Blizzard, Xfire Announce Machinima Contest

Blizzard Entertainment, developers of popular MMORPG World of Warcraft, and Xfire, a game-themed instant messaging service, have announced that the two companies will co-sponsor a contest for World of Warcraft user-created in-game movies, or "machinima." The contest began on December 14th, and the deadline to submit entries is January 21st, 2006. The contest is divided into Drama, Comedy, and Dance categories. First prize winner in each will receive an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ dual-core processor, second gets an Xbox 360 Premium pack and 512MB USB flash drive, third place gets an XFX GeForce 7800 graphics card, 4th prize is a DLink DGL-4300 router, and 5th place is a Zboard gaming keyboard with World of Warcraft keyset. In addition to those main categories, special prizes will be awarded in Best Music, Best Dialogue, Best Action Scene, Best Pun or Line, Best Editing and Special Effects, as well as one "special prize" catch-all. All winning movies, as well as some runners-up, will be available for download through Xfire's peer-to-peer distribution network and the Xfire World of Warcraft movies channel.