I remember playing with 3D Movie Maker extensively. Me and my mate would make shitty movies usually ripping off James Bond or Indiana Jones.

I also used the other McZee programs, Creative Writer and Fine Artist, which were basically a fancy text editor and a fancy paint program.

It feels like we don’t have anything like that today, there doesn’t seem to be this type of creative game out there. I would have expected 3D Movie Maker to have unending sequels, like the one with Nickelodeon, getting more advanced with each decades pop characters, but it just stopped.

I guess I’m looking for kid-friendly versions of business applications.

Like Creative Writer is Word for kids, Fine Artist is Photoshop for kids, 3DMM is Maya/Blender for kids…

  • Hillock
    10•1 year ago

    I would say Machinima simply filled the needs and there was no need for these kind of games to be developed on top of it. Just using existing game engines with a decent editor would always be cheaper and more popular since people are familiar with the assets. Just take a look at how many Team Fortress “movies” are out there.

    And even without editor using games was fine. World of Warcraft had a ton of videos as well.

    Tools for Machinima also saw the gradual advancements you talked about. While the initial movies produced had a lot of workarounds to get a decent end product there is now dedicated software for it. NVIDIA recently released their own version.

    On top of that with smartphones having cameras now, kids can always shoot their own movies.

    • @[email protected]
      2•1 year ago

      Not really comparable to a game/creative suite aimed at children in grade (elementary) school. This wasn’t about making indie movies on a budget, this was more like the Belcher kids putting on a show with cardboard and a Casio keyboard. 3D Movie Maker was a learning type creative sandbox for computer graphics, emphasis on learning. But it absolutely was not about learning the arcane rituals to get a prosumer open source computer graphics and video editing package working. It was more like a SIMs game where you wrote the script and placed the cameras.