Mesquite, Tex. ? He was trapped in the dimly lit, tile-floor control room, explosions erupting around him. His life, it seemed, was about to end.

But a few deft keystrokes later, he managed to hack into the computer system and open an escape hatch. Leaping headfirst to safety, the world slowed to a halt, his torso frozen in time.

The end.

This minute-long clip could have played out in the movie “The Matrix.”

In a sense it was.

But “Matrix: 4×1” and its brethren are different. Part cinema, part video game, these so-called machinimas don’t need real actors, props, cameras or sets just a home computer.

This emerging form of filmmaking uses the graphics power of today’s computer games to create movies with remarkable visceral power.

As gamers raged across the street at QuakeCon 2002, an annual party for hardcore gamers, some of the top machinimas were on display last weekend at the first Machinima Film Festival at a steakhouse in Mesquite, near Dallas.

Machinimas are made using special software tools originally developed for the graphics engines of many first-person shooter video games, notably “Quake” and “Unreal Tournament.”

Instead of running around virtual worlds with guns blazing, the game engines have been reworked with all the tools of a director: lighting, sets, actors.

“Simply defined, it’s a film in a virtual 3-D environment,” said Paul Marino, executive director of the Machinima Academy of Arts and Sciences, a New York-based group trying to promote the movie technique.

It may sound like something you’ve seen on the silver screen, but unlike big-budget productions such as “Toy Story” or “Shrek,” the software used in machinima is much cheaper and often a free download.

What’s revolutionary for directors, says Marino, is that machinimas can be made in real time.

“You’re not waiting days on end for a scene to be created,” said Drew Campbell of Fountainhead Entertainment in Mesquite, one of several game-related companies to spring up around the headquarters of game-maker id Software Inc.

Since March, Fountainhead has been developing “Machinimation,” software it hopes will make it easier for Steven Spielberg wannabes to get a start in filmmaking.