When I returned from my rather extensive machinima vacation in late 2005, the first person I reconnected with was Leo Lucien-Bay (Dr. Nemesis). If I remember right, I’d made a post over on Machinima.com’s forum, and he flagged me down via PM with a “OMG! Are you really back?”

We began chatting regularly, scheming about how to initiate a Quake 2 machinima revival, speculating about how to achieve a Red vs. Blue level of viewership. Along came a guy named Phil Barton, otherwise known as Digital Phil. He had this idea about hosting something called a “podcast” with a machinima emphasis, and approached Leo to be his cohost. Machinima Live! was born. A couple episodes in, Leo suggested that I be brought on as a guest for one episode, and I was asked to spend at least part of the time talking about Machinimation, Fountainhead Entertainment’s machinima tool which had manifestations in the engines of Quake3Arena as well as Doom 3.

The events leading up to a politically incorrect pitfall happened so fast. I mentioned the fact that Machinimation uses id Software engines, Leo mentioned that Katherine Anna Kang (of Fountainhead Ent.) was married to one of the id Software higher ups, and then I improvised and said she was “the Yoko of id.” (Just in case you don’t get the reference, Yoko Ono was the girlfriend / wife of John Lennon of The Beatles, and rather famously less talented - as least musically - than he. Conspiracy theorists of the era tended to speculate that her presence was ultimately responsible for the breakup of the band.)

Leo and Phil laughed, but Leo said that they were going to get quite a bit of grief from their listeners because I’d said something like that about a highly respected machinima advocate and innovator (and creator of the groundbreaking Anna… and founding AMAS member…). I think my response to that was something like, “Too bad,” as if I didn’t care. That drew laughs too.

In our post-show discussion (which Phil was still recording, I found out later), I suggested that maybe we should cut out that remark I’d made. I think I was envisioning the awkwardness of running into Ms. Kang at a future festival or Quakecon, and how awful I would feel if it turned out that she was genuinely offended by what I’d said. But the guys convinced me to keep it in, Leo saying “No, that was the best part of the show!”

Inspiration then struck. I would apologize on the show, or rather I would make it clear that I assumed Ms. Kang had a sense of humor, and that I meant no malice with the remark. It felt like a bit of a chance to take, to assume that subtle in-character self-deprecation and satire would effectively communicate repentance, but what can I say? Sometimes you have to be willing to gamble for the sake of big laughs.

Here’s the “apology,” which aired in the subsequent episode of Machinima Live! In retrospect, it added a bit of SNL flavor to the show which had been missing up to that point. It was so well received, in fact, that it motivated me to continue creating that kind of content for the show (and later, my own show).

The skit drops a few names…

• Todd Hollenshead (CEO of id Software) is compared to Brian Epstein (long-time manager of The Beatles)
• (John) Carmack and (John) Romero were for many years considered the two big creative powerhouses at id Software. They later split, Romero going on to found game company Ion Storm, Carmack remaining with id. They are compared to (John) Lennon and (Paul) McCartney, the two big creative powerhouses of The Beatles, who later split. “Carmack would have to be McCartney since he’s the easiest one to confirm is actually alive” is a reference not only to John Lennon’s tragic death in 1980, but to Romero’s almost total disappearance from the mainstream 3d gaming world. (He’s still out there, and working, just not in the limelight.)
• Tom Hall was with id Software in the beginning, but resigned in the early days of the original Doom’s development, well before id Software had peaked in popularity. Thus the comparison to Pete Best, who was dismissed from The Beatles in 1962, before the band had conquered the world.
• * Interesting factoid, though unrelated to The Beatles analogy: Tom Hall left id Software first, but years later when John Romero left, the two joined up again to form Ion Storm, creators of the rightfully acclaimed Deus Ex, the underappreciated Anachronox and the overhyped Daikatana.

It’s very interesting, the funny little parallels between these game gods and music gods. What’s most interesting about it is, I’d not given the comparison one bit of thought until that moment when the Yoko comment came out of my mouth. Then, when I sat down to craft the apology skit, I started looking at the two and laughed out loud at the funny little parallels which, admittedly, only make sense if you know as much about id Software as you do about The Beatles. Truth is, there are people in machinima right now who are young enough to know next to nothing about either.

If you’d like to hear how it all originally played out, you can download the original episode 3 of Machinima Live!, or you can hear an edited sequence of all the events by listening to the overcast #012.