Machinima Goes Epic With ‘Dragon Age’

In case you haven’t noticed, Machinima is booming lately—and starting to look pretty darn cinematic to boot. Those stories built entirely in video game platforms have come a long way since those early Quake movies or that couple of guys in Texas who spent way too much time with their copy of Halo and through their Red vs. Blue series introduced millions to this new storytelling format. Now the things in machinima land are getting epic.

Over the weekend, Machinima.com launched what could be their most ambitious machinima web series to date—Dragon Age: Warden’s Fall. After launching the 7-minute first episode (above) on Saturday, it already racked up over 130,000 views on YouTube.

Writer-director Andrew Will was tapped (along with lead animator/cinematographer Jason Choi) to create the story of a Grey Warden player’s encounter in the dark fantasy game Dragon Age: Awakenings DLC from BioWare

, using the game’s toolset. Machinima.com worked closely with BioWare, and while the series is original it borrows from the fiction of the game’s already epic story.

“Warden’s Fall demonstrates the power of machinima as a true story telling medium,” said Andy Shapiro, VP of Creative Development for Machinima.com. “The ability to create narrative content in a highly cinematic manner gives writers and filmmakers an opportunity to be very ambitious in their execution. We are endeavoring to push the medium as far as we can.”