Diary of a Camper (1996)

Directed by

Matthew Van Sickler

Genre

action film

Country

United States

Runtime

1 min

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

Five members of a gaming clan fight a single opponent in a multiplayer deathmatch. This short film is known as the first example of machinima, using the Quake video game engine to tell a story.

pioneeringlow-fiexperimentalarchivalbreezyminimalistretroniche

What happens

Diary of a Camper is an American short film released in October 1996 that was made using id Software's first-person shooter video game Quake. The film was created by the Rangers, a clan or group of video game players, and first released over the Internet as a non-interactive game demo file. The minute and a half-long video is commonly considered the first example of machinima—the art of using real-time, virtual 3D environments, often game engines, to create animated films. The story centers on five members of the Rangers clan fighting against a lone camper in a multiplayer deathmatch. Machinima had its roots in the demoscene of the 1980s, helping to inspire the demo recording modes of the video games Doom and Quake. Although players had previously recorded segments of gameplay, these were usually deathmatches or speedruns. Diary of a Camper was the first demo to contain a narrative with text-based dialogue, instead of merely showing gameplay. Commentators have called Diary of a Camper primitive, but acknowledge its importance in establishing video games as a medium for filmmaking; the film inspired machinima filmmakers and spurred more complex machinima works in Quake and other games. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

More like this

• Torn Apart (film)
• Ranger Gone Bad
• The Seal of Nehahra (2000)
• Quad God (2000)
• Ranger Gone Bad 2
• Meet the Medic (2011)
• Blahbalicious (1997)
• Operation Bayshield (1997)