Made by the Players
The game shipped with no filmmaking tools whatsoever, so players pointed its camera at staged scenes and made films anyway, an entire machinima scene with festivals, prizes and feature-length work. Alongside it: songs, addons that rebuilt the interface, databases the developers ended up relying on, costumes that take months, and replica weapons on walls. This facet is everything Azeroth caused to exist that Blizzard did not make.
Part of World of Warcraft
61 moments in this segment.
- - Illegal Danish Super Snacks. Myndflame's machinima, made by pointing the game's own camera at staged scenes and dubbing over them. It is the film usually credited with showing that WoW could be a production tool rather than only a game.
- - Illegal Danish Super Snacks, part one. Myndflame's Illegal Danish is the machinima that showed players the game could be a filmmaking tool, and it circulated on forums and fileservers long before YouTube carried it well. This is part one, in the higher-quality transfer that later replaced the compressed originals. Kept as the full first half where the archive otherwise holds only the short cut.
- - Big Blue Dress. Cranius's song about a mage's robe, recorded and animated in-game. It is the best-known piece of WoW music made by a player, and it is genuinely a good song.
- - Illegal Danish Super Snacks, part two. The second half of Myndflame's Illegal Danish, the machinima that more than any other established WoW film as its own form. The archive carries the first part; this is the rest of the episode, released the year after it began.
- - The Anti-Elf Anthem. Oxhorn's machinima, from the era when a fan film could reach a large part of the playerbase because there was nowhere else to put it.
- - Inventing Swear Words. Oxhorn's best-known short, and the one that made the case that the game's stiff animation set was a constraint you could write around.
- - That's the World of Warcraft That You Play!. Ian Beckman's short, one of the pieces most often named when people describe the tone of the early machinima scene.
- - The Ballad of the Noob. A player-made song about being new, from a period when the game had no tutorial worth the name and being new was genuinely hard.
- - Resurrection. A thirty-minute machinima that won at the Xfire Summer competition, from the years when the scene had prizes and juries.
- - More dots. A raid leader explains a plan for Onyxia; it collapses; the recording of the collapse becomes the game's longest-running in-joke. Blizzard eventually put the line into the game itself as an achievement.
- - Tales of the Past III: the creation of the Ashbringer. A single sequence lifted from Martin Falch's Tales of the Past III, the feature-length machinima that was the form's high-water mark. This is the Ashbringer's forging, the film's most-quoted scene.
- - Illegal Danish 2: Escape from Orgrimmar. The sequel, longer and far more ambitious, made entirely inside a game that provided no filmmaking tools of any kind.
- - Tales of the Past III. A feature-length machinima with a cast, a score and a three-hour running time, made by a small group over years. It is the most-cited achievement of the machinima scene and almost unwatchable to anyone without the context.
- - Darrowshire. Cranius setting a quest chain about a destroyed village to music. The quest it draws on is one of the few pieces of vanilla writing that people still talk about.
- - ROFLMAO. A later Oxhorn short, from the point at which machinima had a genuine audience and a convention circuit.
- - Burning Crusade: The Movie. A feature-length player-made machinima assembled from Burning Crusade footage and released in February 2008, here in a later upscaled re-upload. It is the kind of long-form fan film that the expansion era produced in volume, made entirely inside the game client. The archive keeps it as a released work of its own year.
- - Assassinate, a rogue song. A player-written parody song about playing a rogue, set to an Xzibit beat, from the wave of WoW music that circulated on YouTube in the late 2000s. Fan music was a whole genre of its own alongside machinima, and this is a plain example of it. Dated to the release of the track.
- - The Craft of War: BLIND. A short film following a rogue through Stormwind, animated far beyond anything the game engine offered, and still the technical high point of WoW machinima.
- - The trading card game. A physical Warcraft card game, one of many objects the game generated outside itself. Loot cards from these packs redeemed for in-game items, which made cardboard worth real money.
- - Epic Raids, an Oxhorn music video. Oxhorn was one of the most prolific machinima makers of the era, working in filk, original songs performed by in-game characters. Epic Raids is a raider's complaint set to music, made when forty-man raiding was the game's centre of gravity.
- - An Oxhorn Brand Medley. A musical machinima by Oxhorn, one of the most prolific WoW filmmakers of the late 2000s, staging the game's characters as a song-and-dance number. Oxhorn's shorts were a fixture of the era's fan-film scene alongside the better-remembered dramatic machinima. Dated to the film's release on the maker's own channel.
- - Tank Tank Heal Tank. Oxhorn was one of the most prolific WoW machinima musicians, and this song, cut from his film Associates, is a joke told entirely in the grammar of a five-man group. It shows the fan-music strand of the community, where the game's mechanics became lyrics. Dated to release, which is its upload.
- - The board game. Warcraft as a tabletop game, photographed at a gaming convention in 2009. The franchise had been a board game, a card game and a novel series before it was ever an MMO.
- - Gnome Overboard. An Oxhorn machinima musical, made inside the game engine with player characters as actors and an original song on top. Oxhorn was one of the most prolific of the WoW machinima makers and represents the comic-musical strand of the form, against the cinematic ambitions of BLIND and Tales of the Past. Dated to the film's release.
- - Gold Farmer, a machinima parody. A player-made music video setting Snow's 'Informer' to a song about gold-seller spam in Ironforge, complete with machinima footage. It is fan work about the game's economy, and it preserves the casual racial caricature that Western players routinely aimed at Chinese farmers, alongside the archive's more sober coverage of that trade.
- - The Fall of the Lich King, part three. The closing part of Onix's machinima retelling of the Icecrown Citadel campaign, cut from in-game footage to the game's own score. It is a fan film made in the same months players were actually fighting the Lich King, and shows what the community did with the tools it had. Machinima on this scale is the closest thing the archive has to a native cinema of Azeroth.
- - The Fall of the Lich King, part two. A player-made film of the Icecrown Citadel assault, cut in the style of the guild progression movies of the era, released around the time raiders were working through the instance. Machinima like this was how most players first saw content they had not yet reached themselves. Kept as a released fan work of 2010.
- - An Illidan costume. A costume of the Burning Crusade's final boss, built by a player. Warcraft cosplay skews toward armour and prosthetics because almost every character in it is the wrong shape for a human body.
- - Cosplay at PAX. Warcraft costume at a games convention in 2010, at the height of the game's subscriber numbers.
- - A hearthstone, made real. A physical replica of the item that teleports a character home. The hearthstone is one of the few objects in the game every single player owns from their first hour.
- - Like the Game. An Oxhorn music machinima, from one of the most prolific fan film-makers of the era, who built a following making comic shorts entirely inside the WoW client. By 2011 machinima had its own recognisable auteurs with their own audiences. Released on its upload date.
- - Lady Vashj. A costume of a raid boss from the first expansion, five years after that raid closed. Cosplay is the part of this culture that keeps content alive longest after Blizzard removes it.
- - Away From Keyboard. A feature documentary about the people who play, made by players rather than by a broadcaster.
- - The concert stage at Gamescom. Warcraft music performed live at Gamescom in 2013. The score has been one of the least-argued-about parts of the game for its entire run.
- - Dragon Con. Warcraft costume at Dragon Con in 2014. By this point the game was ten years old and its cosplay community had its own competitive circuit.
- - A costume contest. Honourable mentions at a convention costume contest. Contest cosplay of this kind takes months and is built to be judged at arm's length.
- - A night elf. 2014. The race has been playable since launch and remains one of the most-built.
- - The Rise and Fall of Sparta, epic animation cut. A short German-made machinima that stages the Thermopylae story with WoW models and voice actors. By 2014 machinima had moved from Fraps and improvisation to scripted casting and model rigs, and this is what that later craft looked like.
- - Valeera Sanguinar. A blood elf costume at a Canadian expo. The blood elves arrived with the first expansion in 2007 and immediately became the most-played race on the Horde side.
- - Blood elf, contest entry. A costume contest entry in Chicago, 2015.
- - WonderCon. Warcraft costume at WonderCon in California, 2015, a general comics convention rather than a Blizzard event.
- - ChinaJoy. Warcraft cosplay at ChinaJoy in Shanghai. China was one of the game's largest markets from 2005 until the servers went dark in 2023.
- - The Rise and Fall of Sparta, the Wrath-era cut. A German machinima retelling the assault on the Lich King, voiced by a cast of fan actors credited in full. It is a late entry in a form that had largely died by 2015, made with Wrath-era assets years after that expansion ended. Kept as evidence that machinima outlived its own moment.
- - Past vs Present. A machinima short setting vanilla Azeroth against the Warlords-era game, made at the moment Nostalrius was being shut down and the Classic argument was at its loudest. It is the nostalgia case made as a film rather than a forum post. Dated to the film's release.
- - Cosplay at BlizzCon 2016. The convention floor, where a substantial fraction of attendees arrive in costume.
- - An orc at C2E2. An orc build at a Chicago convention contest. The silhouette is the hard part: the shoulders alone are usually a separate rig.
- - Draenei at Igromir. A draenei costume at Igromir in Moscow. Russia and eastern Europe held some of the game's densest player populations.
- - BlizzCon, in costume. Costume at BlizzCon 2016.
- - Animefest. Warcraft costume at a Czech convention, 2016.
- - A private-server guild band records a song. Players on the Kronos vanilla private server recorded a rap about the priest spell Shadow Word: Pain and released it under the guild's own band name. It is small, amateur and completely typical of the fan-music layer that ran alongside the game for twenty years, and it is notable that by 2017 that layer had migrated onto private servers along with the players.
- - Resurgence, a death knight machinima. A machinima short following a death knight's memory of the life taken from him, made a decade after the golden age of WoW film-making and released during Legion. It shows the form surviving into the era of modern rendering tools.
- - A group build. Several Warcraft characters photographed together at a Taiwanese event. Group cosplay is coordinated months ahead and is usually guild-organised.
- - A Sylvanas statue, on stage. A player and his collectible statue at a Blizzard event in Taipei. The merchandise economy around the game is large enough to sustain its own manufacturers.
- - Ragnaros Wipe Animation. A fan animation of a Molten Core raid falling apart, made in the tradition of the older Onyxia Wipe Animation it credits. It is a joke that only lands if you have stood in a forty-person raid listening to a leader lose control, which is exactly the shared experience it documents.
- - Struggles of Raid Bosses. A comic machinima short imagining the raid encounter from the boss's side of the fight. It belongs to the late period of WoW machinima, when the form had survived long past its 2007 peak and turned mostly to comedy. Dated to its release.
- - Sindragosa. A costume of an Icecrown Citadel boss, built a decade after that raid opened.
- - A wall of weapons. Replica weapons from the game, built and mounted. Almost every object in Azeroth has been fabricated in the real world by somebody.
- - The Craft of War: Redemption. A sequel made thirteen years after the original, long after the scene that produced it had dispersed to other platforms.
- - Carbot. An animated series that has been drawing Warcraft for over a decade, and is now most players' shorthand for the game's own absurdities.
- - Twenty years of music, played live. The orchestral concert for the twentieth anniversary. The score is one of the few parts of the game that has been continuously well-regarded for its entire run.
- - The Lich King, 2026. An Arthas costume built in 2026, eighteen years after the expansion that introduced him and sixteen after he was killed.
