Damien Valentine 01:00
Hello and welcome to another episode of A now for something completely machinima. I'm your host, Damian Valentine, and I'm joined by Tracy Harwood, hello and Ricky Grove, hello. Phil is absent this week because he is moving to Mars, so he's packing up his house. He's loading up his spaceship, as we speak, with

Ricky Grove 01:22
a lot of lead you know, yeah, Mars doesn't have an atmosphere, so all those UV rays he's got, it's going to be a very heavy, heavy spaceship.

Damien Valentine 01:31
Oh, yeah, but when we see him again, it'll be a bit of a lag on the transmission that he has to send away from Mars. So that should make for some interesting recordings, indeed. Anyway, despite his absence, we are here to discuss Ricky's choice for review this week this month. So let's get to it. What have you got for

Ricky Grove 01:53
us, sure? Well, you know, I'm drawing most of my choices this year from the archive.org collection of machinima, which is very vast, and it's got a lot of interesting things in it. And I came across a series of game documentaries that were created by the machinima.com which is with the second version of machinima.com and, you know, I've never been a big fan of machinima.com to put it mildly, but I have to acknowledge that there are some very creative and talented people who worked for the company, and after a little soul searching and watching, I thought we should include this, because It'll pay it'll show people some of their good content that they're created, but also you give us a chance to talk about it and the impact of M com on the rest of the community and all of that. So the series is, it's called all your history series, and it's a basically documentaries that detail the game development history of specific games, franchises and developers. They've done episodes on Call of Duty, Halo, bungee, Blizzard, valve and more. The one that I chose is on the Stanford brothers, they're from the 1980s and 1990s and they created a game company called the rare game company, and they worked with Nintendo and innovative and unique kinds of things, like the headshot Pre rendered graphics, which brought in 3d modeling to games. Some of the games that they did were Donkey Kong, country Wizards and Warriors and GoldenEye, very influential. And then in 2002 Microsoft brought rare, bought rare, which were able to retain their original logo and everything, and they went on developing games for the Xbox series of consoles. Now, according to some of the information that I got, one of rare main goals is to create games people will enjoy and find a lot of fun, rather than just to earn profit and follow current trends. They developed games for five generations of gaming consoles, and they had consistent excellence in their work now the the documentary was developed by Written and directed by Nicholas Werner and produced by machinima.com there's an actual documentary on the the game. This particular documentary series in which they interview people who are part of it and Nicholas Werner himself. It's a bit self serving. We'll put the link up on that because they say, Oh, we were so great, and we did all this great work, but there were some really interesting things in there. Nicholas Werner, the director and writer of it, was not a typical m.com artist or producer, because he didn't want all the flash. He mentions that in the first episode that they did, which I think was on Halo, there was a lot of cooks in making the meal. Everybody had an input and everything. But then when it turned out so well and they could, they saw that he could do it on time, and it was interesting. They let him alone, so he was able to take out a lot of the fluff and make things very direct. The reason why I chose it is a, it's from m.com and it's good, but also because it features a, it's a good documentary about the history of the sent Stanford brothers and the rare game company, but it's also features an enormous amount of machinima footage from all of those early games, which is fascinating to watch. I think there are five or six episodes in this particular series. They recover some of the same material, so it gets a little redundant, but it's a lot of fun. The quality of the of the copies that they have in archive.org is watchable and enjoyable. I really found it interesting, and it made me go on to watch some of the other series, like the one with Valve. They actually scored an interview with the the main guy there, and he wasn't doing interviews at all about their game, about what they were trying to do. So it's one part of machinima.com that didn't have the flash and the and the Hey, aren't we great and the self serving, tongue in cheek, goofy humor and all of that. It was a straightforward documentary that I think is well worth your time. What did you guys think?

Damien Valentine 07:06
Well, I watched it, and I was, I have to admit, I've only ever played two rare games, gold and I played on a friend's Nintendo, 64 and I played Sea of Thieves. Much More recently, I enjoyed both of them, but going back to the this documentary series looking at the games that they got started with, while I never actually played them myself, it brought back a lot of memories of playing games of that era, and it was interesting to see, you know, the thought that went into making them and all that, because the other developers that made the games that I played would have had some similar experiences. I found it fascinating that when they got started with Nintendo, and they were really pushing the limits of what Nintendo hardware could do, because they were thinking outside the box on how to produce the graphics like the Donkey Kong, where they had the really high rendered animated characters, because they rendered them in

Ricky Grove 08:12
threed modeling. Yeah, package.

Damien Valentine 08:15
So what the blender of its time? Probably a much more expensive than blender, but they knew that they could produce those graphics. And they were really surprised that no one else was doing that. And when I was watching that, thinking, Yeah, they did that. And I vaguely remember seeing screenshots of those games at the time, but I also remember no one else copied that either like they were, you think other developers, oh, we could do that too. They didn't do that. People were still making those very pixelated graphics even after rare proved that, you know, it could be done. So it's, you know, surprised that even though they're being very innovative, they weren't inspiring other developers to do the same thing.

Ricky Grove 09:01
Well, eventually they did it. Just took them time to to figure it out. How to do it technically.

Damien Valentine 09:08
Yeah, obviously I've, even though I've only played golden life once, I've heard a lot about it, and it's a very popular game that a lot of people will say, well, they spent their childhood playing all their teenage years or whatever. And, you know, the behind the scenes, learning how that was made was very interesting as well. It was almost like an afterthought, that it wasn't really taken seriously as a project. And it ended up being one of the most famous first person shooters ever made. Yeah, and you know, all the first person you just get on console now only exists because gold and I proved it could be done, because otherwise people, you know, the consensus before was it has to be mouse and keyboard. You don't get a mouse and keyboard for a PlayStation or, right, yeah, or anything like that. So I found that really fascinating. And you. You're seeing how they progressed since

Ricky Grove 10:01
then. So, yeah, Boy, those guys, those guys must have put in a hell of a lot of work and time in order to put that company together and get the amount of games out in the time that they did.

Damien Valentine 10:13
Oh, yeah, because, you know, they were making multiple games at once. Yeah. And even though, back in when they got started, games didn't take so long to make they were just churning churning them out, and they were all very well received, obviously. Well actually, I've got a list of games that they've released on my screen at the moment, and obviously they have slowed down a bit because games take longer, but they still have an extensive list of games released over the last decade. So you know, they're still very productive studio.

Ricky Grove 10:45
So in a way, you have just the opposite of what machinima.com is promoting, which is lot of sizzle but no substance, right? Whereas these guys and also the documentary series itself was an effort of passion, their passion and their hard work that they put together. So in a way, there's a conflict there between the two things. But I'm glad that the producer and Nicholas Werner were able to get this concept of history of gaming and the technology behind it, on to machinima.com Like I said, it's one of the good things that they did

Damien Valentine 11:25
that was one of the things I was obviously being interested in the history of the company, but when I was watching it, thinking, How did machinima.com agree to produce this? Because it's not what they would normally put out. There's no big explosions apart from what they were showing in the footage, because it was just there. It wasn't about that, and it wasn't a comment. There's a couple of jokes in there, but it wasn't about being funny. That's just the way they presented it. To make it a little bit more interesting, because if you're making a documentary about history or something, it can be a very dry subject, so you need to make it a little bit more fun to little bit humor to keep the attention of the audience, but it was fascinating and very well presented. And yeah, it's a surprise that they machine com agreed. Well,

Ricky Grove 12:14
I think it's all due to Nicholas Werner, the guy that they hired, because he mentions in the documentary about the documentary series, that when the first version of it, they got all these notes where they were. They say, We want to zoom in here. We want to pan across this. We want this big sound effect and all of that. And he didn't want any of it, but he went along with it at first, in order to appease him, and then once they saw he could do it, they left and he was able to do it the way he wanted to do it. So in a way, he tricked them by being smart on how to do it. Very smart. That kind of answers your question about, How did this documentary series get on machinima.com they all jumped on it when they saw it was going to make money, it's okay. They left on other things, which is what sales, people oriented towards sales do all the time, which was my big complaint about the company. They focus on what they can sell. Once they see that, that products done, they leave. They go away from it and do something else. It's not about passion, it's all it's all about profit.

Damien Valentine 13:21
Yeah. Well, this series definitely a passion project, and I do commend him for that smart approach of indeed, getting it started.

Tracy Harwood 13:28
Okay, well, it's really interesting to hear you talk about a documentary that you've seen where the producer is talking about this, because I didn't find that. So I've done a lot of research on this, but I didn't find that, which is hilarious, so

Ricky Grove 13:45
I've got the link. Yeah,

Tracy Harwood 13:48
yeah, I will be really interested. Okay, what I want to do is start with the title of the series, because it's really grammatically strange. All your history are belong to us. I mean, I just had to look into it because I thought, What the hell is that that is

Ricky Grove 14:06
just, it's a game quote. It's a

Tracy Harwood 14:08
weird dialog. It's Yeah, well, it immediately hit me that it was odd. And turns out, of course, it's a take on a popular meme from the earliest days of the Internet, based on zero wing and their creators very poor linguistic translation of video games, basically, I mean, it's a Japanese game released in that I think the late 1980s and the actual words were all your base belong to us. And it turns out there's a whole wiki page about it, which I'll share a link to by 2006 there were websites actually dedicated to the meme, and pretty much every tech developer used some take on it at some level. And then when YouTube you. Underwent some maintenance. In 2006 it actually posted the phrase, all your video are belong to us as a placeholder, which some believed indicated the site had been hacked, leading YouTube to actually say, No, we haven't been hacked. Get a sense of humor. So for machinima to use it for a show, given what we know about their behavior, is probably very self evident, actually, and self evident of their dominance over YouTube during those first years of its development. And I'd say it's clearly an attempt at irony, if not humor. I doubt Werner would have been the one that came up with that title, personally, but it will almost certainly not have hit the mark at the time, I suspect, and that's because its target audience probably wouldn't have understood it where the term was most widely used in developer circles, folks a little older than many of machinima as followers, certainly at the peak of the channel views anyway, which at the time that this series were released, was released about 2009 to 14 ish, of course, many of the many of the channel viewers would have been around 14 years old at that sort of period of time. So whether it hit the mark, I don't really know. And also, just to sort of reflect on that at that period of time, each of the episodes that we've looked at here, they're under 15 minutes long. And of course, that was the maximum for YouTube in any event, which kind of explains why the videos might be described really as a little bit thin in places on the content. However, having said that each of the games that were covered seem to have a lot more than one episode dedicated to it, and this one, in this instance, where we're talking about rare, I think there are five, as you said, Ricky episodes in the series, right? So it's unlikely that irony and humor and association to popular culture were were fully aligned. I think would be fair to say, although I'd say irony more than humor, is what's used in the video, because there are a few attempts to use a play on words in in the video, which is a little bit machinima, like in the way that they went about doing things. But I'd say it largely misses the mark for humor in its production value. And I had to go back and listen to it again after I discovered that humor actually wasn't intended at all for it. But as you said, the content isn't unvaluable at all. Looking at it through today's eyes. So to Nicholas Werner, he was employed as a writer and producer for machinima for three years, between 2009 and December 2012 evidently, employed to make the series. He was its showrunner. He he developed it from, you know, coming up with the original idea right through to, you know, completing each of the episodes to its execution. And after he completed his run of it, he then went on to be a freelance content consultant, also an editor for zergnet and a writer for Riot Games, and currently HE'S A News Writer. And from what I can see, this series actually isn't fully listed now on YouTube anywhere, which I think is perhaps a little ironic, given its name and given machinimas intent for it, and I think it was obviously another of the victims of the of the great shutdown when machinima closed up shop a few years ago, and interestingly, though, that's when another popular company stepped in. Rooster Teeth actually archived it when machinima shut down. But unfortunately, even that now appears to have disappeared, because, of course, Rooster Teeth, too has gone. I did find Rooster Teeth original archive listing of the whole series, which may be useful for those of you looking to examine the content more systematically that currently sits on a GitHub page. But not surprisingly, all of the links are broken when, when they go back to Rooster Teeth. However, each of the episodes also has links to the Internet Archive. And I did a bit of a random test, and everyone that I linked to, of which I linked to, about 40, they all look to be there. And I also found a channel on YouTube that has attempted to list many of the episodes, although I couldn't actually find the one you've identified, Ricky, which I'll put a link through to the channel so that you can kind of have a dig through if you want to. So in fairness, I think the Internet Archive is probably the most you. Source, if you know what you're looking for. And in fact, what's not that clear, actually, is who uploaded the content originally? I'd say it looks like somebody at machinima were the first to do it. They do make reference in the archive link to the old playlist on the Machinima channel and there, although all the videos are obviously set to private, it mentions there were 173 episodes in the series. That's actually a little different to what's on the Rooster Teeth archive, which mentions 182 and on the YouTube channel that I found, there's quite a few less than that, and that, in turn, prompted me to do a bit of a deeper dive into the Internet Archive. And it would seem that several folks over the years have uploaded different versions of various episodes. So it's possible they are all there in one form or another. There's 430 odd uploads aligned to this. So there's obviously multiple versions of it. But as I said, when I was digging around, I also discovered that there actually were some special episodes that didn't make the original playlists anyway. That's a role, I think, for somebody else to do a little more

Ricky Grove 21:15
digging. Thanks for all that digging. That's fascinating. Well, it, you

Tracy Harwood 21:19
know, the more you get into it, the more you you find, you know, there's some, some real irony in what they were trying to do and what's ended up with this one. I mean, I've got some other things I wanted to share the, you know, I had a look into a particular comment that I saw on on the YouTube channel, which I thought was quite interesting. It said that after a few years of being made, the series changed hands and then immediately lost everything that made it good, and that seems to be the reason why whoever runs this preservation channel didn't upload all the episodes. In fact, he's evidently only uploaded the ones he thought were good enough, apparently, shortly after the series changed hands, it was canceled, and that's because it was evident the series just was not hitting the popularity stakes that machinima wanted it to, or it was being talked about a lot less than they would have liked it to have been talked About, even though, at the time this was released, the gaming industry and the impact of the gaming industry was was huge, I think it was around this time that games overtook TV as being the most popular entertainment. So I think that's quite interesting, that it was, you know, canceled at that sort of point, having said that, you know, if it really wasn't hitting the popularity stakes, that would absolutely be true to form for machinima folks to actually cancel something like this, even though, of course, completely valuable, course. So then I looked at the series director, and actually I asked him if he knows if the series is available anywhere in its original form, and indeed why it changed hands. If that's what happened. He replied that he saw it on Amazon, but he's no idea if it's available anywhere at all anymore. And checking that out, it clearly was on Amazon for a while, but there is currently no content there either. Vernor also said that he moved on from the show in mid 2012 after which someone called Chris Locky took it over. And indeed, it is Locky that is listed as the producer of it on Amazon. Now, interestingly, Locky is not credited anywhere else, even on his own profile, he doesn't list that he's worked on it, although he was, in fact, a writer for machinima up to about 2014 he'd also written another series for machinima using Red Faction gorilla called Red Faction Armageddon. All that said, I don't think we've any idea how well it was actually supported on the Machinima channels because, well, I just couldn't find any information about that. But I think looking at it now, what surprises me with it is how how little the view counts are for it in its various locations. Now, I dare say, over time, if it remains accessible in some way, that will change. Because, as we've been saying, you know, in the last few months, interest in historic video games and retro practices and developers is really growing exponentially right now, and there is enough detail in these episodes to get a sense of the origins and contribution made by the games.

Ricky Grove 24:45
Exactly, which is what appealed to me? Yeah, exactly. It's

Tracy Harwood 24:49
it's obviously not that clear which of the episodes, though, are attributed to which writer, with Lockheed taking over probably around two thirds of the way through the series. It. Based on what its originator actually said to me. But I'd say this particular one, it was probably made by Verner himself. I've got to say, this is not the type of content at all that I was expecting to see when you said. It came out of the machinima.com stable. Given, you know, given our experience of the pointless tap that we've previously reviewed from them, I think he did an excellent job with this. Verna. I mean, in fact, the rare review, when I looked into it, the five episodes, you know, I skipped, which I did kind of skip through. It actually takes the developers stories up to about 2010 ish, which is kind of consistent with it being a Verna thing, because I think they were doing it up to the up to the moment in time. So it was probably one of the very early, earlier of the episodes that were released. And as you said, it's an insight into the company who was, of course, one of the early pioneers in game development, and evidently, a company still in transition at the time this series was created. I think, in fact, rare is probably one of the most important games developers actually in the UK. And yes, there is some stilted humor, which frankly doesn't add much to this. I think the play on words is actually really quite trite. But all of the all of that said, I think this is really important cultural material, and it has a very clear historic value in terms of its editing and the and the production generally. I thought the episode was well put together there. There is descriptive content, and the graphics are representative of the of the gameplay. It's purely focused on rares, backstory, the computer graphics of the games themselves, and doesn't really seem to include anything more meaty, like interviews, interesting. You said that some of them do create include interviews with the creators, but then again, I think, for a long running series which reviews the beginnings of of the industry, really, and especially the advancement of 3d graphics. I'm not sure I'd expect much more than what you get in this for an episode under under 15 minutes. I think it's about nine minutes long this particular one, given that the series is such an interesting find, though, what I was curious about is, is why this hasn't been more widely viewed. So I sort of sat back and had a bit of a think about that, and I did a bit of an analysis on that as well. Firstly, I think the humor, as I said, would have been pretty dry in comparison to contemporary stuff that was being shown on the Machinima channels at the time for this, for its target audience of 14 year old boys. I think the voice team was some folks that maybe were not especially well known. Both Kyle anonymous and Rob Talbot did have clan credits, I think, for RB and the chief, which was a halo production by Machina, machinima as well, and that was quite popular at it in its time, if you like, unlock it turns out was another of the RB and the chief crew. And since its release, Talbot has actually gone on and produced and directed some pretty impressive content, mainly for big events, big sporting events. Typically, it's using gameplay as illustrative content. It's supplemented with historic photographs, and probably, I would say, archival footage scraped from somewhere, possibly Let's Plays uploaded to YouTube by machinima followers. But it's not created machinima, per se, none of the credits for the content are mentioned at all, which is certainly surprising given the period of its production, but not at all surprising given that it's machinima that produced it. The narration is probably the most tricky part, I think, these days, for me, because it's, it's a little grindingly light in in places. But it's not offensive as at least, none of the stuff that I listened to was, is it in any way offense? It was, it was, yeah, factual, a little bit, you know, a little bit stiff, but perfectly listenable. The version I saw did not make reference to Episode numbers or the fact that there are four other episodes about rare so if that's how it went out, relying solely on the YouTube channel for its playlist run order, then it's a, I think, a surprisingly poorly marketed piece of content By by the Masters of channel and network marketing, even though it's tapping into one of the best known internet memes of all time. And now that it's been separated from an original playlist, and the meme has just kind of disappeared into the annals of cultural, cultural computing history, it's obviously going to be quite, quite hard to. Put together the whole series and its creative context, unless someone has got the run order. But that said, Each episode is clearly a standalone too. So with another lens, I also had a thought about its Contemporary Perspectives as someone who did not start out life as a game super nerd in the early years. I think it was interesting for me to see this particular episode, because rare originated just down the road from where I work, in Leicester, a place called Ashby de la zouche. It's a really sleepy little market town, typically English in its heritage and the achievements of rare in the town were, in fact, celebrated just earlier this year with a with a blue plaque award, the kind of thing that you might find in the UK, which celebrates, say, the birthplace of Shakespeare or or Engelbert Humperdinck, as I said, in the, you know, in the streets of Leicester. But basically, these are, these are only for folks that have made a significant contribution to cultural life in the country, and they're a little bit like the Hollywood stars in the pavement, that kind of thing. And since their days at rare ended, which I think was around 2018 and of course, this goes beyond the series itself, the founders, the stamper brothers, have also founded a company called fortune fish limited in Nottinghamshire, which is about 40 minutes away from Leicester, which I founded in 2013 actually with somebody called Joe stamper, I'm guessing one of the sons, and somebody called Dr Phil Popejoy, whoever that is. Now, they describe themselves as the future of augmented reality, which they state is a scalable platform for them to develop and become a European market leader in headset based augmented reality product development. Now, so far, got to say, I've not seen a single thing that's been produced by them, but it is still a company that's still running. So maybe, maybe at some point in the future, given that we know games take so much longer to develop, there's something that will come through, or maybe they're just producing, you know, content for other organizations. So I think in some what you've asked us to look at Ricky is, in many ways, a bit of a hidden nuggets taken at face value and removed from the Machinima context because of its documented history, more than anything else. Certainly, any researcher wanting to look into specific games could use these episodes as starting points to do a much deeper dive and through the series, there are many different games, as you said, that are given similar treatment. It's a really great resource for anybody wanting to look into the global games development history. Really, yeah, brilliant. I mean, I have to say, I you know, kudos goes to Nick Verner for me for writing this and and, of course, thanks to him for telling me a little bit more about it, because without him telling me, I would not have thought to have looked up the other guy at all. And of course, thanks to you for bringing it to my attention, because it's really definitely one to to have in your armory, I think, when you're looking at any kind of history to do with games. So

Ricky Grove 33:21
yeah, I thought it would appeal to you all of that background info. I didn't realize. I thought that they had actually filmed the Machinima in game. But you're right, their style is not to do that. If they can steal work from someplace else without having to pay for it, I think that's what they do. Yeah, well, thanks for figuring that out.

Tracy Harwood 33:39
I'm certain that's probably what they did, just scrape content and they would, you know, YouTube would have meant for that to be the case, because copyright has only become a thing in the last 10 years. Yeah, well, that takes us, what, 2015 I mean, it's, yeah, it that wouldn't have been the case in those days. I'm certain it would have been scraped from

Ricky Grove 34:00
somewhere. Right now, I sent you the link to the documentary on all your history series in the chat, plus the I put the links on our board so you'll be able to share them in the notes for this episode. Thanks for your comments. Really, very, very insightful.

Tracy Harwood 34:17
I think it was really interesting digging around it. I think if anybody has got the original playlist for it anywhere, that would be a super thing to add to the notes somewhere, because that's, that's the thing, I think that holds it together somehow. I don't know whether anybody has or, you know whether it's that too is lost to time, but it would be super useful to have that. I think sure would. Thank you.

Damien Valentine 34:44
Thank you. That was an excellent pick, Ricky, and I really enjoyed watching it. I do need to go and check out some of these others in the series, with a focus on some of the games I have actually played, you know, just to see how they came to into being. Yeah. Right? Well, I think that wraps things up for this week. So a big thank you to Tracy Harwood and of course, Ricky Grove for choosing this film. Obviously, we'll hear back from Phil when he arrives on Mars, hopefully he has a safe voyage in his rocket. If you have any thoughts about this series or missionary in general, or us, or anything we've discussed, please send us an email at talk at completely machinery.com we look forward to hearing from you there, and all your feedback is something we enjoy receiving. So yeah, we'll see you all next week and take care and see you then, bye, bye.