Chapter 4: Rooster Teeth Bites

Abstract

This chapter examines the most prolific and financially successful machinima production team: Rooster Teeth Productions. Best known for its infamous Red vs Blue series which began in 2003, we consider its approach to professionalizing machinima creative practice. Its story is not exclusive from other machinima creative works and producers but it is intertwined with that of Machinima.com, Machinima Inc. and Machinima.org discussed in the previous chapter. Together with the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences (AMAS), Rooster Teeth’s story unfolded alongside the emergence of the digital cultural practice of other active community members such as Paul Marino (ILL Clan and AMAS), Hugh Hancock (Strange Company and AMAS) and numerous others, and it has been a significant source of inspiration to a breadth of creative communities, including machinima. Rooster Teeth’s contribution has, however, extended well beyond the reach of the immediate machinima community, and for that matter, games development more generally, and we therefore examine its sphere of influence as a global fan-based phenomenon.

We begin with the backstory to its development, the examine how it developed, considering its breadth of content creation products, before considering its impacts on the community and beyond.

Full text

Chapter 4
Rooster Teeth Bites
“It’s one of the more unforgettable moments in recent film history: the opening shot tracks
slowly up a cliff face, so tight you can’t tell what exactly you’re looking at, until it reaches
the top and reveals two sci-fi soldiers clad in futuristic armour standing at the edge of the
precipice, laconically discussing the eternal question: ‘Why are we here?’. You know this
style, this mood, but you can’t quite place it; could be Beckett, could be Tarkovsky. Then it
hits you: This is Halo for the fucking Xbox. And bam, like that, you’ve entered the world of
machinima…”
Julian Dibbell (2005) on Red vs Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles
Introduction
This chapter examines the most prolific and financially successful machinima production
team: Rooster Teeth Productions. Best known for its infamous Red vs Blue series which
began in 2003, we consider its approach to professionalizing machinima creative practice. Its
story is not exclusive from other machinima creative works and producers but it is
intertwined with that of Machinima.com, Machinima Inc. and Machinima.org discussed in
the previous chapter. Together with the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences (AMAS),
Rooster Teeth’s story unfolded alongside the emergence of the digital cultural practice of
other active community members such as Paul Marino (ILL Clan and AMAS), Hugh Hancock
(Strange Company and AMAS) and numerous others, and it has been a significant source of
inspiration to a breadth of creative communities, including machinima. Rooster Teeth’s
contribution has, however, extended well beyond the reach of the immediate machinima
community, and for that matter, games development more generally, and we therefore
examine its sphere of influence as a global fan-based phenomenon.
We begin with the backstory to its development, the examine how it developed, considering
its breadth of content creation products, before considering its impacts on the community and
beyond.
Backstory
Following the likes of animated television series such as The Simpsons, the Rooster Teeth
producers began as a collaborative team of game reviewers with an alcohol infused twist. The
team consisted initially of Burnie Burns and Matt Hullum, who had first worked together on
projects during their student days at Texas State University. Although Burns had originally
been enrolled on a pre-medical programme, he had changed his major to computer science
and found he had more time on his hands than he knew what to do with. Burns created a
show called Sneak Peek at the University’s student TV station, TSTV, which he produced
between 1993-1996 (the show remains on air and has become the longest running TV show
produced by students in the world). His TV show concept was to acquire free movies,
ostensibly for reviewing purposes but mainly because he was interested in watching the
films.
In his development of the show, Burns had been heavily influenced by Robert Rodriguez’
(film director, Desperado, From Dusk Till Dawn, Spy Kids) one-man film crew and Mariachi

style of filmmaking. Rodriguez had also been a student at the University of Texas but had
failed to make the grade in its film school. His feature length directorial debut film, El
Mariachi (1992) was made with $7,000 primarily for a Spanish speaking Mexican audience
yet became a national hit, winning numerous awards and has since been recognized as the
lowest budget film grossing over $1M (Lynch, 2015).
Subsequently Burns expanded his interests by attempting to make a live-action film for which
he had no formal training. He had learned editing skills in a couple of days in the TSTV
studios which had given him the confidence to proceed but ultimately he put out a call for
help which reached Hullum, a film studies student. As the concept came to fruition, the two
connected with actor Joel Heyman, who was Hullum’s roommate, and together they made
The Schedule. Their greatest challenge and ultimate frustration, however, was in distributing
the film which involved sending copies of it to festivals and distributors as a way of getting
the film shown to audiences. They struggled to get traction for the movie and it has never
been released in theatres.
Thereafter, they extrapolated the concept of the Sneak Peek TV show to an online forum that
focussed on reviewing games that had also been acquired for free (years later this became
The Drunk Tank Podcast). As their review concept progressed, so other members joined the
group, including Geoff Ramsey (formerly known as Geoff Fink) and Gustavo Sorola, and
collectively they created a website called Drunkgamers.com. Providing a novel approach to
game reviews, the Drunk Gamers’ aim was to review whilst inebriated. Their first review,
focussing on the game Conker’s Bad Fur Day, took place on 9 March 2001 (with two of the
team and two others, 2001). As a team of young white male gamers, their challenge was that
few games publishers/developers would provide them with games, sponsor their reviews or
indeed were happy to see their game having been reviewed by a team that identified
themselves as drunk.
Despite this, their comedy improv and laddish parody style of reviewing became popular
with a relatively small number of fan-subscribers to their website, with approximately 550 by
2003. In one session, however, two of the team (Burns and Sorola) parodied a gamer
perspective on a PC versus Apple Mac advertisement which generated high levels of
attention. The film was downloaded thousands of times from the internet in a period of less
than 24 hours. Burns only realized this after the fact, when one of the Drunk Gamers team
brought it to his attention the following day. Burns identifies this as a seminal moment in
which he realized the internet had potential to overcome many of the distribution challenges
experienced when attempting to reach an audience with The Schedule.
As the team’s general goofing around and riffing each other in the process progressed, so it
led them to develop increasingly complex plots, team and game-based in-jokes. Burns,
Ramsey and Sorola began creating voiceover-enhanced gameplay videos for their website.
As avid fans of Bungie’s Halo, they discussed the role of the Warthog automobile in the
game which ultimately sparked the Red versus Blue (RVB) web-based series. With an eye to a
longer storyline, Burns created a trailer for RVB which was released on 5 September 2002 on
the Drunk Gamers website. It received little attention and shortly thereafter they closed the
website for unrelated reasons. Their new website RedvsBlue.com came into existence on 30
January 2003 but it was not until March when Computer Gaming World magazine sought
permission to include a different Drunk Gamers’ video on a compact disk to be circulated
with its April edition that they sought to exploit their RVB work. They launched the

RedvsBlue.com website on 28 March and re-released the trailer on 31 March 2003. A few
days later, on 1 April 2003, they released RVB Episodes Zero and 1.
The reason the first episode was separated was not so much related to the storyline (in fact,
the episodes contained credits and story separately) but in order to enable download of its
80MB files from their server. At the time of the creation of the RVB trailer, Burns was
working as the president of a technology support company, TeleNetwork Partners, based in
Houston (Hullum and Heyman had moved to live in Los Angeles following their graduation).
Burns had placed the RVB trailer video on his office server but within minutes of its upload it
was being downloaded at a rate of 3,000 videos per second, effectively overwhelming the
company’s bandwidth.
At the same time, the team also changed their name to Rooster Teeth, which was a
euphemism for an insult traded in the RVB trailer. Its success was such that the Rooster Teeth
team determined to release an average of three episodes per month. As Rooster Teeth came
into being therefore it comprised a team of five: Burns, Hullum, Heyman, Sarola and
Ramsey. They used Rooster Teeth as an umbrella brand for their content, albeit this was
largely invisible to their audience. It is this brand, however, that subsequently enabled them
to launch other machinima and series-based projects. They justified their name change as a
means to provide a veneer of respectability and professionalism to their game reviews,
implying they were doing more than simply playing games, and apparently also reflecting
that one of the team already had both the rooster and a set of dentures as an ident. In their
RVB productions, they were joined by Jason Saldana and Dan Godwin, both of whom feature
in various episodes from the beginning of the series.
Building on their RVB series concept, they began almost immediately creating a shorts series,
which they called Public Service Announcements. RVB PSA #1: Weapons of Mass
Destruction was released on 7 April 2003. Just four days later, on 11 April, RVB Episode 2
(Red Gets a Delivery) was released, on 18 April RVB Episode 3 (The Rookies) was released,
and on 26 April RVB Episode 4 (Head Noob in Charge) was released. By the end of April
2003, Rooster Teeth had more than 1M downloads of their RVB content. Burns described its
phenomenal success as one of feeling as though they were ‘falling up a cliff’ (Burns, 2012)
but had quickly realized their next greatest challenge was going to be how to service their
rapidly growing audience through the available online media channels of the day. This was a
whole different order of distribution problem than the one Burns had dealt with for his first
film, The Schedule.
As to the creative form of machinima, years later Burns explained how in their development
of RVB he believed Rooster Teeth had invented a new creative format in game-based
filmmaking. They had stumbled into creating machinima entirely separately from the
growing community that had previously formed around Quake and other games (Chapters 2
and 3), many of which they had also reviewed during their drunken podcasts. They were
however unaware of its pre-existence and had wanted to refer to the method as RenderVision
(Rigney, 2012). As others began to reach out and connect them to the Machinima.com
community, so their practice and approach to developing their own community began to
form. This was a different approach to that taken by others such as Hancock and Marino, and
even today remains an outlier in the world of machinima and game-based filmmaking. Its
success is without comparators: RVB became the world’s longest running web-based series.

From the outset, their creative philosophy was to “only make content that we would want to
see” (Burns, in Brouwer, 2016). Using Halo and eventually Halo 2 as the basis for RVB, they
describe the plot thusly:
“The Blood Gulch Chronicles [2003]: In the time between the Covenant invasion of
the outer planets (Halo) and the subsequent alien invasion of Earth (Halo 2), there
was a brief period of civil war among the human marines. Places like Sidewinder,
Derelict and Chiron TL34 were the sites of fierce battles where red and blue warriors
fought for control of mankind's future. The Blood Gulch Chronicles tell the story of
the men stationed in a desolate outpost as they fight for control of the universe's most
strategic dry creek bed in the middle of a box canyon.” Rooster Teeth (2003)
Their humour and approach to creating machinima resonated with many of their peer group
followers. Content was not about the game or character performance extension, which had
been implicit within much of the early Quake movie machinima. This was a method of using
the game content to create an entirely new sci-fi comedy, a contemporary approach to
machinima filmmaking where the game is the source of assets that are repurposed. They
were not only prolific creators but their sharp and witty commentary was focussed on current
affairs and many of the social and political issues unfolding around them, reinforced by group
dynamics that had been honed over an extended period of time.
They have since produced hundreds of thematically different shows: by 2017 they averaged
45 shows per year using various aspects of game-related content. Central to their success is
the way in which Rooster Teeth reflected and accommodated the socio-cultural perspectives
of their growing online fan base and also their can-do-any-how attitude towards emerging
technologies, particularly those related to content distribution. They were not so much
creative producers of machinima films but cultural icons and influencers in their community
of followers: rock stars of game-based playfulness and online digital youth culture.
In the next section we explore how Rooster Teeth cornered a market for online fandom and
their fan-based community evolved to include a breadth of media including offline events,
alongside the development of machinima creative works. We then consider how the
community was harnessed by commercial entities such as Bungie, Halo’s game developer,
and others as the audience grew beyond all expectations.
Rooster Teeth Grows Up
By the time the RVB series was first featured (in Electronic Gaming Magazine) on 23 May
2003, two months after it launched, Rooster Teeth had released six episodes of their Halo
parody. Each episode built upon the others and whilst this had been considered to be a
generally flawed strategy for TV production, because it required the audience to go back to
each episode in order to follow the plot, it is a strategy that specifically helped Rooster Teeth
retain and build its audience online. Indeed, the approach enabled them to take their audience
with them as their concepts evolved, many of whom remain with them today.
Content was described as a sci-fi Rosencrantz and Guidenstern, where Halo characters
discuss their lives when they are not fighting in the game, as Thompson (2005) commented:
“… as it turns out, they’re a bunch of neurotics straight out of ‘Seinfeld’… none of the
soldiers have the vaguest clue why they’re fighting.” Ramsey, who had spent some time in

the Army, responded that it reflected real life in the forces – a lot of sitting around, bored for
most of it. It was, however, the combination of regular uploads, series-based content and
periodic specials (the #PSAs) that drew in such large audiences – light entertainment,
designed for the game-playing youth. Eventually, download figures exceeded 1M per
episode, which was more than most viewing figures for broadcast TV channels in the USA,
using an astonishing 180 terabytes of data per month (Bungie.net, 2004).
To enable them to effectively deal with the service and hosting costs associated with this
success, which in their first month was calculated at around $13,000, they quickly settled on
Bittorrent, a P2P sharing platform as a method of download. This enabled costs to be spread
across their audience members but importantly helped to reinforce community values of
using bleeding edge technology and associated online behaviour around the Rooster Teeth
and RVB brands. The method of viewing, of necessity, was largely social, with friends often
seeing their first episode of RVB at another friend’s home.
Rooster Teeth also realized that their use of fora for feedback enabled them to monitor
audience reactions which could be used to help them script subsequent episodes. In so doing,
they noticed that there appeared to be a kind of reputational currency in being the first person
to comment on an episode – and indeed in general on anything online. The first comments
were, however, not prosaic at all but simply the words ‘first post’. This led Burns to devise a
premium subscription model, which they initially called ‘Sponsors’ and later became known
as ‘FIRST’ reflecting the internet meme. Sponsors of the RVB series gained early access to
content for a relatively small fee of $20 a season, which also included a DVD at the end of
the current season and access to branded merchandise such as tee-shirts. There were no
advertising pre-rolls with content in 2003 as there is now with YouTube and many other
online propositions. This was therefore a unique approach at the time, given that the internet
had become a global model for free content. They used their model to provide additional
content such as outtakes and behind the scenes material (later called ‘Sponsor Cuts’). Burns
explained the decision to monetize content some time later:
“What we did with our subscription model was, we built it in such a way that if you
paid $20 for the season… you would get a DVD, we would burn all the episodes and
send them to you. And you also get early access to the episodes as they aired digitally.
So we would put it out on Friday, and then the rest of the public would get it on
Monday. We call that ‘the economy of first’… it was a nail-biting moment when we
say, “Hey, here’s the deal, we have to be able to afford the bandwidth cost on our
server to be able to do this, here’s what it’s going to cost, if you do this, we’ll do
this." And then there were definitely some people who were like, “I’m out, bye.
Money’s involved. Nothing on the internet should cost any money,” and they were
gone.” Burnie Burns (in Kafka, 2017)
In many ways the approach was a leap of faith into the unknown and almost prescient of the
brand’s success in engaging audiences, although their ambition was for RVB to be serialized
from the outset. At the point they settled on their subscription model with commitments for
assets to be created beyond the end of the series, the first series was only half way through
being created. In effect, the model was a forerunner to online crowdfunding, common today
but again unique in 2003.

In fact, the model had also settled on merchandise sales, taking its lead from another
successful online series (flash-based animation Homestar Runner), which became over 50%
of the funds they drew upon. The approach generated sufficient income to support their
continued strategy for almost weekly releases of RVB as well as providing them with the core
funding for development and release of a second series (Kafka, 2017).
Another key aspect to the design of their proposition, behind the website paywall, was to
develop a points-based system that enabled Sponsors to ‘unlock’ website features, effectively
gamifying functionality of the site (Bungie.net, 2004). This was also a novel approach and
one which was successful in locking fans into their brand.
Whilst content encapsulated their passion for games, fun and parody, there was also explicit
acknowledgement of the game on which their content was based. Their short #PSA 2 (Armor
Cleaning), released 13 June 2003, explained why they had not that week released a new
episode of RVB (they had already released 11 episodes at this stage): it was because this same
week Bungie’s Halo 2 had pre-launched and it was their attempt to shine a light, comedically,
on a new game version, which of course they effectively asset stripped for their own ends.
In the meantime, their approach had also generated the attention of the games developer, for
which they produced an introductory short in May for that year’s premiere games industry
show, E3 (held in Los Angeles). It was clear that Bungie’s attitude to the parody was from
the outset entirely supportive, albeit legitimized through their fan owned site,
Halo.Bungie.org. For example, the fan site was frequently used by Bungie employees, who
responded to fan questions, and similarly, Bungie often used the fan-site in their own
promotion and PR activities. Thus, on 5 April 2003, when Halo.Bungie.org’s founder posted
about the RVB trailer and first episode, Bungie’s endorsement was implicit:
“If you're offended by cursing, this might not be for you... but I found it laugh-out-
loud funny. If bandwidth gets tight, we're happy to mirror these... so let us and the
RedvsBlue team know, so that we can coordinate new links. They're planning on
doing 3 a month, if they can keep up - releases will be on Fridays.”
Louis Wu (pseudonym for Claude Errera, Halo.Bungie.org, 5 April 2003)
Just a few weeks later, on 30 April 2003, its endorsement became explicit:
“… today's new announcement: it is Bungie's great honor to welcome the guys behind
the RedvsBlue videos. Not only will they be around to sign your girlfriend's breast,
but DVD-quality versions of their videos will be playing on the big screen! And here's
the kicker: they are working on a special video just for the fan-fest. The premise for
this ‘special E3 video’ is so funny that even the folks at Bungie can't wait to see it!”
Louis Wu (Halo.Bungie.org, 30 April 2003)
Ironically, had it not been for Errera’s help in the first instance, RVB may never have even
got off the ground. He comments:
“I crunched/hosted the RVB trailer that started it all ;) They’d made a trailer to show
off their upcoming series, but it was huge – a few hundred megs. And their existing
site, Drunkgamers.com, couldn’t host it. So I compressed it to a reasonable level – the
tools for that weren’t widely held at that stage, in 2003 – and hosted it for them. They
secured more robust hosting soon after, but at the start, it was me.”

Claude Errera (interview 2020).
Whilst Halo developer Bungie’s backing was never formally confirmed in those early days,
Burns subsequently commented they had been contacted within a week of the first episode
release (Williamson, 2006). By August 2003, the backing of Bungie and Microsoft (Bungie’s
publisher) was acknowledged with a copyright notice on RVB episode 16 (A Slightly Crueler
Cruller), released 15 August 2003. Their support had been orchestrated by Joe Staten
(Halo’s creative director) and Brian Jarrard (Halo’s community director) among others
(Burns, 2017). Bungie’s overt approach to Rooster Teeth had ostensibly been to find out how
they might make the creative process easier for the team (Rigney, 2012). This resulted in a
character movement modification and a cease fire function being added to Halo 2 before its
general release later in 2003, making characters without guns easier to position for
filmmaking.
Burns confirmed each episode was cleared by Bungie before its release (Williamson, 2006)
and with the backing of Microsoft also (Rigney, 2012), Rooster Teeth’s success was insured
if not assured. Of their support, Burns commented in an interview for Bungie’s news web
page:
“The fact that the designers went out of their way to add the feature back in
[referring to a head movement bug they made use of] was very humbling considering
how busy I know everyone was – we cannot thank them enough. I know that everyone
who makes narrative Halo machinima thanks you as well. The feature that allows you
to lower your gun has no impact on gameplay, so adding it for machinima filmmakers
just shows how much you guys support your fans.” Burnie Burns (Bungie.net, 2004)
Importantly for their future as machinima creators, Burns used the connection he had
established with Bungie to help Rooster Teeth overcome the IP issues that many others using
the genre had encountered by seeking permission from the publisher (Microsoft) and
resolving licensing issues (Sinclair, 2004). Such was their success with this approach that
Microsoft actively supported them, for example, their RVB PSA #4 (Hey, Time Out, released
12 September 2003) discussed their upcoming presence at the Microsoft Professional
Development Conference taking place in October 2003. Thereafter, they produced a series of
commercials for the Xbox for game store kiosks (Horiuchi, 2005). Indeed, they became a
licensed partner of Bungie which extended to its subsequent Microsoft studio management
team, 343 Industries (Rigney, 2012). They had, however, signed a non-disclosure agreement
which prevented the team from talking about how much money they made from their
association with Bungie, Microsoft and even their own RVB DVD sales. The agreement also
precluded them from using images of the Halo characters in their merchandise, although
names and other details were permitted (Goss, 2004). Ultimately, this strategy whilst
protecting the IP of the game developer and publisher also helped to position Rooster Teeth
as an umbrella brand which would in future give them a launchpad for new series beyond
RVB.
Perfect Storm

On 24 July 2003, the RVB and Rooster Teeth team participated in the New York Video
Festival alongside Marino and the ILL Clan. It was whilst at the Lincoln Centre that Burns
realized they were not the first to make machinima:
“We had no idea anyone else was doing this stuff. Then Paul [Marino] told me what
Machinima was and how many people were working on projects. Up until then, we
thought we were so original!” Burnie Burns (in Sinclair, 2004).
They had, however, achieved what others in the community had struggled to do: build a
sustainable commercial proposition with a mainstream audience on the back of their creative
work, capturing the attention of new media commentators. Graham Leggat, former director
of communications for the Lincoln Center’s film society, described RVB as absurdist drama
that is ‘as sophisticated as Samuel Beckett’ (in Delaney, 2004), a comment reflected in
Dibbell’s quote introducing this chapter (Dibbell is a US author and technology journalist and
fellow of Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society).
RVB’s first film presentation was a complete sell out at the Lincoln Center, and three days
later they released a special episode (New York Video Festival: I [heart] BG) in which they
provide a very dry summary of their New York visit, complete with their definition of
machinima:
“[Church]:… It’s not exactly a vacation, they want us to come there and talk about
pre-rendered game engines for animation purposes – a more efficient way of creating
large projects by using established routines to animate individual characters – it’s
called ‘machinima’ and it’s gonna be a more and more popular way of doing
animation projects… [Tucker] Wow, that’s the most boring thing anyone’s ever said
to me…!” RVB: New York Video Festival Special: I [heart] BG, 24 July 2003
So successful were they with New York audiences that the Lincoln Center booked them for
the premiere of their second season – another sell-out event on 3 January 2004. In the
meantime, ever with an eye to the frustration Burns had experienced with attempts to
distribute The Schedule, they began maximising their festival exposure. In September they
appeared at the CinemaTexas International Film Festival’s Games Without Borders event
and October attended AMAS’ second Machinima Film Festival at the Museum of Moving
Image in New York, where RVB won its first awards (Best Independent Machinima Film,
Best Writing and Best Picture) among a host of nominations in other categories.
Indeed, the Rooster Teeth team segued into the machinima community, which offered
established structures with Machinima.com and Machinima.org (and with the latter, AMAS)
through which fans could access their work, discuss their approach and appreciate a level of
interaction with like-minded creators. Thereafter, RVB was showcased at every Machinima
Festival that took place up to and including the 2008 event – in the US (2003/4/5/8), the UK
(2007) and online (2006) and became a major attractor for audiences worldwide.
Thus, in just a few short months from launch, RVB had become the most successful and most
recognized example of machinima – the DVD release of the first season went Gold in
November 2003, within a month of its release.

Such became their notoriety that by February 2004, Canadian rock group, Barenaked Ladies
(BNL), announced they would be showing two never before seen shorts of RVB in their music
tour (Landa, 2013). So began a creative association between Rooster Teeth and various
celebrities who would perform cameos in their show over the years. For example, lead singer
of BNL, Ed Robertson, appeared in RVB as the voice for Capt Flowers in several episodes
(Robertson, 2005) and again as lead in their Captain Dynamic live action series in 2009
(Landa, 2013); actor Elijah Wood (Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy) voiced the artificial
intelligence Sigma in eight episodes of RVB Season 10 (Rigney, 2012), web comedy duo,
Smosh, voiced soldiers in the RVB Season 11 trailer, among other things, and actors David
Tennant (Dr Who), Michael Jordan (Black Panther), Dakota Fanning (The Alienist), Koichi
Yamadera (Ghost in the Shell) and Masie Williams (Game of Thrones) voiced characters in
the 2018 gen:LOCK series (Jarvey, 2018; Clarke, 2018).
Building on their early success, Rooster Teeth had become a viable commercial entity. As
early as November 2003, the team discussed how they may scale, anticipating they would be
employing a team of twelve within a few months (Leggat, 2004b). This was an obvious step
in their development. Far from being an off the cuff comedic riff, each episode was scripted,
filmed, edited and reworked over the course of a week – in all, an estimated 50+ hours-worth
of work when the team were already in full time positions with their respective employers.
As the series developed, more characters joined the cast of RVB but their team was also
added to by virtue of extended RVB activities and new series. Their strategy had from the
outset been for Rooster Teeth to be a vehicle for other activities and by September 2004, a
second series was in the offing, resulting from an approach by Electronic Arts. This used
Maxis’ Sims 2 as the basis of a sitcom, The Strangerhood, coinciding with the launch of the
game – again, developed in association with the game publisher (Feldman, 2004).
An entirely different type of game to Halo, Sims 2 necessitated a new website,
Strangerhood.com, but the attraction for the game developer was the humorous approach to
storytelling that was the trade mark of the Rooster Teeth team. Lucy Bradshaw, executive
producer of Sims 2, explained:
“The movies we’ve seen from [Rooster Teeth], so far, are amazing. We look forward
to showing players out there just how much you can do with our game. The
possibilities are endless” Lucy Bradshaw (in Feldman, 2004).
Albeit content needed to be ‘tuned’ for the younger audience targeted by the developer,
Burns relished an opportunity to create a new machinima series that made fun of sitcoms:
“Well, with machinima, you have to work within this limited world. We can’t really
go in and make The Sims characters fight with guns or anything like that. That’s
something we can do in Halo, but in Halo you can’t put them on a couch or things
like that. Some of the concepts we wanted to make fun of [in RVB], things we wanted
to parody… we just weren’t able to. Now, with the Strangerhood, we can make fun of
sitcoms, make fun of reality shows, poke fun at stuff that we were just not able to in
RVB… the way machinima works, you never know. The game’s not built to make
movies, that’s what the creative process is... we try to milk all that out of [the limited
palette]. Some things you can do and some things you can’t, but that’s part of the fun
challenge.”

Burnie Burns (in Feldman, 2004).
The team also found the game aesthetic and mechanics quite different for machinima
filmmaking. With Halo, their approach had largely been one of puppeteering avatars but
Sims was more like working with real actors and their individual personalities, taking their
inspiration from the TV series Survivor. Matt Hullum commented:
“Working with the characters in the Sims 2 is a lot like working with real actors. You
have to coach them, get them in the right mood in order to get the shot you want. It’s
basically machinima method acting. If you want a Sim to act mad, just don’t let him
go to the bathroom for a while. It’s not the most sanitary way of motivating your cast,
but sometimes art is messy.” Matt Hullum (in PCGamer, 2005)
“It’s rewarding when you try for a long time to get a shot and are finally able to
achieve it. It’s almost like you work with these characters for so long that when you
finally get them to do what it is you want them to do… it’s like, ah ha, I’ve brought
you around to my way of thinking! It’s almost like you’re in the game and are
working with a personality… We realized that after we wrote the first couple episodes
that we needed to start taking it from the perspective that it's more like a reality
series… We get a lot of ideas that the game generates for us in a way.”
Matt Hullum (in Adams, 2004).
Their approach with both series in many ways was to adopt TV series making methods but
without corrupting (by hacking or modding content) the nature of the game, which reflects
the basis of their relationship with the game developers. The number of episodes per season
and storytelling methods largely reflect channel rather than internet origins, adopting the term
webisodes to describe the result (Steurer, 2005). They also brought in new actors to ensure
The Strangerhood’s characters were differentiated from RVB and in so doing added more
staff to the Rooster Teeth team (Kathunter, 2005).
Their efforts generated considerable mainstream media attention: on 7 August 2003, RVB
was featured on the British Broadcasting Corporation’s (BBC) online entertainment review
(Waters, 2003). This was the first time machinima had been described in UK mainstream
media, defined by the reporter as ‘digital puppetry’ and the merger of two interests:
filmmaking and game playing. Building on the association with the emerging machinima
community, and the work of others that had also generated attention in the media over the
preceding years, Rooster Teeth began appearing in articles alongside Marino (ILL Clan,
AMAS) and Hancock (Machinima.com, Strange Company). Over the next year, they are
featured in media production, entertainment, film and game journals and magazines both off
and online focussing on their background and creative work, machinima creative method,
their relationship with the games developers and the approach to their audience, with articles
appearing in the likes of The Guardian (Azhar, 2003), Filmmaker Magazine, New York
Magazine (Leggat, 2004a), Daily News (Leggat, 2004b), Polygon Magazine (Sinclair, 2004),
Austin Chronicle newspaper (2004), Computer Shopper magazine (2004), The Wall Street
Journal (2004), Xbox Nation (2004), USA Weekend (Louderback, 2004), Honolulu Star
(Jandoc, 2004), The Toronto Star, Austin American Statesman (Goss, 2004), New York Times
(Allen, 2004), The Salt Lake Tribune (Horiuchi, 2005), Rolling Stone Espana (2005) and
MTV.com (Totilo, 2005); technology and film TV shows such as Pulse a TV show on G4TV
(2004), Unscrewed with Martin Sargent (2004), The Screen Savers (18 January 2005), Fuse

TV’s d’FUSEd (7 February 2005) and featured on iFilm (April 2005), a pre YouTube website
for viral videos which eventually became MTV… and all before RVB was two years old.
Furthermore, RVB feature length season videos were shown at local cinemas, such as The
Alamo Downtown, Texas and IMAX, San Jose (Goss, 2004). Their DVDs were found, often
playing, in general, game and toy retailers such as Target, Babbages and Toys R Us (Errera,
2004). Increasingly, their growing body of fan followers demanded personal engagement
with the RVB creative team. Many had originated on the Halo.Bungie.org fan site (Errera,
2020).
Building a Fandom
Overcoming their apparent initial reticence with general public engagement, they launched
on to the fan festival scene with new vigour at South by Southwest (SXSW) in March 2004, an
annual multimedia event that takes place in Austin, Texas – at the time with around 900
bands, a film festival, an interactive media festival and various celebrity appearances. As
Hullum commented:
“It’s one thing to put something on the Web and get some nice emails about it. It’s
totally different to be surrounded by thousands of people seeing your work on a huge
screen” Matt Hullum (in Goss, 2004).
Personality and joie de vivre made the team a big hit with attendees – they were living their
dreams. In April, they were nominated for both a Webby Award in the humour category and
entered into the Internet Movie Database (IMDB). Subsequently, their interaction with fans
became embedded into the breadth of their activities.
Their approach to fandom was to feed the flames of public interest. For example, in May
2004 they released an RVB special for fans of the industry games exposition, E3; in July 2004
they participated in a Halo focussed 24/7 machinima and clan match event, coordinated by
Bungie; and, in August 2004, part of the team travelled to the Australian Centre for Moving
Image in Sydney to present RVB seasons 1 and 2. Over the next year, they headlined
numerous festivals and events, including Sundance Film Festival, where they presented a
panel on machinima with Marino and others (February 2005), JACON (Japanese Animation
Convention) in Orlando, Florida (April 2005), AiggeCon, the oldest and largest student-run
science-fiction convention in the US and the largest convention in Texas at the time,
organized by Texas A&M University's Cepheid Variable student organization (April 2005),
the San Diego Comic Con (July 2005), the Penny Arcade Expo, PAX, Washington (August
2005); the Canadian National Expo, Toronto (August 2005), GameStop’s annual managers’
conference in Dallas (September 2005), DragonCon, Atlanta (September 2005), OniCon,
Houston (October 2005) and Reactor, an anime and comic book convention in Lincolnwood
(October 2005). In between, the team attended various invitations to speak, sign DVDs and
showcase their work, including another sell-out event at the Lincoln Centre in New York,
where CNN news channel covered their attendance (August 2005). They began selling their
merchandise in selected Hot Topic stores around the US in September 2005 and were
commissioned to make the US zero hour launch video for Xbox360 in November 2005. They
had solved the distribution problem both by creating demand for their products and taking the
products directly to their audiences, including on- and offline.

And as if this was not enough, alongside their continuing productions of RVB (which had
already reached 60 episodes) and Strangerhood (seven episodes), they had also been
commissioned to make two new mini-series: one comprising six episodes for broadcast TV
by Independent Film Company (IFC), based on the Strangerhood, called Strangerhood
Studios, and on which they collaborated with Marino, and the second, comprising five
episodes called P.A.N.I.C. that pre-promoted Monolith Productions’ new game F.E.A.R.,
which was to launch in mid-October 2005.
The IFC Strangerhood Studios mini-series was in fact the first commercially made
machinima. This had come about during 2004 and was the result of networking with the
machinima community. It was Marino (AMAS) that had been approached by the IFC (owned
by AMC Networks which also owns BBC America and SundanceTV) to discuss the
sponsorship of the 2005 New York Machinima Film Festival, alongside organizations such as
Nvidia, and also the potential for producing of a machinima series. Of the discussion, Marino
commented:
“IFC felt machinima was fertile ground for development - videogame worlds, with a
guerilla filmmaking approach. It was very much what IFC was about, so it fit with
their brand… There were several rounds of discussions and they chose to partner
with Rooster Teeth on the production side... with the SH production itself, I think it
was an informal thing - Matt, Burnie and I discussed working together and it just
spun up from there... In the end, while the SH episodes were well-received, I believe
the visual aesthetic of the Sims proved to be too ‘corporate’ for their audience (even
as the series was a direct commentary on that) and didn't connect well as a result. It
may have also been a bit too ahead of its time. Beyond that, SH had its following on
RT.com, which resulted in additional episodes/seasons.”
Paul Marino (interview, 2020)
Rooster Teeth became an unstoppable force, no longer bound by the internet they were
buoyed by an exponentially growing fan base which on their website alone reached over
400K by early 2006, then 500K six months later (see Figure 4.1).
Figure 4.1
Rooster Teeth team (L-R Hullum, Zuelch, Burns, Sorola, Heyman, Saldana) at the
Lincoln Centre New York launch of Season 4 RVB DVD (source: Grussi 2005)
Their appearances at events and coverage in international mainstream press continued to
build and their endorsement became an event marketers dream. They had striven not simply

to reinforce inside-gamer jokes so their fans were both male and female, as well as military
personnel including those serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, to whom they sent DVDs and
corresponded by email, at one time receiving in return an American flag that been used on a
mission aircraft (Konow, 2005). Military staff evidently appreciated the reflection on their
daily routines and down time analogized in RVB (Thompson, 2005).
In an article appearing in Tom’s Hardware Guide (Konow, 2005), they were described as a
cult and two of the team became immortalized as a cartoon in the game culture web comic,
Penny Arcade (Krahulik and Holkins, 2005). They took a further step along the celebrity
road when audiences began organizing their own Rooster Teeth content focussed events, the
first taking place in Toronto (RvBTO) in July 2005 and the second in February 2006 in South
Carolina, called RvBSC. The Rooster Teeth team attended various events, for example, in
March 2006, Hullum appeared alongside Will Wright, creator of The Sims, at an event
organized by Georgia Institute of Technology.
In the Sundance Film Festival’s official write-up of their appearance, which is the biggest
film festival in the US, machinima had been described as organic (rather than commercial)
and a crucial application of emergent technologies for indie filmmakers, reflecting comments
made by Intel’s technology researcher, Joe English, whose view was that “technology seems
to find a way of finding its own applications” (in Smith, 2005). Thus, they inspired others to
creatively express their opinion, as well as create their own machinima works.
Among the thousands of fan art and machinima pieces they inspired, one notable series to
emerge was Sponsors vs Freeloaders (Sevenar Productions, 2004-2006). This comprised an
activist group of RVB Sponsors who ran a forum thread on the RVB website and decided to
make machinima about their experiences. Their aim was to both provide a means to connect
Sponsors as well as deal with complaints by those who refused to pay for early access to RVB
episodes despite apparently being able to afford to do so. Sevenar’s machinima series
featured Sponsors as well as freeloaders (what they referred to as whiners and moaners). The
plot was generally thin and series releases ad hoc, focussing on poking fun, but it nonetheless
ran for two years and generated over 100 pages of forum discussion and tens of thousands of
content views (initially on the RVB website and later on their own website,
SponsorsvsFreeloaders.com). In fact, the idea for Sponsors vs Freeloaders had emanated
from the forum, as Reece Watkins, Sevenar’s co-founder, commented:
“When I joined the RVB forums, I found a group that had been talking about doing a
series to pay homage to RVB’s creators, but there was no real organization behind it.
Every fan wanted to be a part of RVB, but the creators couldn’t let everyone have a
part for obvious reasons. SvF was a way for everyone to be part of at least something
related to the show, in theory. Nobody had a script, a production plan, or even just a
vague idea of what SvF should be… once the forum fans saw we had actually
managed to DO something instead of just talk about it, interest grew pretty quickly…
That we managed to do it all before the creation of YouTube still amazes me. We were
even recognized at the 2005 Machinima Awards, even though we weren’t nominated
for anything… it would have been nice to make some money, but I don’t think I could
have bought the experience itself for anything.” Reece Watkins (interview, 2020)

The series evolved in direct response to arguments between fans. Laird MacLean, who had
also created his own Halo films was a co-producer with Watkins, highlighted the passion in
the community and their commitment to it, both in terms of rewards and also costs:
“… a bunch of people were complaining about having to pay for content on the
internet. I know it's a crazy reason to start a parody web series over but that's the
case. We figured ‘if these guys can do it, why can't we?’ so a group of us on the old
RVB V0.5 forums got together and learned the hard way how to create content and
machinima. None of us had any experience in voice acting, or sound design, video
editing, and many other things. It was all on the fly but we did it for the love of the
show Rooster Teeth created… the love of having our own show that had grown in a
modicum of popularity outside just the Rooster Teeth community. I mean somehow we
got nominated for a Machinima Arts and Sciences award (I even won one myself a
few years after SVF ended, that's crazy)… we were a bunch of friends goofing around
on the internet and it entertained people and that was enough for a while. We (or at
least I) lost money on [the SVF] project 100%. We had the actor George Lowe as our
voice for Space Ghost, that cost a lot, our web servers were all paid for by us, our
domain names, software, and licenses. The benefits for me eventually were the
network I built from going to conventions, participating in this machinima series, the
friends I made, and eventually my career in the industry, which eventually paid.”
Laird MacLean (interview, 2020)
Furthermore, the strength of the community also extended into other areas of activity, such as
participating and coordinating community led events to support the community. For
example, the RVBCanWest (Vancouver) convention had begun in 2006, founded by Laird
MacLean, as an event centred on Rooster Teeth’s local community but this inspired many
others from different online communities to participate, leading to direct involvement with
Bungie Studios, 343 Industries, Xbox, and others, as well as Rooster Teeth.
Ultimately, fan coordinated events became charity fund raising in focus, donating proceeds
from ticket sales to organizations such as Child’s Play, the game industry charity that had
been set up originally by Penny Arcade, in the US and Special Effects in the UK. This focus
is an outcome has also been an interesting strategy, helping to legitimize the community and
enhance its general public persona:
“The sentiment comes from a counter to the public’s perception of gamers because
the stereotype of the twatty nerd down in a basement playing video games, with no
friends and all that – no, we’re a very social bunch of people and playing video
games doesn’t rot our brain, it doesn’t make us aggressive, it’s not all these negative
things that people perceive it to be, so it was counter to that image... It became the
rallying cry that the community is doing something for a good cause, something we
all have a connection to, and gives everyone a purpose.”
Jason Boomer (interview, 2020)
Their collective effort had been endorsed by Rooster Teeth, where other riffs on RVB content
had apparently been killed off quickly – this was no doubt because, in true RVB style, the
series effectively shamed those who did not contribute directly (or indirectly) to financially
supporting their creative effort.

This form of fan activism had not previously been observed on the internet or in machinima
communities. Their role is another major factor that contributed to the success of Rooster
Teeth’s emergent business model which extended beyond machinima, knitting together
creative content, IP owner brand endorsement, active audience engagement and generally
embracing the celebrity status that was bestowed upon them.
Distribution disruption
A further contributing factor to Rooster Teeth’s success is their use of emerging distribution
channels. Already known as advocates of new technologies associated with games and
machinima filmmaking, their use of emerging technologies included those incorporated into
their website, some of which sat behind their paywall. For example, their use of Adobe Flash
enabled viewing content on the web possible, rather than downloading content (Shivakumar,
2016). Their attitude towards and use of social media platforms was, however, quite
different. They were ambivalent towards the use of YouTube as a distribution channel at first.
This was because they saw it as a direct competitor to their own channels which it clearly
was, as outlined in our previous chapter, with considerable other machinima creators using it
as a means to distribute and reach audiences since its launch in 2005. Instead Rooster Teeth
preferred to drive their audience interactions to their own production websites (Johnson,
2014a). Over time this approach changed, not least because YouTube became its own market
derived force, ultimately pushed by the weight of Google (from September 2006). Burns
stated:
“… we’ve had to stay adaptive. I think the biggest place we’ve had to adapt, we’ve
always believed we have to have our own corner on the web, that we don’t try to build
our own company on Facebook, or on MySpace back in the day or even on Twitter or
Snapchat. We try to have RoosterTeeth.com be our destination. That being said, over
time we’ve had to embrace things like YouTube, because YouTube is undeniable in
that it grew to the point where it was… YouTube became a verb that meant to watch
video online… and some of our other shows with YouTube specifically, it’s helped
take us to the next level.” Burnie Burns (in Brouwer, 2016).
What is interesting is that they rejected the methods of monetizing content that many had
taken on YouTube with pre-roll advertisements, even after they began using the site. Burns
had witnessed the dissatisfaction that had begun to rumble around the machinima community
as Machinima Inc. influenced distribution methods and decided to do their own thing. In his
view, Machinima Inc. had confused the market although Rooster Teeth was committed to
using machinima as a production method (Kafka, 2017). Burns also commented that he had
witnessed the disruption of new technologies in changing the ways audiences had interacted
with content in both music and print (media) industries. The same impact was imminently
anticipated in the video sector, and in order to capitalize on the move from TV, Burns wanted
to be sure their organization was ready. For a short period of time they collaborated with
Machinima Inc. in an advertising partnership. Burns explains:
“… we actually ended up partnering with [Machinima Inc.] for ad sales, because the
relationship was such that we had so much brand confusion, and it didn’t seem to be
going away, and it was better to try and figure out a way to have that benefit us in
some way. So we had some ad partnerships with Machinima for a short period of

time… initially our evaluation of all these platforms was to see them as competitors
… [but] to their credit they were enormously progressive for creating [the network
channel partner] model. But for a long period of time they didn’t have it… We didn’t
get on YouTube until 2008 or 2009, and we ended up having to play catch-up. But it
just reached a point as a brand where YouTube, you had to be part of the
conversation. If you wanted to be in online video… However, for a really, really long
period of time, and I don’t know that we’re beyond it yet, people who were on
YouTube didn’t leave YouTube. They didn’t click away to go to anything else.”
Burnie Burns (in Kafka, 2017)
The online presence and momentum Rooster Teeth had achieved with its audiences as a
machinima production studio, however, set them apart from all other machinima creators at
the time. Burns’ comment in The Sydney Morning Herald reflected his view:
“We get a lot of email from young filmmakers who have really been turned on by the
possibilities of machinima. Machinima gives them the opportunity to hone their craft
at an early stage… More artists are going to have to break away from making too
many in-jokes. Not everyone plays video games!” Burnie Burns (in Hill, 2006).
Their diverse approach to commercializing their proposition as well as their stance as a
creative media studio attracted not only the attention of games developers and publishers but
also commentators on the disruptive potential of new media and platforms (Johnson, 2014b)
and potential investors. For example, Electronic Art’s Madden NFL 2007 game reported
record sales of more than $100M in its first week of release in no small part due to Rooster
Teeth’s machinima broadcast commercials (Forbes, 2006). Furthermore, it was Rooster
Teeth’s RVB series that laid the ground for the future of web streaming, which was first
claimed by YouTube and subsequently others such as Twitch and Steam. At the 2006 SXSW
festival (March), Burns presented a keynote speech in which he discussed the potential
applications of machinima and by June, Computer Gaming World magazine asked the
pointed question of whether amateur creators should quit their day jobs (Gladstone, 2006).
The Rooster Teeth team already had.
Over the following years, the team produced new machinima works, including seventeen
seasons of RVB with a series of different story arcs. Its Blood Gulch Chronicles series ended
after its fifth season with episode 100, released with three different versions on 28 June 2007
(all answering the question Why were we here?!). Other machinima productions included the
2006 1-800-Magic, a four-episode series using the Shadowrun game (FASA Studio), the 2008
Supreme Surrender, made in Supreme Commander (by Gas Powered Games), and 2008
Stroyent, a four-episode Quake Wars series. They also branched away from machinima and
dabbled with 2D in 2006 with a web comic series that satirized the daily lives of the Rooster
Teeth production team. The web comic ran until 20 August 2011. The team then notably
moved to computer generated animation in season ten of RVB (2009). This was ostensibly
because the team, under the guidance of self-taught animation expert Monty Oum felt a need
for greater flexibility in production approaches. This new approach was first presented at
PAX East in August 2010. Thereafter, its CG animation series RWBY, also produced by
Monty Oum, was described as a machinima-like production but was not actually based within
or indeed on a specific game. Other CG animated productions included the 2010 Drunk Tank
Animated Adventures (which in 2011 became Rooster Teeth Animated Adventures). This was
a series that depicted stories first told on their Podcast (which had begun in December 2008).

In 2016 CampCamp and 2017 gen:LOCK – all variously building on their unique approach to
observational humour with animated game-inspired characters.
Similarly, extrapolating their expertise in live performance for machinima creation that had
often been showcased at events, Rooster Teeth developed a series of game player/viewer
network channels. Their Achievement Hunter channel, formed in 2008, evolved from the use
of an achievement mechanic found in Microsoft’s Xbox360, primarily by Ramsey. The
channel began showcasing game play videos that illustrated how game achievements and
Easter Eggs had been reached (Easter Egg is a term used to describe hidden objects, features,
messages or images in a game). In 2012, the channel spawned a Let’s Play sub-series which
focussed on Minecraft (see Figure 4.2) and Grand Theft Auto games, the former of which had
rapidly become the internet’s hottest game-based property (Johnson, 2014c). This channel
now includes numerous shows, such as Game Night which was first live streamed in 2014.
These game-performance based channels and shows have since become the staple of Rooster
Teeth’s production and screening proposition, each channel with millions of viewers and tens
of thousands of subscribers – it had already reached its 1Bth content view by April 2012
(Rigney, 2012).
Figure 4.2
Rooster Teeth Achievement Hunter let’s play Minecraft team
back L-R Jeremy Dooley, Ryan Haywood, Jack Patillo, Geoff Ramsey, Gavin Free, Michael
Jones, Lindsay Jones and front L-R Matt Bragg, Trevor Collins, Alfredo Diaz, Fiona Nova
(image with permission by Okay Donuts 2020)
Their evolution from live performance also extended into game inspired live action
entertainment that began with Captain Dynamic in February 2009, promoting the online
game City of Heroes (Cryptic Studios) which starred Barenaked Ladies’ Robertson.
Following its success, Rooster Teeth produced its Shorts series (2010), a sketch comedy
based on the web comic jaunts of the production teams’ office life and in which later
episodes they collaborated with the production team behind Mega64, a comedic video game
centred TV series (2003-4). In 2013 they also produced a Vine-based series of Shorts (6
seconds long short videos). In 2010 they released Immersion, a live action series that tested
key concepts presented in video games, such as heckling (online harassment often seen in
multi-player online games), driving from a third person perspective and safe room doors such
as seen in Left 4 Dead, with various members of the growing Rooster Teeth team becoming
‘test subjects’ (Sorrel, 2010). Subsequent series have explored various aspects of gameplay
related content from pure play to story-based action in live settings, often displaying their
brand of humour in the process, including Million Dollars, But… (2015), a scenario based re-

enactment series, Day 5 (2016), a post-apocalypse style short series, a game show On the
Spot (2015) and feature length sci-fi action comedy film, Lazer Team (2016).
Many of their creative efforts directly involved the Rooster Teeth fan base, with trailers and
teasers often being showcased at events they attended and subsequently their annual
exposition, the RTX convention which was first held in Austin, Texas, on 27 May 2011. This
was not only a means through which to gauge audience reaction but also an opportunity to
include the audience as participants in the creative processes they employed. For example,
Rooster Teeth’s live action June 2011 episode of Immersion included 400 fans filmed at their
first RTX (over 500 had attended the event) and Day 5 included 1,800 fans as extras who had
attended the 2012 event. This homage to fans was undoubtedly instrumental in the success of
the 2014 crowdfunding campaign for their proposed live action comedy film, Lazer Team
and its board game version of Million Dollars, But… in 2016. For Lazer Team it raised
$2.5M, having reached its original target of $650K in just eleven hours. The film received an
award as the most crowdfunded film campaign on the Indiegogo platform (Busch, 2014),
with a number of highest donors receiving credits as executive and co-producers as a benefit.
In total 37,497 fans funded the film, the final push for which had taken place at the 2014 RTX
event, where over 32,000 fans had attended (Busch, 2014). Furthermore, on its release in
January 2016, it achieved over $1M in box office ticket pre-sales (Hurst, 2016a). For the
Million Dollar, But… game, Rooster Teeth raised over $1.3M from 30,546 funders, with an
initial target of $10,000 having been reached within just five minutes of the crowdfunding
campaign’s release on Kickstarter (Hurst, 2016b and 2016c).
Unsurprisingly, community groups have now spawned in many US cities as well as countries
around the world but only two have been formally recognized with local representation and
presence. The first was in Australia, emanating from its Roo Teeth community which grew to
be the biggest fan community outside the official website. The presence was managed by
partner Hanabee Entertainment, a local firm which coordinated RTOZ events (the first was in
2011) and community activities, then took on sales and distribution of merchandise as well as
the RTX Sydney convention (first held in January 2016). Hanabee is headed Eric Cherry,
who then also took on a role as head of global business development for Rooster Teeth.
Already present with its RTX London convention (launched in 2017 with 15,000 fans in
attendance), the second base for Rooster Teeth was subsequently planned for opening in UK
in 2020, headed by Cherry, through which its aim was to build regional programming,
licensing, consumer products and live events (Clarke, 2018; Sam, 2019). For various
unreported reasons, however, this has since been dropped.
Boom
What is also notable in their journey is the way in which Rooster Teeth recruited staff, many
of whom had demonstrated their chops originally as part of the community of followers and
fans, often beginning their association as part of the RVB cast. Each member of the growing
team brought new skills, enabling the portfolio of projects to expand significantly as they
were inculcated with the Rooster Teeth family values.
Monty Oum (recruited in August 2009) had, for example, created a Halo pre-rendered film
(Haloid) that had attracted attention in 2007. Released on the GameTrailers website, the film
received over 4M views and became the most watched user-generated film on the site. It was
during the production of his subsequent series, Dead Fantasy (which combined two different

games), that he first met Burns whilst on a panel at the San Diego Comic Convention in 2009.
Oum’s specific contribution was extensive and detailed character design as well as animating
complex combat sequences, the like of which had not previously been included in RVB
series. It is also his skillset that formed the basis of the CG animated RWBY series.
Jack Pattillo (recruited in December 2009) worked on live action projects, including the
Achievement Hunter channel as its co-founder (originally as a contractor) and became head of
RT’s charitable arm. Chris Demarais (recruited in November 2010) is a writer for the RT
Shorts and other live action series, having begun as a bit part freelancer in RVB Season 9.
Gray Haddock (recruited in August 2011) was a digital compositor on RVB and RWBY
having joined also with acting and anime credits. He subsequently wrote and directed the
2018 series of gen:LOCK and then became head of the RT Animation department.
Between mid 2007 and December 2011, Rooster Teeth staff reached 20 permanent members
from its original core of six and over the next three years (to the end of 2014), Rooster Teeth
Productions released twelve new series, comprising machinima, CG, 2D, comics, board
games, music video and live action content.
In February 2013 they made their first acquisition with The Slow Mo Guys, a popular web
series that used high speed cameras to record pranks and stunts, often with a pseudo-scientific
aesthetic. The series had been co-founded in 2008 based on an ambitious plan by one of its
directors to acquire a work permit for the US by creating a viral series in order to work on
RVB Season 7. The series was released on Rooster Teeth’s website as well as continued
running on its own YouTube channel from 2013.
In November 2014, Rooster Teeth along with another studio, ScrewAttack, was acquired by
Fullscreen, which itself had recently been majority bought by Otter Media (a joint venture
between Chernin Group and AT&T) as the media sector undertook a period of consolidation
(Cheredar, 2014). For example, at a similar time Disney acquired Rooster Teeth and
Machinima Inc.’s competitor, MakerStudios, Dreamworks acquired AwesomenessTV
(Fixmer, 2014), Amazon bought streaming service Twitch for $1B, Microsoft bought the
Minecraft game and its developer, Mojang, for a reported $2.5B (Booton, 2014; Yarrow,
2014) and Machinima Inc. was in the midst of two rounds of investment headed by Warner
Bros. (see Chapter 3). At this point, Rooster Teeth had reached 30 staff members (Eng,
2019) and in November 2015 this was added to as ScrewAttack became its subsidiary and
others joined the team working on new series-based content and formats, reaching 220 by
July 2016 (Shivakumar, 2016) several of whom were contractors.
In sum, their success was a wheel of fortune, where everything they touched boomed – see
Figure 4.3.
Figure 4.3

Rooster Teeth’s journey
Feeling the Corporate Burn
The amount paid by Fullscreen for Rooster Teeth was not made public, but its strategy as a
multi-channel network with, at the time, around 70,000 creators alongside its distribution
service which had 600M subscribers and 5B monthly video views was clear (Business Wire,
2015). In addition to web series, Michael Goldfine, Fullscreen’s chief content officer
commented in reference to Rooster Teeth’s feature length film, Lazer Team, and two other
similar projects in their media stable:
“[These projects] signify our commitment to produce movies at the highest quality
bar. These movies allow talent who typically work in six-second or three-minute
formats to tell more immersive stories, and build stronger relationships with their
communities” Michael Goldfine (in Abbruzzese, 2015)
This reflected the race to the top of the media streaming heap being played out across the
sector, as also discussed in the previous chapter. Specifically, it reflected Fullscreen’s move
to a pay-to-view subscription-based streaming model (minus advertising) on YouTube as well
as big screen theatre releases as a means to capitalize on the strength of audience engagement
that Rooster Teeth had achieved with the brand (Fingus, 2015). Indeed, when YouTube Red
launched on 10 February 2016, Lazer Team featured alongside the internet’s all time highest
viewed content producer, Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg’s (known as PewDiePie) latest show,
Scare PewDiePie (Skybound Entertainment/MakerStudios), who at the time had over 41M
subscribers (Lardinois, 2016).
Such YouTube streamers, or YouTubers as they became known, were by now more popular
with audiences than mainstream Hollywood celebrities. As YouTube’s global head of
creative insights Vanessa Pappas commented:

“The biggest changes [on YouTube] are the massive growth in terms of numbers in
our creator community. And with that, the breadth and depth of content – there’s
literally an audience for everything… This isn’t just vloggers in their bedroom. Our
creators are running full-fledged production companies and businesses where they’re
franchising into books, TV shows, movies and products [for example, Rooster Teeth].
And what’s great to see is the audience has really come along for the ride… the
authenticity of the content is still one of the main distinguishing factors on why
YouTube creators resonate so deeply with audiences. That, and the fact that
consistency of programming works... Ultimately we have witnessed over the last five
years that the distance that mainstream media manufactured between a celebrity and
fan has all but eroded online, community and the fostering of a direct connection is
now everything.” Vanessa Pappas (in Walk, 2016)
To compete in the channel stakes race, Rooster Teeth acquired and created more game
inspired subsidiaries (eg., Funhaus and Cow Chop) and began a partnering strategy that
formalized relationships with The Creatures and Kinda Funny producers in Spring 2016 and
Sugar Pine 7 in May 2017, building content for its growing Achievement Hunter-based Let’s
Play channels. This focus has since grown further with new production teams joining, as
well as a few departures.
By 2016 they were producing around 100 hours of content per month (Spangler, 2016a) and
their business model included subscriptions, advertising, merchandising, content licensing
and royalties, and live events, each roughly generating similar levels of income (Patel, 2016).
They had 25M subscribers to their YouTube channels, 3M monthly visitors to their
RoosterTeeth.com website and 1.8M registered community members (Spangler, 2016a).
Whilst central to their strategy from the outset, their subscription model now needed a
revamp: they developed a tiered approach. Its core membership scheme had 135,000
members paying $5 per month for advert-free and exclusive content as well as early releases
of popular series, merchandise offers and access to pre-sales tickets for events, contests and
giveaways. This strategy had always been seen as insurance against the varying advertising
and merchandise rates that can undermine a revenue model which is solely reliant on such
components (Patel, 2016). Burns commented:
“You can’t tell people how to [financially] support you. You make as many
opportunities to support as possible. Give them tiers, give them the option to watch
ads, give them the ability to buy a tee-shirt. If you are loyal to your audience, and
give them ways to support you, they'll be loyal to you.”
Burnie Burns (in McAlone, 2017)
Thus, Rooster Teeth extrapolated the strategy to target its most passionate audience, taking
their advocacy to the next levels of support for the business. They announced a name change
of the scheme from Sponsors to FIRST on 1 July 2016 at their sixth annual RTX convention
in Austin at which more than 60,000 fans attended (Shivakumar, 2016). At the event,
Rooster Teeth also launched its new premium tier of membership: Double Gold members
would pay $35 per month and receive a subscription box of merchandise.
To reflect the significant price differential of the new tier, it also advised new forms of
content and formats that provided the appropriate level of perceived value would be released,

with potential also for attracting new top tier subscribers beyond its core fan base. It
launched apps for game consoles, set-top boxes and mobile devices – stating its audiences
preferred to watch streamed long-form content from the couch rather than the gaming chair
(Spangler, 2016b).
In late July 2016, Rooster Teeth announced the addition of three new team members who
would focus on the expanded subscription model: Luis Medina joined as co-manager of the
Let’s Play family, having previously been vice president of partnerships at Disney’s Maker
Studios; Evan Bregman joined as director of programming, coming from Portal A studio as
its head of original content; and Ryan Hall took on the role of director of development,
having previously been in a similar role at Roenberg Entertainment where he had worked
alongside the directing teams for Netflix’s Marco Polo and Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean
5 film projects (Spangler, 2016c). These were the first of a number of appointments over the
next couple of years that would move Rooster Teeth towards a corporate approach to digital
media business management.
In the meantime, Fullscreen, its owner, was busy attempting to transfer the knowledge
Rooster Teeth had on developing that intimate connection with its audiences for which it has
become renowned back into the Fullscreen platform-based proposition. Alan Beard,
Fullscreen’s chief marketing officer, commented:
“I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how we create fandoms [for example Rooster
Teeth]. This audience is changing fast. The technology changes fast. So in some ways
we’re trying to take the best practices of traditional media companies and layer on
top of that behavioral data and new technology approaches to having a different
relationship, so that Fullscreen develops fandoms and not just fans.”
Alan Beard (in Jarvey, 2016)
By March 2017, Rooster Teeth’s subscriber base on YouTube had reached 35M subscribers
and 5M unique monthly views to their 40+ channels (McAlone, 2017a) and a streaming app
with 200,000 paying members (Patel, 2017).
With a view to leveraging its fan base further, Rooster Teeth launched a game publishing
division, bringing in experienced game and entertainment executive, Michael Hadwin to lead
to the initiative (Takahashi, 2017). Six months later, it added former Gearbox Software vice
president of business development and licensing David Eddings as division head. Their aim
being to bridge the gap between indie developers and the avid community of gamer fans.
Eddings also brought to Rooster Teeth considerable experience from his time at Gathering of
Developers, whose ethos had been to empower indie game developers (McAlone, 2017b).
He commented:
“Rooster Teeth has been killing it. They’ve had amazing growth, and they’re like the
Desilu productions of Internet content. Desilu created I Love Lucy and Green Acres
and Beverly Hillbillies and also Star Trek. Every new medium has to have a breakout
studio with the content that changes that medium. They just need somebody to publish
games… the access to that network is like having a cheat code for game publishing.”
David Eddings (in Takahashi, 2017)
Whilst Burns emphasized Rooster Teeth’s creative business focus on fans rather than
personalities was a means to build and sustain fandoms, Fullscreen’s CEO and founder,

George Strompolos, was at pains to emphasize its business model extended beyond being a
multi-channel network (MCN). This had been the premise on which Machinima Inc. had
originally developed but ultimately failed to deliver – its model of acquiring content was
ultimately flawed and investment strategy in new content unsustainable. As Strompolos
stated:
“The MCN is not our entire business. It’s how we identify, develop, grow, partner
with and monetize creative talent. How we apply that is where it gets interesting.”
George Strompolos (in Patel, 2017)
This comparison of business models is useful in understanding how online media
organizations have evolved – on the one hand, content is king, and the growing
professionalization with which it is made is a distinct trajectory for studios such as Rooster
Teeth. On the other, the platforms and distribution channels must facilitate the formation of
fandoms – most platforms are simply channels. What Rooster Teeth has achieved is a
fandom built around game play and machinima creative values which has become channel
agnostic and is simultaneously everywhere for everyone. This is further evidenced in its
2017 launch of a podcast network which attempts to monetize its model in a new way by
providing a space for creatives and advertisers to connect, called The Roost, and its 2018
formation of a $2.5M development fund for creators (Patel, 2018). Of the podcast, another of
the original Rooster Teeth team, Sorola, commented:
“If we had stuck with the dominant platform at the time, we would have invested
everything in our Myspace page. Platforms come and go. The big thing of the
moment may not be the big thing down the road. Some days you have to decide if
you’re going to wear your creator hat or your business person hat – Rooster Teeth, or
another business, can jump in and help alleviate that pressure for creators… [We
can connect advertisers with] 30 to 50 really excellent shows with established
audiences.” Gus Sorola (in Main, 2017)
On the demise of Machinima Inc., which had been blamed on a lack of investment in original
content and a focus on often time-delimited personality-based channels (see Chapter 3),
media organizations have also attempted to drop the MCN business model in favour of
Rooster Teeth’s pioneering subscription-based model (Patel, 2017). Rooster Teeth has,
however, continued to push boundaries, creatively summarized by the team in a documentary
celebrating its 15 years history and creative ethos: Why We’re Here (Roosterteeth.com),
released on 20 April 2018 to its FIRST subscribers.
Earlier in the year, Ezra Cooperstein, the president of Fullscreen (and previously the founder
and CEO of MakerStudios which he had left 2011) became Rooster Teeth’s president, at
which point it reported 45M subscribers and 250,000 paying members (Baumgarten, 2018).
Around them, Fullscreen’s ownership was changing along with consolidation in the media
industry sector. In August 2018, Otter Media’s owner, AT&T, bought out the Chenin Group
stake of the business for a reputed $1B (Spangler, 2018). This was then merged with its
WarnerMedia division, which in turn owned Machinima Inc. – the division had been created
when AT&T completed its acquisition of Time Warner earlier in the year (June).
In its stable at the time, Otter Media had two main strands of business activity: Fullscreen,
which owned Rooster Teeth and a couple of other content creators, and Ellation which owned

anime streamer Crunchyroll and its platform subscription service called Vrv. The merger
reflected AT&T’s desire to focus on feeding the passion of online audiences by augmenting
their portfolio of digital content and building on their engagement strategies for audience
entertainment globally (Ha, 2018). Notably, it did this by taking Rooster Teeth’s anime
series, RWBY, into the lucrative Japanese market, the first Western made anime to do so, and
then in 2019 teaming with Warner’s DC comics on both its RWBY and gen:LOCK series
(McMillan, 2019).
Thereafter, Otter Media sought to reorganize its portfolio in order to consolidate its
advertising and partnering business activities, in the process laying off 10% of its staff ie.,
around 200 people (Chmielewski, 2018). Rooster Teeth, Crunchyroll and Vrv were
repositioned under its Ellation division focussing on content creation and distribution (‘direct
to consumer’), while Machinima Inc. was subsumed by the Fullscreen division of the
business, which would focus on creator services. The following January (2019), Machinima
Inc. removed all its content from YouTube with some streamers being transferred to
Fullscreen (Makedonski, 2019) and then ceased on 1 February. In a Twitch clip, one of its
former content producers, who made the jump to join Rooster Teeth under the Ellation
umbrella as part of the reorganization with his long running Inside Gaming series,
commented:
“[Machinima Inc.] at this point, cannot verify the copyrights to all videos in
Machinima’s network, and there are a ton of videos. It’d cost a lot of money to do it,
and this is on videos that aren’t getting any views. So, they cut it loose. That’s that.
It’s a business. That’s how it goes, man.” Lawrence Sonntag (in Knoop, 2019)
Otter Media’s CEO, Tony Goncalves, described the absorption of Machinima Inc.’s key
productions as reinforcement of Rooster Teeth’s appeal to its gaming fans (Spangler, 2019a),
expanding its team to around 450 by summer 2019 (Shanley, 2019).
Its rapid growth is evident but such a comment also hints at potential challenges in the
management of such prolific yet diverse creative forces. Difficulties emerged in June 2019
when anonymous posts were made about the treatment of Rooster Teeth employees
summarized in an article on Popdust.com’s site (Kahan, 2019) which completely contradicted
its long-portrayed values – as one fan stated on the Reddit platform community thread:
‘People have got to stop thinking it’s still the 6 dudes in a spare bedroom’ (WillTroll, 2019).
With the senior team depicted as an ‘extreme bro/friends club’, a crunch culture is described,
typified in the game industry sector where creators’ passion for their work is exploited by
managers with unrealistic production deadlines, zero overtime pay, oppressive work
conditions and unkept promises for improvement.
Fallout
The fallout from the problems rumbled across multiple fora including its own website
culminating in Hullum, as CEO of Rooster Teeth, commenting on changes that were being
made to address the issues highlighted. Haddock was moved from his position as head of
animation to a creative role (and shortly after resigned) and the head of Ellation, Margaret
Dean, was appointed as consultant to advise on developing their workflow, pipeline and
production structure as well as bringing in a new head (Aguilar, 2019).

By September 2019, their plight had deepened and Hullum announced redundancies of 50 of
its team, around 13% of staff (Blake, 2019) – the biggest staff cuts they had made in Rooster
Teeth’s sixteen years history. Two weeks later, it was announced that the original driving
team behind Rooster Teeth would be stepping away from their management roles into
creative positions. Burns moved from chief creative officer into an executive producer role
focussing on new projects, Hullum moved from CEO into a chief content officer position
whilst Ramsey took over Burn’s previous executive creative director role, among other senior
manager moves.
At the same time, a new CEO was announced: Jordan Levin. Levin had been one of the
formative voices in the early days of the WB Television Network (now CW) which developed
Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dawson's Creek for teen audiences, then as president of
programming becoming the youngest CEO in broadcast television history. He had also been
the NFL's first chief content officer, general manager of Xbox Entertainment and CEO of
AwesomenessTV.
Of the changes announced, Burns and Hullum commented briefly on their journey and their
passion for a creative future focus:
“After spending time with my newly-expanded family and reflecting on the path of my
career, I have decided to step down as the Chief Creative Officer of Rooster Teeth
and the day-to-day productions of the company. Tomorrow, I transition into a
producer role in the newly formed Rooster Teeth Studios division, reporting to Ryan
Hall. Building Rooster Teeth from a small start-up in a spare bedroom to the media
empire it is today has been the proudest accomplishment of my career. We have truly
built a company unlike any other and I want to thank every person who has helped
make that journey possible. Now, I plan to focus on the passionate reason I began the
company all those years ago — to work on my own projects telling captivating stories
to the world.” Burnie Burns (Roosterteeth.com, 2019)
“Leading Rooster Teeth has been one of the greatest privileges of my life. Despite an
ever-changing industry and an ongoing series of acquisitions and integrations, we
managed to grow the company to more than ten times the size it was when I began as
CEO just over 7 years ago. It’s been an incredible ride, and now I’m beyond excited
to be returning to the creative work that inspired me to want to co-found Rooster
Teeth in the first place.” Matt Hullum (in Whittaker, 2019)
Ramsey’s comments reflected on the impact of the changes on fans and his renewed focus on
creators:
“This is not me taking a step back from Rooster Teeth, if anything, it's the opposite.
I'll basically be doing for the rest of the company what I've been doing for gaming
content, and I couldn't be more excited... Rooster Teeth has been an all-consuming
part of my life since the day Burnie, Gus and I filmed episode one of Red Vs Blue.
That won't change. Will this affect my on-screen time? Invariably. [I’ll be] spending
most of my energy doing the absolute best I can for RT and our future as a company,
in the best way I know how. A lot of that is imparting my experience on the next

generation, while continuing to drive the vision and identity of this company going
forward.” Geoff Ramsey (Roosterteeth.com, 2019)
With each remaining visible at a creative level within the business, fans appear to have taken
the decision by Rooster Teeth’s founders supportively and positively, not least because there
remains considerable nostalgia for the early shows, core values espoused and represented
throughout the fandom, with each having remained active in the community at different
levels. As one fan replied to Burn’s post:
“I still remember when the first episode of the podcast was released, I was in the 7th
grade and was over the moon lol. Your personality on screen is so energizing and you
bring so much to the shows you're a part of. While I'm sure we're all sad to see you
stepping away from the cameras, I'm excited to see what you're up to next.”
Handy (Roosterteeth.com, 2019)
Furthermore, many of the shows now produced had their own casts, beyond the founders – as
was the original intention with the formation of Rooster Teeth back in 2003. The single
greatest challenge for each, however, is visibility above the noise of the now very crowded
internet space, much of which is not about quality but generating hits for instant reward of
advertising revenue – a challenge that the Rooster Teeth model for creative support was
attempting to actively address.
At the same time there is a significant level of criticism towards the apparent corporate
takeover. This is likely to be exacerbated with the release of Rooster Teeth’s major new
endeavour gen:LOCK (Season 2) on WarnerMedia’s new HBO Max platform on 27 May
2020, with an exclusive 90 days run on the service before it is made available to the FIRST
paying subscriber community and fan base. Moreover, it indicates possible further
consolidation of the media sector and synergies across the business which will result in
further rationalizations to facilitate ‘profitable growth’ (Spangler, 2019b). This has been
compounded in the announcement of the closure of the Australian store, due to a breakdown
of the partnership between Rooster Teeth and Hanabee Entertainment. Cherry, its president,
announced in December 2019:
“It became clear over the last year that Rooster Teeth’s global growth would lead to
a crossroads. Their merchandise team is world-class, and they started pumping out a
range of products as fast as Zara. Even Amazon struggles to keep up with those
logistical demands. Although we fought like hell, ultimately, the Australian store
couldn’t keep up. So the hard decision was made, and we started the process of
untying Hanabee and Rooster Teeth’s long-standing relationship. That lead to a
restructure; the original staff since moved on to a variety of new challenges. I know
what they’re capable of, and I am certain they will all do amazing things. Hanabee
survived. There are some bruises and scars, but also wisdom and maturity. The
company is more sustainable, and at the end of 2019, we have a clear agenda [for
2020].” Eric Cherry (in Sam, 2019)
Rooster Teeth reported staff changes in December 2019 with the promotion of three of the
creative team who worked on the most popular shows into leadership roles: Joe Clary and
Sean Hinz became joint heads of animation and Doreen Copeland overall head of production

(Spanger, 2019c) and the departure of another long-standing member of the team, Ian
Kedward, lead animator on core shows (Baculi, 2020).
As a consequence of COVID-19 pandemic impacts on tourism and travel with access
restrictions to events and infrastructure, their 2020 RTX convention was pushed back to later
in the year and then cancelled (Whittaker, 2020). It would have been the first opportunity the
new leadership had to engage with anticipated 70,000 fans face-to-face. There is now a long
lead into reflecting on how their community is valued by the corporate machine over the
intervening months now that it has its hands on the reins of their fandom. Notwithstanding
this, however, one of the first major announcements to emanate from the restructure is a new
season of the machinima series, RVB (Season 18) teased in January and to be released in
2020. Thus, it seemed Rooster Teeth’s original members were returning to their machinima
routes.
Various institutional problems remained, however. Around 1 June 2020, Heyman had been
pushed from the organization over a reported social media faux pas. His departure was not
announced and much speculated on by followers. An extensive social media thread (4 and 5
June 2020) on comments by Mica Burton, the former editor and head of streaming for
Achievement Hunter at Rooster Teeth, aired her reasons for leaving. As a woman of colour in
the gaming sector, the thread stated it was the lack of leadership in addressing issues of
equality rather than community instigated abuse, which had been something she had been
subjected to during her time at the organization. On her Twitter post and a subsequent
personal exchange with Burton, Burns reflected:
“… ‘Helping’ people have platforms isn’t enough. I need to be better in my continual
support of them… [Burton] made an excellent point about the power of my voice in
the brand that I started and my lack of backbone in using that voice to affect change.
Very powerful words that I should have been saying to myself.”
Burnie Burns (Twitter, 2020a)
Hours later, an emotional podcast with an extensive apology was aired on Rooster Teeth’s
Achievement Hunter channel, hosted by Ramsey.
A week later on 11 June 2020, apparently unrelated to the fallout, Burns stepped away from
Rooster Teeth in one of the most anticipated changes in management in the organization
since September 2019. On his new personal website, Burns commented on his updated
status:
“… my time walking the halls here at Rooster Teeth has come to an end. As some of
you have predicted over the past year, my steady move away from a public life was in
preparation for this change. So I hope this will not come as too much of a surprise. A
few months ago, I enjoyed returning to the spotlight for a short podcast run with my
old friends, and I would like to be able to continue to explore my creative passions.
To that end, Rooster Teeth and I are currently working on a first-look agreement,
which will enable me to incubate my own projects and then present them to the
company for possible development… Starting this company and growing it in the
early years were some of the hardest but greatest moments of my life. The constant
camaraderie of Gus, Geoff, and Matt always made the impossible seem achievable; I
could not have asked for better companions on this journey… Thank you to every

person who has walked through these doors as a collaborator or tuned in to one of
our videos as a viewer or made the choice to become a member of our community…”
Burnie Burns (Burnie.com, 2020b)
Undoubtedly the end of an era, of his departure Jordan Levin Rooster Teeth’s general
manager commented:
“Burnie is a visionary and we look forward to his new ideas continuing to energize
this unique company that he and his founding partners built. We are thankful for his
continued passion and enthusiasm for Rooster Teeth.”
Jordan Levin (in Whittaker, 2020)
What is perhaps interesting is the manner in which the news emerged with no announcement
direct to the community by remaining Rooster Teeth co-founders which attempted to
reconfigure the brand and its focus on community. This undoubtedly presents a new
challenge, leaving many speculating on how long it may be before they also depart.
A table summarizing key dates is provided at the back of this chapter, Table 4.1.
Impact and Influence of Rooster Teeth’s machinima productions
Rooster Teeth have achieved what other machinima creators only dreamed of doing in the
early days, moreover they are now part of what has become one of the top ten global media
entertainment companies, AT&T (Seth, 2019). As Jason Boomer, founder and leader of the
Rooster Teeth UK community group since 2003 reflected:
“[RVB] marks a change in the way that machinima was created and consumed.
Before it felt very experimental and felt like people were doing something they were
passionate about but didn’t necessarily have a plan for, at least not in a grand sense,
whereas RT really captured an audience in a way that no other machinima ever has,
and probably at this stage, ever will… RVB has been their flagship title since day one,
I think that’s the thing that people will never be able to surpass. It will go down in
history as one of the most important machinima pieces ever to exist, not only because
of its longevity but because of the way it was there in the relatively early days and
how it is still there today.” Jason Boomer (interview, 2020)
The convergence of game and film in media production industries, whilst a growing
specialism within the filmmaking sector has so far remained a limited form of media
entertainment. For Rooster Teeth, it is their creative ethos that has stretched the medium,
rather than their machinima production specialism that has enabled their central proposition
to grow into the organization it now is. Boomer again:
“It used to be that everyone plays Halo, whether you found RVB first or you found it
through Bungie forums and things like that, but now with RWBY and CampCamp and
these other animated shows and the growing emphasis on podcasts there are people
that are joining the community that have no connection to Halo, Griffball or RVB…
the podcast was the game-changer for all of this. Up until that point it had been about
the show, the content they’re producing, that’s the part that the fans were obsessively

consuming but once the podcast started it suddenly became about the people and the
personalities.” Jason Boomer (interview, 2020)
They have created a phenomenal ecosystem of fandoms based on creative story arcs that
draw heavily on their game-based ethos of having fun, creating content they want to see, and
actively engaging with audiences and communities but that move continually with
contemporary socio-cultural, political and technological advancements. It is this
evolutionary spirit that reaches and sustains audiences over time that Burns attributes to
Rooster Teeth’s longevity. As he commented in his Vlog in 2017:
“You have to be able to continue to grow your voice and not just exist in some space
where people can fondly remember you. Who wants to have a career that’s that? At
Rooster Teeth we walk that line every day – we started a company that began with
one person in a spare bedroom, then grew to five or six people and then over the
course of fourteen years now have almost 300 people. We have to take a company
photo with a drone at this point! When I started, I wanted to make videos that made
my friends laugh… I approach everything in that way. I think if I do that, keep that
same spirit, then the thing that made Rooster Teeth what it is will continue… it is a
perpetual journey of figuring things out!” Burnie Burns (Vlog, 2017)
That authenticity of voice is what resonates so well with other creators. Marino reflects on
his first meeting with the RVB team at the 2003 panel held at the Lincoln Centre, New York:
“I remember thinking how similar they were to me – creatives who also loved games.
They were really easy to speak to and we had a common language through a love of
games and filmmaking.” Paul Marino (interview, 2020)
Other machinima creators were similarly inspired. Chris Burke, who now works in
LittleBigPlanet with Tamara Yadao (aka foci + loci) and scores grindhouse horror films
(currently Mandible Judy), is a performing musician and machinima producer of long-
running Halo series This Spartan Life which ran between 2004 and 2015, reflected on their
influence on his work:
“I performed music at the opening night of the New York Video Festival in 2003. It
was curated by Katie Salen, a talented game designer, educator and animator and I
was asked to perform one piece and I decided to do a cover version of the original
theme from Zelda. It turned out the show also featured folks from ILL Clan, Corey
Archangel, Ze Frank and they screened the first episode of Rooster Teeth's Red vs
Blue, which premiered earlier that year… We launched our first episode on June 28
2005 and a string of blog posts led to tons of traffic within a month – first Create
Digital Music and then Boing Boing. Our ISP shut us down, throwing a huge bill for
bandwidth at us (in the thousands) and Claude Errera stepped in to host us for free
on Halo.bungie.org, bless him. We had something like 1.5 million downloads in the
first year before getting on YouTube… I interviewed Burnie [Burns] in-game for
Episode 4 of This Spartan Life and we shared the bill at live events here and there,
notably at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in 2007. I remember Burnie
telling Jack, his 5 year old,‘This is Chris. He's the only other guy in the world that

does exactly what I do for work’… RT and TSL have always had a super friendly
relationship though. We had Geoff [Ramsey] and Jack [Patillo] on the show as well
in 2012 and we saw some of them in Austin whenever we were in town. Burnie helped
us out by suggesting TSL as content for 343’s Halo Waypoint channel, which we did
for about a year. They are tireless and endlessly creative media makers.”
Chris Burke (interview, 2020)
Alexander Winn, founder of Edgeworks Entertainment and of another popular dramatic Halo
series that launched in 2005, The Codex, commented:
“I’d never seen anyone making original movies out of a video game before, and it
opened a huge world of possibility. After that we went off and did our own thing with
it but The Codex definitely wouldn’t exist without RvB establishing the precedent of
what could be done. Rooster Teeth holds a strange place in my heart: simultaneously
the shining example of what’s possible, but also the passionate rival. The Codex was
the #2 machinima series in the world, but we could only ever be #2 because Rooster
Teeth had been given a license from Bungie and we were repeatedly refused…. We
actually met the RT guys a few times, at various conventions and such. Burnie Burns
was very kind, and even hung out with us for a while outside of a party that we (as
high school kids) couldn’t get into. They’ve done incredible things, and in many ways
they’re doing what I hope to do with Edgeworks Entertainment: producing multiple
projects, owning studio space, working in film/TV, etc. They got there first, but we’re
catching up!” Alexander Winn (interview, 2020)
Edgeworks Entertainment now makes computer video games from its Los Angeles studio,
their latest venture being TerraGenesis, a game which has at July 2020 been downloaded
18M times (Winn, 2020).
Whilst for Laird MacLean, co-producer of Sponsors vs Freeloaders and founder of the
RVBCanWest fan event, commented on how the experience of being part of a community
impacted his career development:
“[Rooster Teeth influenced] my future career path and relationships within the larger
Halo community and gaming industry. Over time with working alongside RT on their
first prototype Rooster Teeth events for RVBCanWest I moved on over to the games
industry working on various titles including eventually a Halo title.”
Laird MacLean (interview, 2020)
In 2006, Burns had reflected on his experience with the machinima community at large and
his contribution to it. His comments highlight his deep respect for the community and its
stakeholders that has continued to resonate with audiences as the creative work of Rooster
Teeth has evolved. Importantly, this includes the ways in which games developers and
publishers are treated in the process:
“I always keep in mind that while we did not invent machinima, we have certainly
forged some new paths in the genre. We always try to conduct ourselves in a manner
that would make people in the future point to us as an example of why machinima is a
good thing. I would hate to think that some young filmmaker wouldn't get the

necessary permission to work on his machinima video because we did something that
left a bad taste in the industry's mouth.” Burnie Burns (in Frankie, 2006)
At the same time, Burns also recognized the path to future recognition of the genre of
creative practice, at least at a commercial level, was far from straight forward:
“Machinima is just going to grow and grow. Real-time animation still has a long way
to match the quality of pre-rendering. But, that gap is closing at an amazing rate.
Look at the difference in visual fidelity between Marathon (1995) and Halo 2 (2004).
Then look at two pre-rendered movies from that same time frame: Toy Story (1995)
and The Incredibles (2004). Sure, both sets had improvements in technical quality,
but the real-time achievements gained a ton more ground. They haven't caught up yet,
and I don't know that they ever will, but the differences will soon be insignificant.”
Burnie Burns (in Frankie, 2006)
Rooster Teeth, and particularly RVB, was both an influencer in the machinima community
and was also inspired by the work of others. Burns again:
“There's a ton of great work out there. Randall Glass was an inspiration for some of
our first RVB vids, and his work never fails to impress me. Overall, my favorite piece
is one called ‘My Trip To Liberty City’, which is a piece made using Grand Theft
Auto. The author did a fantastic job of capturing the spirit of machinima. It shows
him playing GTA and talking about the game, then he goes on to say how doesn't
really want to beat people to death with baseball bats, so he re-skins his character
with a Canadian tourist texture and starts wandering the city taking pictures of
architecture and prostitutes. To me, that's the essence of machinima in a nutshell,
wandering around in a virtual space and exploring it in a unique way...”
Burnie Burns (in Frankie, 2006)
Significantly, the team inspired many machinima creators, with works that reflected different
aspects of games, film and creator personalities. Importantly, however, it is their approach to
delivering creative works, that Burns described as being similar to the Saturday Night Live
(SNL) US variety show which parodies contemporary culture and politics, and distribution
methods that have become a model of practice beyond the machinima community. As Burns
commented in 2017:
“[When] we started in 2003, we thought we were late to this. It turns out we were
about eight years early. And I give a lot of credit to Netflix when they converted from
a mail-DVDs-to-your-house service to subscription digital. That was, I think, the
moment when everybody suddenly was… so that inevitability was imminent. So we
wanted to be able to compete in the world of Netflix, Hulu, Amazon video. We wanted
to be able to make that kind of content and compete on that level, and that’s why our
relationship with a company like Fullscreen just made sense… but my life didn’t
change because I was already doing what I wanted to do. It was my passion…
Rooster Teeth is one of those rare online entities where we now have multiple
generations of talent that our audience loves. Kind of like an ‘SNL’ model that we
follow. And developing some of those people into huge personalities, that’s a huge
goal for me.” Burnie Burns (in Kafka, 2017)

As Boomer and Burke commented though, it has moved beyond machinima into other
creative genres now:
“It’s the shift to let’s play content that has cemented their position, but also in a way
the shift of people consuming that content away from machinima to let’s plays means
that there’s no longer an appetite for that content in the same way.”
Jason Boomer (interview, 2020)
“It's interesting to see how they work changed from the Why Are We Here [Episode
1] in 2003. I think, once you find you have a huge audience, you aren't satisfied with
doing the more oddball stuff. That first episode made me think of Waiting For Godot.
TSL, similarly started with an emphasis on the art side of things and moved slowly to
being a talk show about the games industry… RVB and TSL both slowly became more
about the characters, game-related jokes and entertainment than anything really
subversive or arty, which worked for us both for a while. But RVB especially spawned
a ton of knock-off series, with wise-cracking characters and over the top acting… RT
are clearly the big success story to come from the first generation of machinima
makers. Burnie et al were very smart about how they maneuvered around the usual
pitfalls for a growing media company. They should be remembered for their ability to
make truly inventive and funny content while appealing to a huge audience.”
Chris Burke (interview, 2020)
Indeed, a number of key points in the evolution of their creative work and distribution
methods have been identified as impactful turning points for Rooster Teeth from a
community perspective: firstly, the appeal of RWBY, their anime show, to a younger female
audience helped move their programming into a new and more diverse realm; secondly, the
shift from series based narrative work to let’s play; and thirdly, their use of new streaming
platforms changed the ways they were able to engage and interact with their community.
Boomer commented:
“RWBY was a major milestone because up until that point it was very adolescent
male dominated community. With the introduction of RWBY it shifted and has now
become 50/50 male/female split and it actually dropped the average age fairly
significantly. Successive shows have done the same – they’ve brought in their own
audiences... [and] when Achievement Hunter was formed, that is where a lot of the
focus for gaming content went. It became very let’s play driven and a lot of it is also
personality driven... The other thing that had a major influence, and in my opinion for
the worse, was when a lot of the content was hosted on YouTube… comments are
notoriously toxic and its got no community spirit there. It’s a platform that is a hub
but has no forum that you can really use. When they put a lot of their content out on
YouTube there were people that were used to that environment finding the content
and then joining the community itself and it was bringing with it a hostile and
negative perspectives which didn’t gel as well with the community.”
Jason Boomer (interview, 2020)
Thus, community remains central to their proposition. As Mary McDowell, Rooster Teeth’s
head guardian for its RTX Austin community events since 2010, reflected:

“With the rise of social media, the community has more outlets to create and
celebrate their love of the content. I've made life-long friends being part of this
community. I've been to weddings, I've travelled to States and countries for
community events, I've lived with this community, and I have worked alongside this
community. Since Rooster Teeth began making more than just RVB, the community
has grown exponentially. With every site change, program shift, new hire, or talent
exit brings a shift in community. However, the energy and the positivity of the
community feels constant and I appreciate that. Many of us have seen our community
friends get hired by Rooster Teeth and so we really sink our teeth into that emotional
attachment – I want this to be successful because it will make my friends successful!
… Like any other community, there will be issues to work through and solutions to
discover. Having Community Managers who are attentive, invested, and validating
really keeps this train moving. Our Community Managers are actually from the
community! That right there is super important because our CMs understand the
culture they are supporting. They come directly from the community and get to
amplify it and/or change it for the better.” Mary McDowell (interview, 2020)
For many, however, machinima and the underpinning creative processes developed through
the evolution of RVB remain the heart of Rooster Teeth’s proposition. As McDowell
explained:
“As an older fan, RVB will always be my first Rooster Teeth love. With more content
being created, there comes a huge shift in content relevance. I feel like RWBY was the
game changer for Rooster Teeth in that regard. RVB is not as prominent on the
content line-up as it used to be. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. I
miss the days when RVB was THE prime content of the site, but Rooster Teeth has
developed some truly terrific content outside of Halo-themed comedy. This is like
Disney creating content without Mickey Mouse: awesome stories without the need of
the company’s original figurehead to be involved…
RVB is an absolute triumph. In its humble beginnings, it was a group of gamers
animating within a game using console controllers. Now, the show has several
dedicated production teams that make up a very large animation department. Look at
how far we've come! From head nodding in time with dialogue to Monty Oum mo-
capped fight sequences to creating worlds outside of an Xbox universe – RVB
machinima paved the way for RWBY and gen:LOCK to be so worldly successful. The
machinima skills of RVB opened the door to all sorts of animation advancements in
the company. Rooster Teeth was able to take chances that larger and more
established studios are too afraid to try for fear that they will create a losing product.
Machinima made Rooster Teeth brave to try new things and look at what we have
now!” Mary McDowell (interview, 2020)
It is therefore with some hesitation that the community awaits the next phase of Rooster
Teeth’s development under the guiding hand of AT&T and beyond the influence of its
originating driving force at the creative helm, Burns et al. As Boomer observed:
“The shift to having these bigger companies behind RT is reflective of their desire to
produce bigger or more diverse content, and to support a larger staff that allows them

to do all these various productions – I think people are just scared that that might be
a sign of things to come, with big media. But I don’t think the content has reflected
that in any way.” Jason Boomer (interview, 2020)
Thus, the Rooster Teeth story continues.
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