When Pure Pwnage kicked off its inaugural TV run, the first scene wasn't of Jeremy or his gamer buddies, but a skit involving their computer game avatars. As Destructoid pointed out, the use of machinima—computer-animated movies made with game engines—was a hat-tip to long-time fans that their move to television wasn’t going to dull their hardcore edge.

But while machinima remains a relatively  underground phenomenon, it is on the brink of breaking through into the wider pop culture as evidenced by Machinima.com's claim to over 100 million monthly video views.

Machinima emerged out of the Doom/Quake scene because Id Software’s games allowed the recording of runs, the best of which gamers would show off to each other. Multiplayer then allowed one player to control the camera while others were digital actors.

The first machinima film, Diary of a Camper, was the usual bloody gameplay, but with a primitive narrative. It inspired a wave of so-called Quake Movies by crews like ILL Clan and Strange Company. The latter group was particularly ambitious, earning big ups from Roger Ebert for their machinima take on Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem "Ozymandias" while the group’s founder, Hugh Hancock, went on to launch Machinima.com.

Throughout the 2000s, machinima continued its inexorable climb—the Halo-based absurdist war series Red Vs Blue won a massive audience over its 100 episode run while games like The Movies and Sims 2 specifically included machinima software. South Park even won an Emmy for its "Make Love Not Warcraft" episode, which was partly made using machinima.

The improved graphics engines of modern games, and the improved techniques of machinima makers, have made it an ever more sophisticated artform, though much  (like the Half-Life 2-based Freeman’s Mind) remains firmly rooted within gamer culture.

But YouTube has helped spread the gospel further with popular parodies like the recent faux-trailer Law Abiding Engineer, which uses Team Fortress 2 characters to mock the film Law Abiding Citizen or the mindblowing, Toronto-made Half Life: Escape from City 17 by the Purchase Brothers which has 3.6 million views and cost about $500 to make.

While true computer animation remains out of the reach of the creative amateur, machinima can be made in real-time for next-to-no money. Like 80s-era sample-based hip-hop, there are copyright issues at play, but machinima still appears to be the future of indie animation,