The Rooster Teeth Story: The Beginning

Warner Bros Discovery is shutting down the online media company Rooster Teeth just as it nears its 21st anniversary. We look back on the history of the company, how it made an impact on internet culture, and where things went wrong.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts. And how the
tech are you? Maybe this following exchange will sound familiar
to some of you out there. Hey yeah, do you

(00:29):
ever wonder why we're here? That's how the very first
episode of Red Versus Blue, an animated web series that
launched nearly twenty one years ago. As I record this
in March of twenty twenty four, and it's a series
that spans nineteen seasons and multiple mini series offshoots. This

(00:50):
year that series will conclude, which was planned. They had
planned to finally wrap up Red Versus Blue. Also, the
company that produces that series, Rooster Teeth, is going to
shut down. That was not planned, or at least it
wasn't anticipated to be this particular year. I thought I

(01:13):
would do a pair of episodes. It turns out as
a retrospective on Rooster Teeth. By necessity, this is going
to be a cliffs notes version of that company's history
because it packed in an awful lot during those twenty
one years of existence. But I felt it was important
to acknowledge Rooster Teeth because it was one of those

(01:36):
forces that helped shape Internet culture and how online media
can work. Rooster Teeth was one of those early web
based media companies that would fuel memes and fuel merchandise sales.
It would help shape the sense of humor for a
generation of fans, and I actually put it up there
with a lot of other early web based comedy shows

(02:00):
off like Aska Ninja and Homestar Runner. These were things
that sort of defined Internet culture and Internet humor in
those early days. You could also point to other groups
like Lonely Island. You know, the trio of Lonely Island.
We're finding amazing success online, but would find even greater

(02:21):
success in mainstream media as they would go on to
work with Saturday Night Live and then other projects. Also,
way back in twenty twelve, I actually had Rooster Teeth
co founder Bernie Burns on this show. We did an
interview with Bernie way back in twenty twelve. So if
you want to crawl through the tech Stuff archives, you

(02:42):
can actually find that episode. It's titled tech Stuff Talks
to Rooster Teeth. We actually have done classic reruns of
that show, so you should be able to find it
through the archives. It originally published on February twenty second,
twenty twelve, while I've been doing the show a long time,
or you can check out the sod How the Great
Movie Ride Worked. That published on September two, twenty twenty two,

(03:07):
a decade later, and that featured special guest Jack Battillo,
who also worked at Rooster Teeth. He was a founding
member of their Achievement Hunter channel, which I'll talk about
more in a little bit. However, to tell the story
of Rooster Teeth, we actually need to go way back
to the early two thousands, before there was a Rooster

(03:27):
Teeth company to speak of. There were a group of
friends and co workers who lived in Austin, Texas, and
they decided to collaborate and to launch a website. And
some of them had had a little bit of experience
doing this. All of them had had some interest in
creating content of one form or another. Some of the

(03:48):
group had actually even attended film school and had the
actual education to go into things like production. One of
the founding members had served in the military as a photojournalist.
It also launched magazines or zines, as they would say
in the old school fandom days for the punk rock scene.
Most of the founding members had at one time or

(04:10):
another worked for a tech help call center, and so
they were familiar with each other and they loved video games.
Oh also they loved to drink as an alcohol. They
loved drinking, though for the record, most of the guys
have seriously cut back or stopped drinking alcohol these days,
and they decided to make a comedy and culture website

(04:34):
called drunk Gamers. So on this site they did everything
from game reviews to commenting on culture to razzing each
other and their audience, usually while inebriated. The joke more
or less ran its course, and they decided to sunset
the website after a while, but it gave them a

(04:54):
taste of creating content for the web. And one of
the things that they produced during the drunk Gamers era
was a trailer for a proposed series. This series would
make use of the Xbox video game Halo as a
sort of engine for their show. The Drunk Gamers would

(05:15):
use controllers in a multiplayer mode to make the characters
bob their heads in time, with lines being spoken in voiceover,
and then they would also you know, move the characters
to specific locations in view of one character that acted
as the camera, so it was like they were hitting
their marks on a soundstage and they would act out

(05:38):
a script. They would record the voiceover to go with
the action, and it was akin to digital puppetry, and
this relatively new art form had the name machinema. Rooster
Teeth did not coin that term, nor were they the
first to do this, but they were an early example
of machinima. The trailer they produced featured a narrative and

(06:00):
an increasingly combative subtitle editor who would squabble as the
editor would paraphrase what the narrator was saying. And meanwhile,
you're watching these clips of video game characters doing stuff.
And it was all supposed to take place in the
era immediately following the events of the video game Halo,

(06:25):
and the story was there erupted a civil war back
on Earth, and the two sides of the civil war
divided into Red armies and Blue armies, so Red versus Blue.
It gave a hint at what the irreverence style of
the series would feature, but at the time it didn't
get that much attention. As drunk gamers wound down, the

(06:47):
team had the opportunity to give the Red Versus Blue
series another go, and they jotted down a list of
ideas and jokes sort of scenarios that they could incorporate
into the episodes, and each episode was only going to
be a few minutes long, as the founders have explained subsequently,
the original idea was to create a limited mini series

(07:07):
of just a few episodes, so it wasn't meant to
be an ongoing thing. But it turned out the show,
which launched on April first, two thousand and three, would
receive much more attention than they anticipated. Plus they still
had plenty of jokes and ideas left from the brainstorming session,
and gradually they started to get the feeling that they

(07:28):
could perhaps do something larger and more ambitious with this
recipe of materials and ingredients. So the show largely lampooned
military life and bureaucracy, as well as tropes you would
find in video games and science fiction action films. The
first season was pretty low fi, but it also had

(07:49):
to be because it was limited to the original Xbox
Halo title, and this was also in an era before YouTube,
so YouTube didn't launch till two thousand and five, two
years after Red Versus Blue started coming out, which meant
the team had to host the video files on a website,
so they had to put the files on a server

(08:10):
and make that available to the audience, and the audience
would actually have to go to the website, click on
a link, and download episodes, and they had a choice.
They could download in quick time, or they could download
in Windows media file formats and then watch the videos
once you've downloaded them. I was actually one of these people.
I didn't discover Red Versus Blue on day one. I

(08:32):
was not like an OG fan from the very beginning
of the launch. But when I discovered Red Versus Blue,
they were only maybe four or five episodes into season
one when I found out about it, and I got
hooked right away, so I would end up downloading episodes
the day they published, and ultimately I even burned the

(08:53):
episodes of season one to a CD because back then
PCs had optical drives. But anyway, the humor in those
early episodes is frequently juvenile and vulgar. I think saying
that not all the jokes have aged well is a
more than fair assessment, and I suspect that if the
creators were to put out the series today, they would

(09:15):
make very different choices in some instances, but the spirit
of Red versus Blue shares commonalities with literary classics like
Catch twenty two. That novel highlights the absurdities and contradictions
of military, particularly during wartime, So Rooster Teeth lampooned conventions
found in bureaucracies in general, not just the military. And

(09:38):
while there was never a guarantee that they would succeed,
the show did find an audience, and it was a
large enough audience to actually create challenges for the team
because again, the audience had to go to a website
and download a file, and internet traffic isn't free, right.
If you are hosting files on a server and there

(09:59):
are a lot of people going to that server to
download those files, it can start to rake up a
pretty substantial bill. So hosting the files would actually require
better servers. Fairly early on in Rooster Teeth's history, so
the group actually formed the company called Rooster Teeth. Rooster
Teeth takes its name from a sanitized version of a

(10:21):
vulgar insult used in the original series trailer, an insult
that I will not repeat here, but it's easily found.
The company traces its origins to April first, two thousand
and three, and the founding members, depending upon which version
of the company's history you're reading, would include Bernie Burns,
Matt Hollum, Gustavo Sorola, Jeff Ramsey, Jason Seldanya, and Joel Hayman.

(10:46):
And the group started on a journey that would lead
to a lot of really interesting opportunities for those folks,
as well as others who would join the company. Now,
the early days weren't exactly glamorous. The company's headquarters was
even an office space. It was a relatively small spare
room in Bernie Burns's home, and some of the folks

(11:07):
meant that, you know, they were crammed into spaces like
a closet where they would work, and they were working
in a perpetual crunch time. They also, at this point
they also had separate jobs. Not everyone could just work
on this full time. In fact, I don't think anyone
was working on it full time. Early on. They were
maintaining a normal job as well as trying to produce

(11:28):
a technically complicated web series. Because getting this right was
not easy. You know, it's hard to tell when you
are performing one of these episodes, if you're in the
right spot, if you're looking in the right direction, if
you're all your settings are correct. It's tricky to do,

(11:49):
and so they were constantly working in Crunch and they
were trying to stick as close to a weekly publication
schedule as they possibly could despite all the technical challenge,
some of which were more server side. Right, if your
server happens to be down for whatever reason, it's not
like you can upload your file. And uploading took a
long time because this is the early days of internet connectivity.

(12:11):
Bandwidth was limited, and some shots that they made would
call for special circumstances that were not easy to generate
or to replicate within the game. Like they were possible obviously,
but they weren't easy. So it could take an hour
or more just to set up a site gag, and
if you messed something up, then you had to do

(12:31):
it all over again. Also, you've got to remember these
are guys who were mostly in their early twenties at
this point, early to mid twenties, and sometimes they would
get up to shenanigans and purposefully do things that would
sabotage a shot and force everyone to set everything up
all over again because that was funny. Yeah, that's the

(12:52):
kind of activity that will get you thrown off of
any normal production set, and I'm sure there were times
where the creators were considering throwing people out of the
Bernie's house. Anyway. There were also the technical issue of
just making sure that the files were available for folks
to download, because as the show grew in popularity, this

(13:13):
became a bigger concern. One way the company generated revenue
was to offer viewers the chance to become what they
called sponsors, and in return, the sponsors would receive a
DVD copy of the episodes at the end of the season.
Then Rooster Teeth also began to produce merchandise like T
shirts and other items featuring characters and catchphrases. I used

(13:34):
to have a couple of red versus Blue T shirts
way back in the day. I got them pretty early on.
I remember having a T shirt from the character Caboose
that said I like me, which you know, it's a
good thing to remember once in a while. Now. In
those early days, this small team handled everything themselves, and

(13:55):
by small, I mean there were fewer than ten people
working at Rooster Teeth. Everything that they did included fostering
their growing community, managing merchandise orders, keeping track of inventory,
responding to technical issues, plus you know, just creating the show.
So people wore many hats figuratively. I don't think they

(14:15):
literally wore a lot of hats. Okay, this is a
good place for us to take a quick break to
thank our sponsors. We'll be right back with lots more
about the early days of Rooster Teeth. Okay, we're back.

(14:36):
So Rooster Teeth would launch the first season of Red
Versus Blue on April first, two thousand and three, and
the first five seasons of Red Versus Blue are collectively
called the Blood Gulch Chronicles, named after a map in
the Halo multiplayer game. These episodes are just largely comedic

(14:58):
in tone. They're also just a few minutes each. They
get longer as the series went on, and later seasons
would introduce much more dramatic elements, though it never strayed
too far away from comedy. Some episodes have very little
comedy in them, but most of them still have at
least elements and references, and the series would also begin

(15:19):
to incorporate original animation using techniques like motion capture technology
to achieve effects that would be impossible if they relied
solely on the various Halo game engines. And yes, they
did upgrade to later versions of Halo as those versions
came out in order to produce subsequent seasons of Red
Versus Blue, and they would find reasons within the narrative

(15:42):
to explain the changes, often as a way that was
just a joke, but you know, they would still acknowledge it.
They would at least hang a lampshade on it, as
they might say. Now. As I mentioned at the top
of this episode, this year twenty twenty four marks the
final season of Red Versus Blue, and the series has
taken a break here and there over the last twenty

(16:03):
plus years by spinning off mini series which adds more
lore and intrigue to the story. Some of those mini
series are far more action oriented than comedy oriented, but
Rooster Teeth would end up being much more about a
single web series. While that was what got the company
off the ground, it wasn't the only thing they did.

(16:26):
For one thing, Rooster Teeth would end up doing a
lot of commercial work. They would help companies, primarily video
game companies and retail establishments, they would help them produce commercials,
and this was another healthy source of revenue for them,
like they had already shown that they could produce cinematic
quality content using video game engines, so they would end

(16:51):
up doing this work on behalf of advertising agencies for
their clients. But this would mean that members of the
team would often have to travel as part of their
jobs to do this work, and that would cause disruptions
and production. The company did grow, but very slowly at first.
In fact, they wouldn't hire on employee number eight until

(17:12):
two thousand and eight, five years after they got started,
and they still didn't even have eight employees. So they did,
over time start to hire additional staff to help take
over some of the duties so that this one small
team wasn't constantly on the verge of working themselves to death.
In October of two thousand and four, however, jumping back

(17:35):
a little bit, the company launched a second machinema series.
This one was called The Strangerhood, and it was a
comedy featuring characters waking up in a strange suburban neighborhood
and had a silly kind of Twilight Zone sort of
vibe to it. This show used the SIMS two for
that first season. There was a small gap between season

(17:57):
one and season two, eleven years between the two. The
second season would actually use the SIMS four game engine
in order to create the story. They did have a
couple of other specials and related sort of the mini
series between those two seasons, so it's not just two
seasons of material. There's some other supplemental material as well.

(18:20):
And season two only exists because it was a stretch
goal for a fundraising campaign that Roster Teeth held for
a feature film, which we will talk more about later
in this episode. So the Strangerhood did not see the
same success as Red Versus Blue. This might explain why
Rooster Teeth migrated away from the property. It didn't try

(18:41):
to create numerous seasons of that. It just felt like
they had a limited amount of assets, largely in the
time department, and so it didn't make sense to dedicate
a ton of their effort towards something that was just
not taking off at the same level as Red Versus Blue.
And in late two thousand and four, Rooster Teeth launched

(19:05):
a new project called RT Sponsor Cut and as that
name implies, that project presented exclusive content for folks who
signed up for a sponsorship, so the company would embrace
this model more and more in the future. This idea
that if you subscribe, you get extra content. You don't
have to subscribe, and you can get all the free content,

(19:25):
but there will be stuff that you won't have access to. Eventually,
sponsors would transform into first members, so called because these
folks would get access to the normal content a little
earlier than the general public, and they would also get
access to exclusive content just for first members. Now, I'm
not going to go through every single production Rooster Teeth

(19:48):
ever created, because this company has been around for more
than two decades and it has tried a lot of stuff,
and it would just get to be a laundry list
of projects, many of which I only saw a few
episodes before the company decided it wasn't working or just
found a new direction. But as for mashinema style content,

(20:10):
since that's where they got their start, they did a
few series using different games. There was Panics, which was
a comedy set in the first person shooter horror game Fear.
There was one eight hundred Magic, which used the computer
game Shadow Run as the engine for its Machinema. There
was Stroyant that lampooned infomercials and used the Quake engine

(20:35):
to do it. And there was Supreme Surrender, which is
a comedy that used the game's Supreme Commander. There was
also a series later on called Minimations. This would take
excerpts from Achievement Hunter Let's Play video sessions and would
animate these excerpts using the game Minecraft. So it would

(20:56):
be repurposing material that they had already produced for one
style video and doing it for another. That would also
be the method for one of the other series that
Rooster Teeth would produce, one that used traditional style animation
called RTAA Rooster Teeth Animated Adventures that would take excerpts

(21:18):
largely from the Rooster Teeth podcast and then animate according
to that stuff. Now beyond Mashinima, Rooster Teeth would branch
out into lots of other forms of content, so as
I mentioned that would include traditional animation, it also included
live action shorts, a social prank show. There were various

(21:38):
game shows. There was a ridiculous reality show that would
recreate video game tropes in the real world. That one
was called Immersion. There were podcasts they did a few
feature length films, they had a comic book series, and
they even produced a couple of video games. By two
thousand and five, using a spare room in Bernie's home

(21:58):
just wasn't cutting it for the company's HQ. The team
would relocate to an office in Austin, Texas. This would
be the first of several moves for the group as
they would grow and they would pursue increasingly ambitious goals.
So they moved in two thousand and five, but they
would relocate again in two thousand and seven, then again

(22:19):
in twenty ten, and then yet again in twenty fourteen,
so they kept on outgrowing their environment and moving into
a new one, kind of like a hermit crab. In
two thousand and eight, Jeff Ramsey and Jack Pattillo, who
had been doing some work with Rooster Teeth on a
contract basis, would found the Achievement Hunter branch of Rooster Teeth.

(22:42):
So Jack would become employee either nine or ten. There's
some disagreement in the company history, but in one video
Jack famously proclaims himself as employee number nine. The division
Achievement Hunter would take its name from Xbox Achievements, So
if you're not familiar with achievements. These are goals that

(23:02):
game developers set inside their own games, and when you
complete one of these goals, you get a notification that
you acquired an achievement. So each game has a certain
number of achievements. They've been capped at different levels throughout
the history of Xbox, and in turn, these achievements are
associated with a point value, so when you make an achievement,

(23:25):
the point value of that achievement gets added to your
total score. And some gamers put a lot of emphasis
on their achievement scores, like a lot, a lot, And
there are even gamers who will seek out specific Xbox
titles not because they're good games that these folks want
to play, but instead because these games are notoriously easy

(23:48):
to rack up achievements. Likewise, there are some gamers who
will avoid titles that are known to have really tough
achievements associated with them, particularly games that include online play achievements,
because those tend to be the hardest to get. And
this was a terrible idea. I think there are a
few games out there where the developers created an achievement

(24:09):
that required you to essentially become the best player in
the world in order to secure this achievement, and by
definition that meant that it was a really hard achievement
to get and that most people would never be able
to get that, which means they would never be able
to complete their list of achievements for that game, and
for some folks that can drive them crazy anyway. Achievement

(24:30):
Hunters started off with videos that explained how to secure
various achievements in different games, but it quickly evolved into
a channel that would feature things like let's play style
videos as well as office shenanigans among the growing staff
of the department. Some of their most infamous videos were
live action videos where they would pull pranks on each

(24:53):
other or just do wild stuff in the office, frequently
resulting in massive dam image to company property. It was
almost like Jackass for the corporate world. Also in two
thousand and eight, the Rooster Teeth podcast launched. Now, originally
it was not called the Rooster Teeth Podcast. It was

(25:13):
called or the RT podcast, as it's usually referenced. Instead,
back in the early early days, it was called the
Drunk Tank, and eventually they did change the name. One
reason that they made this change is that it turned
out to be really challenging to convince sponsors to buy
advertising for a show that had the word drunk in
the title. That's not necessarily an association that ad partners

(25:36):
are eager to go after. So the first episode of
Drunk Tank featured Bernie Burns, Gustavo Sola, and Jeff Ramsey,
three of the co founders of rooster Teeth. Now it'd
be quite a few episodes before they would find their
go to podcast crew, which typically but not always, would
feature Gustavo Sorola, Bernie Burns, Barbara Dunkleman, who would reload

(26:00):
from Canada to work for Rooster Teeth after first being
a fan of the series Red Versus Blue, and then
Gavin Free who would actually move from England to work
for Rooster Teeth after being a fan of Red Versus Blue.
In those early days, both of them were community members
for Rooster Teeth before they would subsequently work for the company.

(26:20):
The Rooster Teeth podcast would become one of the most
popular comedy podcasts online, and it like the company would
go through some pretty major changes, particularly in the summer
just last year, that being twenty twenty three. For those
of you who are listening from the future, Gustavo Sorolla,
who at that point was the singular remaining original podcast member,

(26:45):
would hand the reins over to a younger group of podcasters,
which would include Armando Torres, Griff Milton, and Andrew Rosas.
Barbara and Gavin would step down around that same time.
Bernie had already left the company by twenty twenty. Tie.
In two thousand and nine, Rooster Teeth's influence made its
way into the video game that provided the company with
their first mashinema engine, that being Halo specifically, it made

(27:10):
its way into Halo three, which included a new online
competitive game mode called Griftball. Griftball started as just a joke,
kind of a throway line in Red Versus Blue, but
it became a type of community game on Halo servers
after Bernie Burns made up a rugby style competition using
Halo matchmaking. So it was a fan made game, a

(27:32):
fan in this case being Bernie Burns, a fan of Halo,
and with Halo three, Griffball graduated from being a community
game type to an official matchmaking game within Halo. Pretty
cool to see now. On top of that, the voice
talent and the on camera talent at Rooster Teeth started

(27:52):
to land opportunities to voice characters in the very games
that they would feature in their videos. You can hear
the voices of Rooster Teeth crew in numerous video games,
including big titles like the Halo series or the Red
Dead Redemption games. If you are really familiar with them
and you start playing these games, you might start to

(28:12):
hear familiar voices as you encounter various NPCs around the world.
Another important moment in Rooster Teeth's history happened in two
thousand and nine. The company hired Monty Ohm, an animator
who would go on to create the series Ruby. Now.
He originally was working on Red Versus Blue, and he
was known for pulling extremely long hours at his job

(28:34):
and was an incredible and passionate artist. He would work
with the company for more than half a decade, but
tragically he passed away in twenty fifteen after a severe
allergic reaction. This was two years after his series Ruby
had premiered, and several Rooster Teeth staff would promise to
carry on his work on that series. We'll talk more

(28:55):
about that in just a bit. We're going to take
another quick break to think our sponsors, But we have
lots more Rooster Teeth history to get through. Okay, we're back,
and we're up to twenty ten. That's when Gavin Free

(29:16):
would create a new YouTube channel with his friend Dan
and they called it The Slow Mo Guys. And as
the name suggests, they specialize in shooting various stuff in
ultra slow motion. You've likely seen their stuff at one
point or another. Multiple videos that they have produced have
gone crazy viral over the years. In fact, I remember

(29:39):
seeing them even pop up in a Delta Airline safety
video several years ago. That's how big they got that
they were being recognized in other forms of media, including
a safety video on an airplane. In twenty thirteen, Rooster
Teeth would officially acquire The Slow Mo Guy's channel, so
Gavin was working with Rousti Teeth Back in this time,

(30:02):
he wasn't working for them yet, but he was doing
work with the company but had not been hired on
as an official employee. In twenty eleven, Rooster Teeth would
hold its first live event in Austin. This was called RTX.
The original event was relatively modest in ambition, and even

(30:22):
so it attracted more than five hundred attendees. Now, over
the following years, Rooster Teeth would hold many, many more
in person events, some of them would be large enough
to fill out an entire convention center in Austin, Texas.
They would even do live theatrical shows that would sell
out major venues, and they would hold events in various

(30:44):
cities and countries around the world. In twenty twenty three,
Rooster Teeth president Jordan Levin revealed that the RTX event
had never been profitable and the company had decided to
cancel the twenty twenty four RTX. This is in twenty
twenty three, and the plan was to go back to
the drawing board to kind of figure out how to

(31:05):
go about handling live events in the future so that
they wouldn't be a money losing proposition. But as it
turns out, that concern is moot now. Rooster Teeth continued
to grow, but it was still very, very small at
this point. By the end of twenty eleven, there were
only around twenty employees. One of the last to join

(31:25):
that year was Barbara Dunkleman. As I mentioned, she was
a fan from Canada who relocated to Austin, Texas to
work for the company. As a community manager. Then the
next year, Gavin Free, who again had left England to
join Rooster Teeth, would officially become an employee near the
beginning of twenty twelve. He had already done a lot
of work on Red Versus Blue at that point, but

(31:47):
now he was an official employee. And I mentioned these
two specifically not just because they're two of the more
forward facing members of the company, but also because of
their situation, right because eavn their home country to work
for Rister Teeth. That's a huge thing. I'm pretty sure
a lot of you out there have never done anything

(32:08):
like that. I certainly have never done anything like that.
Some of you may have, though, some of you may
have left your home country to go work somewhere else.
And as you know, your work situation is incredibly important
because in most countries, that's what justifies you living in
that country, right, and if that situation changes, you might

(32:29):
be in a bind. Right if your company shuts down
while you're working in a country that isn't your home country.
You know, maybe you were required to have something like
a green card. Well, you are in a challenging experience.
And so I imagine that Barbara and Gavin and others
like them are in a pretty stressful situation at the moment,

(32:49):
more so than your average employee who's also facing unemployment.
In the near future, the company began to tackle more
ambitious projects. In twenty twelve, they launched a game show
called The Gauntlet, in which competitors attempted to win at
video game related events. Some of the entrants in that
show would actually later on become Rooster Teeth's staff members.

(33:10):
Two of Rooster Teeth's staff, Carrie Shawcross and Christa Maras,
would travel to New Zealand to walk from the filming
location for Hobbiton in Lord of the Rings to the
filming location for Mount Doom. That's a one hundred and
thirty mile trek, and they titled it a Simple Walk
into Mordor, and it really highlighted how ill suited the

(33:32):
two were to take on such a task, which of
course made for really great content. The company also released
a trailer for Ruby that year. That was the animated
series dreamed up by monteaum So. Ruby features a group
of four young women, that being Ruby, Rose Weiss or
Vice Schnee, Blake, Belladonna, and Yongshao Long and their initials

(33:56):
create the title r W B Y that's pronounced Ruby.
It's a fantasy science fiction series in which there are
monsters and monster hunters, plus lots of different intrigue, and
it's a highly stylized series. It's in many ways a
real departure from much of Rooster Teith's other content. It

(34:16):
would go on to find its own passionate audience beyond
the company. It also would become the subject of lots
of debates does Ruby count as anime or not? And
there are passionate people who argue either side of this
particular debate, And I am not going to get into
it because that is not my area of expertise if

(34:36):
I even have an area of expertise. Ruby would debut
in twenty thirteen. RTX attendees got the first chance to
see the very first episode before anyone else outside the
company had had seen it, and after Monteaum would pass
away in twenty fifteen, other members of Rooster Teeth decided
to continue the series without him because they wanted both

(34:58):
to finish the story they had started and also to
honor Home in the process. So when the show debuted
in twenty thirteen, it quickly found an audience, and it
has had nine seasons, which they call volumes, with a
total of one hundred and sixteen episodes so far as
of last year. The aforementioned Kerrie Shawcross is the showrunner

(35:22):
for the series and has said that he hopes to
find a home for Ruby so that he and the
team can finish the stories that they've begun. In twenty thirteen,
Rooster Teeth received a Webby Award for Best Animated Series.
This was for Red Versus Blue, and at this point
the company was well known in online circles and was
getting recognition from the mainstream media as well. It was

(35:44):
still largely seen as a company that made content for
a younger web centric audience, so think like teens to
young adults, and according to numerous podcast episodes, the folks
in Austin didn't really seem to be that aware of
Rooster Teeth in general, so it's not like they were
a big deal in their hometown, but the company was

(36:05):
finding some wider recognition. Some employees in particular, occasionally found
themselves singled out by mainstream publications which would run features
on this little upstart media company out of Austin, Texas,
and it was starting to really gain traction. Also in
twenty thirteen, Jack Pattillo would spearhead a charitable effort that
Rooster Teeth would embrace over the following decade. It was

(36:29):
part of Extra Life, which is a charitable event that
raises money for the hospitals that are in the Children's
Miracle Network. Many participants in the event just in general,
not just at Rooster Teeth, but many people who are
fundraising for Extra Life, will stream themselves playing games in
sort of a video game version of a walkathon to

(36:50):
raise money for their chosen hospital. I've done this a
couple of times in the past, pulling twenty four hour
sessions of playing Minecraft in order to raise money. But
Patillo's efforts meant that Rooster Teeth would raise more than
three hundred thousand dollars for their chosen hospital that first year,
and then every year he would really strive to beat
that number to great success. Patillo says that he plans

(37:13):
to do an Extra Lifestyle fundraiser this year twenty twenty
four despite the fact that the company itself is shutting
down all right now. In our history, we're up to
twenty fourteen, and this is when I realized that I
would have to break this episode up into two. But
we've got a really good place to split our episodes
coming up in twenty fourteen, because a major event would

(37:33):
happen that year that would completely change the course of
Rooster Teeth. So in twenty fourteen, first of all, there
was a group of fellas out in California who created
a comedy media company called Funhouse spelled Funhaus. That group
included James Williams, Sean Poole, Matt Peak, Lawrence Sontag, Bruce Green,

(37:54):
and Adam Kovic. Many of them came from other web
content companies that had either fold or had downsides significantly,
such as Mainema Mashinima had not got out of business
at this point, it still existed, but it had downsize
quite a bit and changed dramatically. Or some of them
had worked for a more traditional content company like G

(38:15):
four TV, but that particular media company went through its
own long and protracted demise. As I covered in a
previous episode of tech Stuff many many years ago. Funhouse
would create its own series and content, focusing largely on
let's play style videos in which the cast would play
a game or sometimes a series of games while they

(38:37):
would just make jokes, and they would also launch other
series that showcase the team's sense of humor, their writing,
and their performance styles. While they would collaborate occasionally with
their Austin counterparts, they mostly were left to do their
own thing, with some caveats, which we'll get to in
the next episode. I mentioned earlier that Roster Teeth would
tackle hugely ambitious projects, including feature length films. Well. The

(39:01):
first of those attempts that made it beyond the pre
production stage was a film called Laser Team Lazer. This
movie featured four hapless protagonists, each of whom dons a
piece of some alien made armor. And each piece of
armor has its own abilities and was meant to go

(39:22):
to a specific person, a human champion who had been
secretly training for this moment his entire life. But instead
the armor bonds with these four idiots who just happen
across it, and then they have to defend the Earth
from an extraterrestrial threat and hilarity ensues. Rooster Teeth launched
an indie Gogo crowdfunding campaign for a Laser Team, and

(39:45):
their goal was to raise six hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Now,
this was not going to be enough money to actually
fund the filmmaking. Instead, it was really to show potential
investors that there was a passionate audience for this film,
so it was kind of like seed money to help
secure additional funding. By the end of the campaign, they

(40:07):
had raised nearly two point five million dollars their goal
was six hundred and fifty thousand, and it made the
project the most top funded film on indieg Go at
that time, so they were able to secure the rest
of their funding because people said, oh, well, if folks
are passionate enough to pour their money into something that

(40:29):
doesn't even exist yet, then it's worth supporting. And they
released Laser Team in twenty fifteen, and it's fine. I mean,
it has its moments, but it really wasn't my cup
of tea. I was kind of hoping for something that
would appeal to me more. It's not bad, it just
kind of forgettable for me. But still, it was really
cool to see a media company that started out just

(40:50):
releasing short videos that were made in a Halo game
engine graduate into a fully fledged movie production company. That
was really fascinating. Now beyond the film, Rooster Teeth would
release a whole bunch of different series, and I'm not
going to go into all of them, but they included
shows that had titles like Social Disorder, Ten Little Roosters,

(41:12):
the cute little mystery series on the Spot, Screenplay, and
Happy Hour, among others. And I just want to stress
how incredible it is for an upstart media company that
was tackling a feature film to also be launching a
half dozen new properties and still support ongoing shows like

(41:35):
Ruby and Red Versus Blue. That is a ton of projects,
and the company at this point is still fairly modest
in size. I mean, it's much larger than twenty people
at this point, but still not like a major studio.
It's this sort of bootstrapped startup that's doing all this.

(41:55):
And of course people were working their butts off to
get all this to happen, and and we'll talk more
about that in the next episode too, but this is
where we get to the event that really caps off
this episode and will serve as the launching point for
next episode. And it happened in November twenty fourteen. So
a company called full Screen, which in turn was a

(42:17):
subsidiary of another company called Otter Media, would acquire Rooster
Teeth for an undisclosed amount of money. This would be
the event that would redefine Rooster Teeth and change the
course of the company over the following decade. Now, you
could argue this move is what would spell out the
eventual end of Rooster Teeth itself, but I would argue

(42:41):
it's impossible to say if Rooster Teeth would have flourished
without this acquisition. The company had clearly developed hugely ambitious
goals and it would have been really hard for them
to achieve those goals on their own. So in many ways,
being acquired by a larger concern was potentially a roadmap

(43:03):
toward achieving these goals, and if they didn't do it,
maybe they couldn't achieve all the stuff they wanted to.
So they were in a pretty tough position to say no.
I mean, it would have been really kind of self
defeating at least at the time, I'm sure, But as
it would turn out, this acquisition would be the starting

(43:26):
point for what would lead to the situation where Rooster
Teeth would shut down. So in our next episode, I'll
explain more about full Screen and what they were all about,
as well as their parent company, Outter Media. Then we'll
talk about the complicated series of corporate maneuvers that would
happen well above the heads of people working at Rooster Teeth.

(43:47):
They had nothing to do with it, but there was
a lot of stuff that was happening at top levels
of the companies that owned Rooster Teeth that would have
a big impact on them. So we'll talk about how
these corporate changes actually filtered down to affect the people
at Rooster Teeth and how it would manifest and shape
the way the company operated. We'll also talk about important

(44:08):
people in Rooster Teeth like Bernie Burns, who chose to
step away from the company for various reasons, and will
talk about some of the really ugly controversies that are
merged out of the company within that ten year period
of twenty fourteen to today. And of course we'll explore
the reasons and timing of the company shutting down. But
for now we're going to step away from our history

(44:30):
lesson and we will rejoin in the next episode. I
hope you're enjoying this retrospective look at Rooster Teeth. It's
a company that created a lot of stuff that I
really enjoyed for many years, and while admittedly I've stepped
away from some of their content, Like I haven't watched
Red Versus Blue in many seasons. I have no idea

(44:51):
what the storyline is at this point, but I have
watched other stuff that they have created subsequently and still
remain a fan of the the company and their shows.
I think it's one that's worth really exploring. For one thing,
while they're shutting down, it remains true that Rooster Teeth
is one of the most successful online media companies to

(45:13):
come out of the early two thousands. You know, most
of those other companies that created stuff in the early
two thousands either went into long term hibridation and only
occasionally become active again, like Homestar Runner, or the people
behind them have moved on to totally different things and
they don't do online content anymore, and their names are

(45:37):
largely just left in the history books. So it is
pretty phenomenal that Rooster Teeth has stuck around as long
as it has. So in our next episode, we'll keep
ongoing with the Rooster Teeth story. We'll cover what happened
in the last decade. And in the meantime, I hope
you are all well and I'll talk to you again
really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more

(46:06):
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.