The Rooster Teeth Story: The Beginning

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 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

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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.

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

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 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

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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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,

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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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, 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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

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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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, 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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

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 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 podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.