In Memoriam: Rooster Teeth Productions

A very long time ago a group of Central Texas videogamers started making little film projects together. These friends made a movie in the late 1990s, then a website called Drunkgamers, and then a few videos that went viral (or what passed for it back then) in the very early days of internet-based video around 2001-2003.

One of the video projects they made, Red vs. Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles was clever not just because of its rat-a-tat, Clerks-like dialogue but because of how it was made. Instead of putting actors into space suits and shooting out in some desert, the buddies, who would the same year form a company called Rooster Teeth, animated their footage using the videogame “Halo.” This made the visuals in the videos instantly recognizable to legions of gamers. The funny lines featuring bored, goofy soldiers fighting a nonsensical war did the rest.

By the time I caught up with these guys, including founders Burnie Burns, Gus Sorola and Matt Hullum a short time after that, they were busy, but still very small-time. I visited their headquarters, a small apartment in the tiny suburb of Buda where they recorded lines in a closet when a train wasn’t passing nearby on the train tracks just outside their makeshift workspace.

Over the next two decades, Rooster Teeth would go from a group of friends with some very funny video ideas to a huge company that employed hundreds. They moved to real offices, hired animators and writers, and came early to the YouTube revolution with bite-sized scripted and unscripted shows that turned Burnie, Gus, Hullum, and a bunch of new video creators, podcasters, and animation producers into online celebrities.

Not all the projects they worked on succeeded: they cut bait on a lot of series that didn’t work. But their success rate for a while was astonishing. They hired the late animator Monty Oum who caught lightning in a bottle with his anime show RWBY. They pushed out popular gaming-related shows like Let’s Play, Achievement Hunter and The Slow Mo Guys over the years. The online success led to offline events including their annual RTX convention, which peaked at around 65,000 attendees in 2018.

They made video games. They made a full-length big-screen movie, Lazer Team and then a sequel to that movie. Rooster Teeth made its own streaming app and bet on itself to continue growing its fan base, widening its reach with projects like gen:LOCK, which starred Michael B. Jordan, David Tennant and Dakota Fanning.

But despite the studio’s ability to seemingly stay ahead of web video trends, the wheels eventually came off. The scrappy local video startup got too big to stay indie. It first was bought by the company Fullscreen in 2014, then ended up in the ownership of AT&T’s Otter Media before AT&T itself was swallowed up by Warner Bros. Discovery.

Internally, the company over the years suffered from growing pains and weathered several scandals. Rooster Teeth was at one point juggling several different businesses and types of content productions across multiple locations with about 400 employees. Its plan to bring all those employees never seemed to come into fruition and it started facing some of the same cutbacks and audience retention issues that other streaming content companies are facing. Rooster Teeth took its content from YouTube to its own website and tried to keep its going with a sponsorship model, but that apparently didn’t save the business.

Last week, Warner announced that while Rooster Teeth’s popular podcast network will continue, its other operations will wind down and the brand will be shuttered, with more than 100 employees losing their jobs. A final season of “Red vs. Blue” is apparently still going to see the light, but it’s unclear what will happened toother Rooster Teeth franchises.

21 years is a long time for a new-media empire to exist, let alone to create so many movies, shows, podcasts, games, live events and, perhaps its biggest contribution to the web, all the fandoms that sprung up around Rooster Teeth’s prolific output.

A few days after the news broke, Rooster Teeth staffers put out two-hour stream about what’s happening. Gone were a lot of the faces most associated with the early days of Rooster Teeth, replaced by newer generations of hosts and content creators and the last general manager of the company, Jordan Levin.

Speaking for the team, Levin said that the 21-year run is anything but a failure: Rooster Teeth’s influence and a lot of its library of shows will continue to live on for a long time to come.