Though it’s tempting to blame id for not considering the importance of machinima when designing Quake III, it’s not fair to put the burden of the scene’s demise entirely on their shoulders. No, the hard truth was that Quake III’s design limitations were a wake-up call to the limitations of the Quake machinima films themselves. Removed from the frantic onslaught of releases, viewers became aware of the amateurish and juvenile nature of many of these machinima pieces. Though technologically impressive, even the best Quake shorts (such as Operation Bayshield) feature some questionable jokes and an overall lack of maturely crafted content. While there is an argument that Quake machinima pieces could have matured creatively speaking if id had made the Quake III software a bit more accommodating, the scene had reached its zenith and the most talented machinima artists had moved on to other projects in new titles.

In the immediate years that would follow the release of Quake III, we would see the first machinima video ever played on MTV (“In the Waiting Line” by Zero7), a highly regarded machinima recreation of the poem “Ozymandias” produced by The Strange Company, Steven Spielberg using Unreal Tournament to help make his film A.I., and, of course, the aforementioned Red vs. Blue and the rise of Rooster Teeth as an internet powerhouse.

From that point, machinima would somehow just keep growing. G4 started the first machinima series in Portal, X-Play used Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory to bring us the adventures of Bob and Steve, South Park gave us perhaps its best episode ever in the machinima-driven “Make Love, Not Warcraft,” a host of new games incorporated advanced filmmaking options never before dreamed of, and companies like Valve used machinima as a concept for their Source Filmmaker and the Team Fortress 2 “Meet the Team” series. You could even argue that the entire idea behind let’s play videos are just an expansion of the machinima concept.

Even though machinima eventually reached nearly every corner of the entertainment industry, the early days of Quake movies never quite receive the widespread notoriety that we usually assign to innovators. Quake’s role in the formation of machinima is not entirely forgotten, and it’s not as if Quake itself doesn’t still receive plenty of love from generations of gamers, but the scene’s once-mighty online empire stands in ruins. Cineplex’s former website now leads to an IGN 404 page, while Quake Move Library’s directs to a similar one over at Machinima.com. Speaking of Machinima, they have grown into a content provider that barely even produces their namesake content anymore much less reserves much bandwidth to pay tribute to the game that helped launch their site. The saddest example, though, would have to be the home page of the formerly popular Quake Done Quick sites. The headline of the site’s last post (dated December 29, 2011) reads: “Is Anybody Still There?” while the post itself begins with the words: “I guess most of you had given up hope by now.”

Though it is natural that the evolution of the internet would leave some sites and works in the dust, it somehow seems cruel that such an innovative early internet phenomenon is now relegated to some scattered YouTube channels and the memories of the “remember when” section of a few message boards. Quake movies mastered the community building potential of the internet and now much of their original online presence is easily forgotten. At a time when most gamers and game makers found themselves constantly needing to argue the merits of the industry, Quake gave members of the gaming community a chance to showcase the artistic creativity of the medium and its fans. Though their work may be dated, the spirit behind these projects lingers in the very best of modern gaming.