Before machinima became a recognizable genre, Michael Houston was already using Quake as a movie set for two idiots named Dank and Scud.
Visit The Adventures of Dank and Scud
The project began in the mid-1990s as an excuse to practice graphics and HTML. Houston used Quake levels as sets, posed game characters, captured screenshots, and assembled the results into a comic with image editing software. What could have remained a three-page experiment became a multi-issue webcomic with mirrors, downloadable archives, audio, Flash versions, custom game material, and its own small orbit inside early Quake culture.
The production notes are the best part for anyone interested in how people made web media before convenient tools existed.
Houston describes hiding game entities, adjusting the field of view to remove the player’s weapon, positioning models, taking screenshots at 800×600, and compositing the panels afterward. The tool pile included Quake Model Editor, BSP editors, WinPak, Paint Shop Pro, and several generations of Photoshop. The Web did not provide a comic-production system. He assembled one out of a first-person shooter and whatever graphics utilities were lying around.
The site also records how large media felt on a dial-up-era Web. A high-resolution 1024×768 JPEG was announced as a 155 KB download. A PDF of one issue weighed 11 MB and was described as something only committed fans should bother downloading. Mirrors in other countries mattered because hauling graphics across an ocean was a real concern.
Then the comic started becoming software
Dank and Scud kept drifting into stranger formats. The first issues were converted into Shockwave Flash presentations with voice acting and sound effects. Houston experimented with a simulated webcam based on a series of Quake scenes. Plans appeared for a QuakeWorld server where players could become Dank or Scud by picking up special runes. QuakeC entered the picture because naturally a webcomic eventually needed custom multiplayer code.
A 1998 redesign was delayed partly because Quake II created a new problem: if the game world changed, the comic’s characters, skins, sets, and story now had to migrate too. That is a wonderfully specific production crisis that only makes sense when your cartoon studio is also somebody else’s game engine.
The site survives with news posts going back to 1996 and 1997, which means the development process is preserved alongside the finished work. You can watch a webcomic figure out what webcomics, game screenshots, downloadable PDFs, browser audio, and interactive media could be while all of those ideas were still relatively new.
For Internet-history researchers, that makes Dank and Scud more useful than a cleaned-up retrospective would be. The obsolete plugins, bandwidth complaints, mirrors, ZIP files, and improvised tools are part of the artifact.