On October 26, 1996, a well-known gaming clan, the Rangers, surprised the Quake community with Diary of a Camper, the first widely known machinima film. This short, 100-second demo file contained the action and gore of many others, but in the context of a brief story, rather than the usual deathmatch.
But by 1998 things had moved on quite a bit,
A hectic sword fight is taking place on a roof-top in Edinburgh, Scotland. Behind it, the city’s signature “old town and castle” skyline can be seen…
So starts Stuart Brown’s energetic 2003 documentary about Machinima – a then very new moviemaking movement which had grown, quite unexpectedly, out of the online computer gaming scene of the late 1990s and early 2000s. From Edinburgh to New York, Bondi Beach to Vladivostok, small groups of gamers were coming together to make movies. And the hub for this community was a new website – machinima.com – set up and run, not from California, but a small dingy flat in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Sources:
Diary of a Camper (1996) by United Ranger Films
