Ark of the Lost Angels

Series Title Card _{(Credit: Jon Graham)}

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Obscure internet culture strikes again.

In the earlier days of video sharing on the internet, there existed an interesting crossover of media. Machinima, which stands for “machine cinema” refers to films essentially made inside video games. As video games became a popular topic of conversation on the internet, several creators started making fun videos in these games.

These were not videos of gameplay, although the two ideas would soon become intertwined.

While the popular webseries Red vs. Blue was not the first example of machinima, it would become one of the most enduring and iconic products of the genre. The show about two groups of soldiers in the middle of a box canyon would help make Rooster Teeth a major creator of internet content across gaming, comedy, and podcasting spheres before it sadly folded in early 2024. However, it’s since been revived by the original founder, Burnie Burns.

The reason Red vs. Blue was so popular was because Halo was so popular. In online gaming spheres of the early 2000s, Halo was one of, if not the biggest franchises. It was a tentpole franchise for the original Xbox, and it remained so in the Xbox 360’s early years. Halo 3 was perhaps the most talked about title release in 2007, despite the entire year being chock full of other game releases which would become juggernaut franchises of their own with series like Dead Space, Mass Effect, Bioshock, Assassin’s Creed, and Uncharted all making their debuts that year.

Another very popular Halo machinima series was an unconventional hybrid with live action called Arby ‘n’ the Chief. The series began as a fun video called “Master Chief Sucks at the Halo” where an action figure of the Halo series’ main protagonist Master Chief, brought to life with the Microsoft Sam voice-to-text feature from old versions of Windows, plays the Halo 3 Beta and interacts with other players online. Chief is characterized as an immature, foul-mouthed, illiterate, offensive stereotype of many online gamers at the time, written by creator Jon Graham to represent the worst parts of online gaming. His foil is the action figure of another main character within the Halo series, the alien known as the Arbiter. Arbiter is voiced by Microsoft Mike in the series and serves as the voice of reason and straight main to Chief’s juvenile insanity. Arbiter is the more principled and erudite of the two and deconstructs Chief’s arguments.

The series, rife with parodies of Xbox Live gamers, habits of the terminally online population, and amusing hijinks befitting of the Toy-Story-esque nature of the main protagonists saw scenes in both machinima, and live action with the toys being puppeted by Graham in his apartment. As the series continued on, the originally one-off comedic episodes with loose continuity became more structured and serialized. As Graham continued his education in filmmaking, he began writing in more dramatic elements, and exploring the toys’ feelings about their existence as animated action figures in a world populated by humans.

Machinima Network

In the early days of YouTube, one channel rose above the rest when it came to gaming videos. Machinima, Inc. was named after the aforementioned methodology of producing narrative content. Machinima as an artform came about as a side effect of the internet. Filmmaking wasn’t as quite widespread as it is now in the early 2000s. There were many video game fans who also wanted to be storytellers in some way, shape, or form. Using video games as a way to make movies or television shows brought the visual component of filmmaking into reach for many would-be writers who lacked the resources for more traditional filmmaking methods. There became a way to meld their love of video games with their desire to make movies. More than that, making machinima often necessitated greater creativity as games often didn’t have built-in tools to make narrative content in the same way.

Halo became a popular choice for machinima thanks to Red vs. Blue. It was because of a visual glitch with third-person character models that pointing the pistol at the ground would raise the head back up, meaning characters could look like they were standing at ease, making dialogue heavy scenes feel more natural. Original Halo developer, Bungie, added a feature to Halo 2 which allowed characters to lower the gun. This was inspired specifically by Red vs. Blue, but allowed other machinimators to have an easier time making content. Bungie would add theater mode to Halo 3, which became a mainstay of the series and would inspire other games to do the same. Theater mode was ostensibly for players to look at matches they played, and move the camera around during the playback, untethered from their characters. This allowed for great moments to capture gameplay and give better angles to great performances, or funny fails. Rooster Teeth’s gameplay-focused division Achievement Hunter would create a series based on the latter: Fails of the Weak. Community members would send in videos of their best failures in Halo Reach, and Achievement Hunter hosts Jack Pattillo and Geoff Ramsey would commentate over the community-submissions.

It was in a similar niche that Machinima, Inc. became a YouTube juggernaut. Their website originally began as a place for burgeoning machinimators to show their works off to gain a larger audience. As machinima grew more popular, so did the number of creators within Machinima’s network. The company migrated primarily to YouTube by the end of the 2000s, and was inking deals with thousands of creators. These creators would create content for Machinima’s channels, and receive a cut of the advertising revenue.

The deals were often in perpetuity, and a large company network pressured young creators into signing open-ended deals which took their labor to make the company the bulk of the money was a predatory business model. Jon Graham was one such creator. “Master Chief Sucks at Halo” gained a virality in the Halo community, and the gaming community at large which made him a hot talent. Jon has spoken at length over the years about how unprofessional and predatory Machinima was from his early days. For example, in the first two Arby ‘n’ the Chief seasons, Jon used a bunch of popular music and movie soundtracks, unlicensed. When he asked Machinima about the rights and legality, they responded saying not to worry about licensing the rights to the music because the internet was the internet and nobody cared. Jon also detailed how his payment would be delayed for months on end, and the Machinima staff were unresponsive and unprofessional.

Much of Machinima’s content broke away from its namesake forms of movies made in video games. The network became focused on gameplay videos: guides, let’s plays, and competitive multiplayer gameplay by high profile players. The network started Inside Gaming as a gaming news show and channel. Machinima would also become the home of other productions like the hybrid Machinima/traditional animation series Sanity Not Included, or the animated show Sonic for Hire. The traditional machinima would vanish from the network’s most prominent slots. Eventually, Machinima, Inc. would tumble financially, and sell to Warner Brothers. The focus on video gaming on YouTube meant many prospective victims of Machinima’s predatory business practices decide to go their own way. Machinima would passed through ownership to fall under AT&T before being shuttered in 2019 after a massive purge of its entire content library.

After Machinima’s fall, Jon was able to recover the archive of episodes and upload them to his own channel, keeping Arby ‘n’ the Chief alive, alongside some of his other shows.

The Show

The first episodes of Arby ‘n’ the Chief were very short, comedic, and focused on the weird roommate dynamic of the two toys. The episodes lampooned common online behavior, and aspects of the Halo community. Reactions to happenings in the gaming community were common centerpieces of episodes. Arbiter tended to represent Jon’s viewpoint on a variety of issues while Chief was the representation of the worst parts of Xbox Live’s community: sexism, trolling, and general asinine behavior. The later episodes in the original run (the first 25 episodes organized into three seasons) tended to turn more towards Graham’s soapboxing about certain topics. Originally the show ended with an episode which debated the best machinima creators and served as a commentary on online fandom spaces. This episode was followed by a now-non-canon miniseries called Endgame. Endgame was deliberately over the top ridiculous, and Graham handed off the show to Machinima corporate where they made Arby ‘n’ the Chief in LA. The sequel series was an utter disaster, and Graham was given full control over the show again, continuing with a fourth Season which picks up with many standalone episodes, growing slightly more serialized by the end of the season before turning the show into a fully serialized endeavor starting with Season 5.

By the end of Season 4, Graham had incorporated lessons from his film classes and feedback from other series he did such as Hard Justice and One Life Remaining. The dialogue and plots began to get tighter, and the characters began to have much more consistent development, while still remaining true to their core identities. The show became less about making a commentary on the online world and more about using it to tell stories. The stories began serving the characters rather than the characters serving the comedy. Elements such as the toys status as living, sentient beings (or as close as Chief can get) became fodder for their development, with his inability to truly experience the world putting Arbiter down a dark path, and the friction between the two plastic roommates which was previously mined for comedy became a frequent source of drama.

One of the show’s most loved episodes from the original run was where Arbiter and Chief are invited to a wedding in Halo 3, which they find ridiculous. Chief, being the troll he is, decides to crash the whole wedding by killing the avatars of everyone involved, to which the participants and sole audience member react as though Chief had actually wrecked an in-person wedding. The episode ended with Arbiter asking Chief if he’d like to crash another wedding sometime to which Chief responds, ‘Dam rite son.’ The follow up to this promise became the core storyline of the fifth season. Arbiter and Chief crash a wedding for a very valid reason, using game exploits which violated the terms of service and would get their account banned. While that as a dramatic consequence for taking what is viewed as an insane action seems laughable, the drama comes from online play being Arbiter’s only window into the larger world, and that he willingly gives it up for a valid reason still causes a serious amount of angst in the following season. The people they go up against in the sixth season and events of the seventh whittle away at Arbiter’s moral center. Chief’s charming character flaws become a poison for Arbiter.

Season seven was the last to have aired on Machinima. At the time, the final season was quite depressing and a far cry from the lighthearted, irreverent comedy it was at the start. The show ended on a rather sad note. The seventh season aired between April 2012 and August 2013. The show had a definitive end, and it marked a big departure of Graham’s involvement with Machinima. Two years later, Jon announced that there would be an eighth season which premiered in 2015 and aired its final episode in 2022. Season eight continued the story from the end of the seventh, and gave a very different and more open-ended ending.

After the show’s conclusion, Jon has continued making episodes of a shorter, more lighted hearted, comedic nature that serve as one-offs in the vein of earlier episodes of the show. They continue to this day on a periodic basis amidst Jon’s other projects.

The Show from Outside

Arby ‘n’ the Chief in its original form is a relic of a bygone era. It’s a still-living connection with an older era of the Halo community and gaming at large. Halo was a massive tentpole franchise in gaming, and the ‘Master Chief Sucks at Halo’ episodes along with the Pilot for Arby ‘n’ the Chief got Jon attention from original Halo creator Bungie. In fact, Bungie enjoyed the first few videos so much that they gave Jon the coveted Recon armor. In Halo 3, for the first couple years of the game’s lifecycle, the Recon armor was exclusively given out by Bungie to individuals to community members for specific accomplishments that impressed the Bungie staff. Jon’s videos, for their humor and love of the Halo community, was one such accomplishment which netted Recon armor. Naturally, he wrote it into the show’s second episode as Chief having wanted it badly and Arbiter sending an email to Bungie to get it (the email written in the episode was never actually sent). Chief, naturally, became obnoxious on matchmaking and bragged to anyone who was listening (and several players who weren’t). He was the perfect encapsulation of much of the community in that way.

Jon’s filmmaking was rudimentary at best in the early days. Much of the humor was quite low brow, and often very topical to what was going on in the gaming community – and especially the Halo community – at the time. But beneath the rough exterior early on lay a great sense of comedic timing, and a creative approach to the production which really let him stretch what should have been a small gag series into something that spanned generations of gamers. For example, monotone, rudimentary text-to-speech voices gave life to two characters because Graham found the best way to utilize the pauses, speeds, spelling, and pitch within the programs to give these characters’ voices so much personality. Clever shooting and editing had to disguise the fact that these were toys being puppeteered by one man alone in his apartment. Graham used camera tricks to convey emotion with both the static faces of the toys and the helmets of the in-game avatars. Slow movements, camera shakes, and a great deal of physical comedy helped give static characters in both mediums quite the range of expressions. Coupled with a more artful use of music, and the series found its legs within a few years. Jon’s use of music is an interesting case study. In the earliest episodes, Jon, “infringed [his] ass off” but by season three, started using classical music and royalty-free tracks he purchased the rights to. Those remained staples, but starting with the fourth season, Jon began composing the soundtracks for his shows himself using software. It served to highlight the one-man-show, guerrilla nature of the production which lent it its charm.  

Much of the rest of the show’s charm came from its humor. It was a satire and a love letter to online gaming in the earliest days. Many of the jokes revolved around topics such as the console wars, with Chief being a fanatical Microsoft devotee, even going as far as deleting the shortcut to Firefox off the desktop before looking to find Internet Explorer when needing a browser. Lots of pop culture references were sprinkled in, coupled with the odd couple nature of the two toys. Chief used ‘leetspeak’ which was popular among the gaming and nerd communities in 2008, but almost nonexistent now. Chief believed in Halo as the ultimate video game and everything else was awful, while Arbiter loved old games (echoing a lot of Jon’s nostalgia).

As Jon tried to grow as a filmmaker, the show started tackling more mature themes. The online gaming sphere came with its own set of challenges to make a compelling environment without the artificial drama from the early days when the show didn’t take itself seriously. In the earlier seasons, the world could take online gaming very seriously because it was meant to be farcical. In a grounded show, characters taking the online world as seriously as they did would come across as eyeroll worthy.

Enter Fragban. Fragban is the name of the fictitious software exploit Jon wrote into the show which gave the machinima portions of the show proper stakes. The software works that when a player is killed (or ‘fragged’), their account information is sent to the user of the hacks and their account (and later console) is banned from the network. This not only stops people from playing online but speaks to the massive privacy concerns which have defined every debate over the internet’s role in society since its inception. The software was iterated upon by a number of villainous characters, and the majority of the threats Arbiter and Chief faced were built off the lore of their adventures crossing paths with Fragban so many times.

Jon was able to weave an excellent explanation as to why people killing each other in Halo had meaning and dramatic value into the show and was one of many ways the show charted his development as a filmmaker. After the original end of Arby ‘n’ the Chief, Jon tried his hands at creating more traditional machinima. Hard Justice followed cops and crossed paths with One Life Remaining, which were his two followups to Arby ‘n’ the Chief. Unlike the former, Hard Justice and One Life Remaining used machinima as the storytelling avenue and the game world represented the ‘real’ world for the characters within it. One Life Remaining followed a teenager named Anthony as he graduates high school with no real direction in the world and ends up dating a girl named Kathryn. The series ends with Kathryn attempting to bomb Anthony’s college campus in a suicide attack. Jon has gone on record hating these other early works.

Arby ‘n’ the Chief was the right balance between relatable and farcical to have found its own endearing niche. It managed to handle the troubles and tribulations of online gaming through the eyes of a pair of action figures in such a way that made them interesting, deep, relatable, and endearing characters. It captures the Halo and gaming communities in a time capsule, and gave entertainment to thousands of viewers over the last eighteen years.