Remember 2008? The days where Half-Life 2: Episode Three felt like it was only a little while away and Machinima actually had Machinima on it’s channel. It’s time to take a trip down memory lane and revisit a classic Machinima series: The Gman Squad.

Recent announcements of a possible TV series set in the Team Fortress 2 universe have made waves through the community, leaving many trying to figure out if it’s a joke or a hoax.

Freeman’s Mind is a long-running machinima comedy series which reveals the inner thoughts of Half-Life’s protagonist throughout the original game. After sixty-eight episodes the series has reached its much anticipated conclusion.

Ignis Solus is a classic Team Fortress 2 machinima created by the (now inactive) Lit Fuse Films group. It is considered to be the first piece of fan-made TF2 machinima ever produced.

Welcome to the first article of the ‘Cinematic Spotlight’ series, a new feature being introduced to the film/multimedia section on LambdaGeneration.

Today we’re going to take a look back at some of the best, most iconic pieces of film and multimedia inspired by the Half-Life universe. As you may imagine, there has been an amazing amount of fan-created productions over the years. As much as we’d love to cover everything, we could not pack anything near the amount of stuff that exists into a single article (and we would probably burn out all of the content we have been wanting to share in this section for years ahead!). There are probably a lot of things that have been sadly lost or forgotten online too. Anyhow, here is a list of a few of the memorable fan-produced films, machinimas, series and other multimedia created since Half-Life’s release in 1998. Enjoy!

So you’re playing some Team Fortress 2 when all of a sudden you turn into solid gold. You were just killed by a player wearing a tuxedo, holding a small golden statuette of a shirtless, hairy Australian man. You may say to yourself “I hate my life and everything in it”, or you may ask yourself “wait, how can I get one of those things”?

The answer, my friend, is to win the Saxxy Awards.

Machinima Prime, a sub-channel of the popular Machinima.com gaming network , just uploaded a trailer for a fan-film named ‘Half-Life: Raise the Bar’.

The full film will be uploaded this Friday and can be viewed on the MachinimaPrime Channel on YouTube.

I have returned from the dead to ensure that each and every one of you gets to look at some of the greatest moving pictures I have seen this side of the Source Engine!

The only time voting has ever been exciting, terrifying, and completely nerve-wracking, (all at the same time) in the history of humankind… was probably when Valve had us shooting the hell out of each other like never before, then patiently re-editing the footage into a cinema masterpiece (also like never before), all in the name of attaining a foot-high Australium bust of Saxton Hale. Evidently, I’m referring to TF2’s First Annual Saxxy Awards, which took place in May of 2011.

Well, I hope you’ve been keeping your voting finger in good shape, for it’s all going to come rushing back very soon. And by “very soon“, I mean “literally right now“.