for creating entirely new animated sequences. Films so made have been around for several years, but the technique, and the results, have begun to attract mainstream interest only recently. Machinima is usually said to be a blend of machine plus cinema; the large number of Web sites in German that feature it suggest the term may have been coined in that language.
