The release of Terminator Salvation in late May marked a dubious first: it was followed by the online release of a 72-minute downloadable animated film, Terminator Salvation: The Machinima Series, which was 'filmed' entirely inside the brand new Terminator Salvation video game.
The project marked the first time that a major studio - Warner Bros - has spent serious money on the geeky enterprise of in-game filming, or machinima, a genre that, until now, has been the domain of a geeky tribe of PC gamers. But machinima might not be underground for long.
Machinima is an amalgam of 'machine', 'cinema' and 'anime'. It dates back to the mid-1990s, when 3D shooter games Doom and Quake first included software to let players record bouts of monster slaying. It didn't take long for gamers to use video-editing software and add voiceovers to these saved sequences.
The result was machinima, a narrative form unique to the personal computer.
Like many machinima series, Salvation Machinima was released in parts, and the sixth and final instalment went on sale only recently (available to US audiences from iTunes and Amazon). While the series may mark new levels of photo-realism - machinima only really loses out to CG movies such as Shrek or Wall-E in its ability to create facial expressions - mainstream exposure may also herald the death of machinima.
Salvation Machinima is not very good. Its storyline is just another wonky Terminator plot tangent, this time a prequel to Terminator Salvation. It tells how a major character in the new film, Blair Williams, came to join the resistance against the machine conspiracy to destroy all humans. All of the cool conundrums about cyborg identity, circa the first Terminator, are lost. The result offers little more than what you'd expect of a video game - fighting robots.
