Hollywood Halo

Luther and Winn have known each other since fourth grade but really became buddies in middle school at an SMU video-game summer camp, which taught the basics of game design. As freshmen, Luther and most of their close friends were obsessively playing Halo, an Xbox game released in 2001. "Halo is about a war between a coalition of alien races and humans," Winn says. "You play as this super-soldier that is trying to destroy an ancient alien weapon before the aliens can set it off. Most first-person shooters have a pretty thinly veiled plot; they're just an excuse to shoot stuff. In Halo, it feels like a movie and has a really in-depth plot, a good backstory and good characters."

The game has spawned three novels. And it's addictive.

Malone would be up all night playing games even in middle school. When his parents moved the computer out of his room, Malone would wait until they were asleep and sneak out to play, draping a towel over the modem so his mom and dad wouldn't hear. He hadn't bought an Xbox because he didn't think it was worth the $300 investment. His father bought him one as a gift. "I started playing Halo and stayed up three days doing it," Malone says. "My dad was cool with it until it affected my regular life."

When the highly anticipated Halo 2 was released their junior year, Malone camped out for four hours to buy the game. He didn't go home to grab some sleep. He played, then went to school, then missed a class because he went home to log on again.

Meghan Foster didn't even go to school that day. A year earlier Foster had gotten so obsessed with Everquest that her mother had to take the computer out of her bedroom.

"I'd been up three days straight playing," Foster says. "I think what happened was I forgot to do my chores for the third week in a row. I never should have started playing Everquest." She now calls it Evercrack.

Why are they so into games? None of them has much insight into their addiction, but the answer is probably as easy as this: It's fun. It's competitive. And game developers have figured out how to make the quest personal. David Freeman, a consultant for games, calls it emotioneering.

Foster became just as obsessed with Halo. "You become attached to the characters, your fellow marines," she says. "It shakes you up when something happens to characters you've come to trust. A lot of people don't realize the emotional impact these things have."

Like thousands of other Halo addicts, Winn, Luther, Malone and Foster loved Red Vs Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles, a popular machinima comedy series based on Halo 2. Created by older gamers who met at the University of Texas in Austin, the series features bored futuristic soldiers enmeshed in a civil war who say stupid stuff to pass the time. Ed Halter of The Village Voice called it "Clerks-meets-Star Wars." Here's a sample from the first episode:

Tucker: What are they doing?

Church: What?

Tucker: I said, what are they doing now?

Church: God damn, I'm getting so sick of answering that question.

Tucker: You have the fucking rifle. I can't see shit. Don't bitch at me because I'm not going to just sit up here and play with my dick all day.

Church: Okay, look. They're just standing there and talking, okay? That's all they're doing, that's all they ever do. Is just stand there and talk. That's what they were doing last week, that's what they were doing when you asked me five minutes ago. So five minutes from now, when you ask me "What are they doing," my answer's gonna be "They're still just talkin', and they're still just standin' there."

The creators of Red Vs Blue now run a company called Rooster Teeth, based in Buda, Texas, and earn money creating machinima for commercial use. New episodes of Red Vs Blue, now in its fourth season, are posted each week and downloaded by half a million people.

"Red Vs Blue is Beckett," says Wired's Anderson. "It's doing Waiting for Godot. It makes an asset out of its limitations." Among the limitations: The Halo marines are all wearing helmets, so they can be distinguished only by their voices. Figuring out who's who in a battle scene is difficult. And the soldiers don't have complete range of motion; for example, they're able to crouch but not sit down.

"But you can blow things up real easily," Luther says.

Red Vs Blue and its many imitators inspired Winn to think about using Halo 2 to create a movie. He assumed that after making short films -- dealing with actors, getting location permits, coping with weather -- creating machinima would be a breeze.

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Winn had grown up watching old movies with his grandmother. As a teenager, he started using editing software on his computer to make trailers for real and made-up movies he'd like to see, snipping video slices and putting them to music.