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the red and blue teams, the makers were surprised that some of their biggest fans were soldiers stationed in Iraq.

In November 2004 the MMO game sensation World of Warcraft (WoW) was released in Korea, North America, New Zealand, and Australia to over 500,000 gamers, which has since grown to now over 8 million. This massive popularity spurred machinima filmmakers, providing not just an eager audience but eager machinima participants. What do you do when you reach level 70 and get tired of the adventuring grind? Your character can become a movie star and be seen by millions.

Today there are over 100,000 machinima films totaling thousands of hours, everything from gold-farming videos to bug exploits and dramatic storylines, mostly stuff that only an online gamer would truly appreciate. Many of the best videos out there are guild recruitment videos, like the one found at CraftingWorlds.com made by Tristan Pope for the guild Timeless on Lightning's Blade. Tristan's World of Warcraft machinima has become hugely popular, winning a number of machinima awards and, interestingly enough, getting seen by many outside of the WoWverse.

In 2006, Paul Marino, Executive Director of the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences (AMAS) exclaimed "2006 marks Machinima as ten years old.." A sign that machinima has grown up is everyone from MTV, Spike TV and the Independent Film Channel are running comedy shorts and music videos produced inside online games to the US Navy, Chrysler and Volvo sponsoring contests and hiring gamers to make "machinimercials".

"We've come a long way since the days of Quake movies" explains Johnnie Ingram the Site Editor of Machinima.com and member of the machinima producers Strange Company. "We're heading somewhere exciting, and it's made all the more so because no-one really knows what's going to happen."

From seemingly out of nowhere on May 4, 2006 Pentagon officials testified to the United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that machinima is being used as terrorist propaganda. While politicians nodded their heads watching a giant screen playing machinima made with the Battlefield 2 game, Pentagon Middle East experts explained "it's a jihadi recruitment video."

Soon after on machinima blogs gamers watched the controversial short film and pointed out that the repeated use of "Allahu Akbar" is not Arabic, it's from the spoof film Team America: World Police. The gamers are of course not the Pentagon's Middle Eastern experts working on

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