I recently went a-huntin’ on Machinima.com for Hugh Hancock’s final editorial from back in February of 2006, because I’d found it highly inspirational and wanted to enjoy it again. I’ve had trouble locating it there. The way they’ve organized the articles has changed, and old links are all broken and just give you a table of contents. So I ventured into the bowels of the Wayback Machine and found it. I’m going to reprint it here so it is not lost. His perspective on the way the nature of the machinima community was poised to change (and indeed, has changed now) was as encouraging to me then as it is now. It never struck me as spin, but instead as someone who embraced change with both arms wide open.

(What got me thinking about it, by the way, was Hugh’s recently well-written rant/explanation of the BloodSpell distribution headaches, which you can read here.)

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So it’s my final editorial on Machinima.com. I could talk about all the cool stuff we’ve done over the past six years. I could talk about everything we wanted to do. I could shamelessly shill for BloodSpell (coming in six weeks or less). I could come out with something profound and brilliant about Machinima. Although that’s not really something to rely on.

I’m not going to do that. I’m going to talk about music.

As anyone who’s ever seen me dressed up for a night out will probably have realised, I used to be a bit of a Goth, in the same way that George W Bush is a bit of an idiot. I was hardcore about that shit - velvet, lace, Sisters of Mercy, The Cure, er, lots of other bands that sounded like the Sisters of Mercy.

Then, a few years ago, something wonderful happened. I moved into a flat that had cable TV. And cable TV, as the kid so memorably opined in The Lost Boys, means MTV.

So, what’s sitting on my MP3 player as I write this? Little bit of Goth still, a lot of punk (Green Day, Sum 41, Offspring, stuff like that), a whole bunch of charty stuff (new Shakira album! Woot!), bunch of indie and unsigned stuff (you’ve not heard of Proxy or the Angel Conversations yet. Hopefully you will, when BloodSpell comes out), some truly weird shit (the Dresden Dolls, Jason Webley, anything bizarre Charlie has enthused about this week.

And it all makes sense to me - there’s a consistent theme running through it all. I’ve got no fuckin’ clue what it is, but I know there’s one in there. And if I turn to Johnnie, currently sitting right behind me trying to find a specific PHP session variable from the totally unhelpful clue I just gave him, and get him to pass his Ipod knock-off over, I’ll find a completely different random selection, with some cross-over, no particular genre lines - but it makes sense to him. There’s a through-line in there that he can understand, even if he can’t articulate it.

I can’t imagine running a music site. Not a specific music site, a punk music site or a Goth site or a “shit that Hugh likes” site, but a site trying to deal with all music - the whole shebang, from Classical to hardcore. I can’t see how it could be done.

Machinima.com’s starting to feel a bit like that - an attempt to glue a whole bunch of stuff together that’s starting to get too broad to fit.

On the one hand, we’ve got hardcore nutcases like myself and Doc Nemesis, glueing together entire worlds with virtual duct-tape and string, perverting quivvering, nubile young engines to our deviant desires like executives on a junket in Thailand. On the other hand, we’ve got a vast and growing sea of people grabbing The Movies and The Sims and making movies that make sense to them - tales of friends’ suicide, political polemics, using the freedom of the virtual to knock out a movie quick and rough and perfect all at the same time, expressing themselves in a way they couldn’t with a camera because of the sheer level of hassle. And on the other other other hand we’ve got dance troupes in Star Wars, wise-cracking marines in FEAR, explanations about why the Internet’s for porn. And then we’ve got porn.

Six years ago we decided that our nascent artform needed a place to come together, a place to grow and grow up, where we could see enough of us all together in one place that we knew we weren’t just individual freaks, we were the pioneers of a movement that would change - and I think I can say this without irony now - change the world.

Yes, change the world. Give new hope and new scope to the sacred right of every living person to tell the stories that roil and boil within their head. Let them, by observing and commenting on the world, mold it to their internal struggles, their heroisms, their tragedies and their glories. And now it’s happened. We’ve done it - Machinima’s not going back in the box at this point. Anyone and everyone with access to a computer can now not just watch stories, crafted by the lucky few in ways that will never quite perfectly mesh with the vistas inside our own heads, but can take what they see in their interior worlds and put it out on a screen. As far as I’m concerned, my work here is done.

And so we’re back to the music. What we’ve got now isn’t one Machinima scene, one small group of lunatics all tied together by doing something that everyone else thinks is implausible or impossible. It’s a series of dozens of scenes, dozens of different groups held together only by the increasingly thin string of what is, after all, just a technology. Just a way of making the things we want to make.

“I went to a shrink, to analyse my dreams.” I’ve done that - literally, actually. And I know what my dreams are, and I think I know why I want to see them live, and breathe, and laugh, and fight - the dreams I’ve had all my life, of people in other worlds, in extraordinary situations, making choices both dreadful and glorious. I’ve tripped and fallen into this changing-the-world crap in the course of that, and I hope my contribution has made a difference. But now, it’s time for me and all the other little birds to leave the nest, to spread out into the world. In future, we’re not going to have a single Machinima site any more - we’re going to have dozens, the big-Machinima-feature sites, the Machinima-diary sites, the Machinima-you-can-dance-to sites. We’re going to have geniuses creating Machinima and not even knowing its name, we’re going to have a bright shining constellation of Machinima creators all spread out there, mixing with the other storytellers as equals, as a part of this new century where we seem to be, as a race, hell-bent on correcting the horrible mistake of “mass media” we made in the last century.

We threw a revolution. And no-one’s going to notice, because we’ll all be too busy being revolutionary.

For the very last time, with respect and love to all of you and the work we’ve done over the years, and the amazing things we’re all going to do,

Out.