Back in 1996, when Quake was the finest first-person-shooter around, a Stanford freshman named David Wright created a piece of editing software called Keygrip and accidentally changed the course of animation forever.

It was Keygrip, and its successor, Keygrip 2, that allowed gamers to edit Quake "demos," and that ability ushered in the film genre known as Machinima.

Derived from the words machine and animation, machinima is a rapidly growing film genre in which movies are recorded entirely within a video game, or filmed using a video game engine.

Popular examples include work down by The Ill Clan, the sketch comedy of Red vs. Blue, and Borg War.

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Machinima has been flirting with mainstream success for a few years now. Machinima boasts its own academy, Spike TV used machinima artists to create shorts for its 2003 video game awards, and Steven Spileberg reportedly used the technique to storyboard parts of his film "A.I."

Machinima is also touted at an annual festival. At this year's festival at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, Wright will be honored for his contributions to the genre.

Publish.com caught up with him to get his thoughts on the state of machinima today, and what happens next.

So, the Machinima Festival is honoring you this weekend for developing Keygrip. Did you have any idea that the machinima genre would achieve such popularity?

I really had no idea at the time that it would be interesting to anyone outside a hardcore gaming audience.

I remember when I was 15, I had a lot of fun playing Wing Commander 2 on my 386SX and watching the battles on the replay cam. I wish Keygrip had been around back then. Are you still making movies?

I currently work as Chief Architect for IGN Entertainment, which was recently acquired by Newscorp. I don't currently develop any software related to machinima, but I have followed it over the past few years.

Did you coin the term machinima?

I'm not sure who coined it - it may have been Hugh Hancock, one of the early proponents. Back when KeyGrip was created we just called them "demos" or "movies".

So let's talk about the future. It took Pixar four years and $94 million to create "Finding Nemo." Will animation studios' desire to cut costs lead them to embrace machinima as a production method?

I think you may see some action on the independent film side of things. For major studio productions they have a lot invested in their current techniques and tools, so I don't expect them to change any time soon.

But is machinima ready for prime time and a mainstream audience? The genre has slowly been creeping into mainstream media -- Spike TV produced some shorts with machinima in 2003, and Steven Spielberg supposedly used machinima to storyboard part of his film "A.I." Where, do you think, is the tipping point?

I think we're already seeing it used in limited areas, such as the ones you mentioned, and others such as the Volvo/GTA advertisement. I don't think the technology is really ready for a full-length production, but the tipping point isn't going to be technology. At some point the technology will be "good enough" and the REAL tipping point will be a really cool piece of content that makes good use of it. The history of Pixar and CG films are a good parallel - CG animation existed for a long time and there were plenty of CG shorts and films, but it wasn't until Toy Story, which was a really great production that happened to make use of CG, that it got widespread acceptance.

So where's machinima's Ingmar Bergman?

I guess that's really my point - for Machinima to become mainstream you're going to need a great story and professional production values (in addition to great technology) to get a hit. For that reason I think the real breakthrough will probably come from a film school or an existing animation house that decides to adopt the technology - but they will benefit from all the work the gaming community has done.

How about legal problems. Machinima is built on the backs of copyrighted work. If a machinima show, such as Red Vs. Blue or This Spartan Life, became a big hit, would there be legal trouble?

Most games have a license agreement that covers how their content (models, sounds, etc) can be used. Generally the publishers are fine with non-commercial productions - anything given away for free. It benefits the publishers with free promotion for their game. If someone wants to start charging for their movies they would need to make their own agreement with the publishers.

Any final prognostications on the future of machinima?

It's really hard to say. For the time being it is still a very small community, but as the technology continues to develop I do think it's going to see more mainstream adoption.

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