Id's openness and modding tools led to a "Quake movie" community, which altered gameplay data to add camera angles in post-production, a practice that became known as machinima.
It popularized consumer graphics cards with its implementation of 3D rendering under OpenGL technology, and its dedicated developer tools encouraged users to create their own modifications, spawning a "healthy mod scene".
[1] Id's choice to create and share an editor and scripting language with Quake spurred its modding community and led to unforeseen innovations, such as animated movies performed by players during gameplay.
[12] Rock, Paper, Shotgun referred to this time as the "Silver Age of FPS modding" for the modder attention to hyper-realistic and polished detail in creating game assets that bordered the production quality of AAA developers.
The actors would control their characters live—creating the demo file—and editors would "re-cam" by revisiting the scene from a new point of view or swapping between pre-selected camera angles.
The Quake tools created for these purposes led to dedicated machinima post-production utilities, such as David "CRT" Wright's Keygrip and Keygrip2.
A programmer frustrated with the game's QuakeEd level editor released his own version for free and was later offered a job by Id's John Carmack.
In 2000, Id transferred maintenance control of the Quake III Arena level editor tools (Q3Radiant) to community programmers, who added new features and released the result as the Windows- and Linux-compatible GtkRadiant.