Rooster Teeth Productions

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Type	Private
Industry	Machinima, Gaming, Film making
Founded	2003
Headquarters	Austin, Texas
Key people	Burnie Burns Joel Heyman Matt Hullum Geoff Ramsey Gustavo Sorola Gavin Free Michael Jones[disambiguation needed ] Ray Narvaez Jr. Jack Patillo Brandon Farmahini Chris Demarais Miles Luna
Products	Red vs. Blue The Strangerhood Other machinima Rooster Teeth Shorts Rooster Teeth Comics The Rooster Teeth Podcast Achievement Hunter Immersion
Website	http://www.roosterteeth.com/

Rooster Teeth Productions is a production group from Austin, Texas that specializes in the creation of live action shorts, animated pieces and machinima, or films created using real-time, interactive engines from computer and video games. The name Rooster Teeth is a euphemism for Cockbite, an insult used in one of the group's trailers.^[1] Originally, the group ran a website called drunkgamers.com, a reviewing site in which Burnie Burns, Gustavo Sorola, and Geoff Ramsey reviewed video games while drunk in order to try to get games from video game developers. Burnie Burns also created voice-over-enhanced gameplay videos of Bungie Studios' popular first-person shooter video game Halo: Combat Evolved. Eventually, these videos led to the creation of Red vs. Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles, an award-winning comedic science-fiction series that was announced in May 2002, premiered on April 1, 2003 and ended on June 28, 2007, with the release of episode 100. Red vs. Blue gained a huge fan base and, while it is still ongoing and continues to be the main focus of Rooster Teeth's work, they have also branched off into numerous separate projects, including live-action shorts.

With the conclusion of Immersion on January 5, 2011, Rooster Teeth began production of Red vs. Blue's ninth season.^[2] The first episode was released on June 14, 2011, and the season concluded on November 22, 2011.The tenth season of Red vs. Blue premiered on Memorial Day 2012, and is currently in progress. Noteworthy is a voice appearance by guest star Elijah Wood, star of the blockbuster The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

As of April 25, 2012 Rooster Teeth's Youtube channel has received over one billion views.

Early company history[link]

While attending the University of Texas at Austin, Burnie Burns and Matt Hullum collaborated with actor Joel Heyman on a 1997 independent film called The Schedule.^[3] The film helped Hullum and Heyman to find work in Los Angeles, California, but otherwise had limited success.^[4] Working for a local company named Telenetwork, Burns later met Geoff Ramsey (then named "Geoff Fink"), Gustavo Sorola, and Jason Saldańa, and the four formed drunkgamers.com, a website where the four reviewed various video games while drunk.^[5] According to Ramsey, the group tried to receive free games to review, but "incurred the wrath" of several game developers in doing so.^[6]

One of the non-gameplay videos that the drunkgamers crew created during this time was a live-action parody of the Apple Switch ad campaign. This video featured Sorola as the main actor, used Peter Tchaikovsky's "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" as background music, and focused on the lack of games available for the Apple Macintosh computer.^[7]

Machinima[link]

[edit] Red vs. Blue

Responsible for reviewing games on the Microsoft Xbox, Burns regularly posted gameplay videos of Halo: Combat Evolved and eventually began to add humor to them with voice-overs.^[6] The idea for a series came next,^[6] and a trailer for Red vs. Blue was posted in 2002.^[8] Six months later, the drunkgamers website closed. However, the following week, the magazine Computer Gaming World asked permission to include the Switch parody in a CD to be included with an issue. To take advantage of the resultant publicity, Rooster Teeth re-encoded the video to point to redvsblue.com, and revived the Red vs. Blue project.^[1] Burns also contacted his old friends Matt Hullum and Joel Heyman and convinced them to work on the series.^[9]

In a parody of science fiction films and games^[10] and of military life,^[11] Red vs. Blue tells the story of two groups of soldiers fighting a civil war in a desolate box canyon. Initially, Rooster Teeth expected the series to consist of only six to eight episodes.^[12] However, the series became popular quickly, receiving 20,000 downloads in a single day.^[13] Accordingly, Burns conceived an extension of the plot.^[14] The series' fifth and supposedly final season officially ended with episode 100, released on June 28, 2007.^[15] However, the group has continued to release new material, including four additional complete seasons (seasons 6-9) and numerous PSA announcements. These PSAs included a five-part mini-series to promote Halo 3.^[16]

In late 2009, animator Monty Oum was hired by RT after his popular Haloid video caught their attention, with his employment being announced at PAX East 2010. He provides pre-rendered character animations to achieve action scenes or character movements in Red vs. Blue that are unable to be done using just the Halo engine. Season eight of Red vs. Blue is the first season of the series to make extensive use of animation, and Burnie revealed in an interview that he and Oum are in the process of creating a completely animated series with no machinima elements.^[17]

Red vs. Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles won several awards, including four from the Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences.^[18] Writing for the New York Times, Clive Thompson credited the series as the first machinima production "to break out of the underground".^[19] Red vs. Blue videos have been shown in Xbox demo kiosks,^[20] and content that is included with the premium "Legendary" edition of Halo 3.^[21] Members of the cast were also featured in an Easter egg in the campaign mode of Halo 3. Their relationship with Halo developer Bungie has grown to the point that Rooster Teeth commonly produces videos on Bungie's behalf, such as promotional series for Halo 3: ODST and Halo: Reach in August 2009 and August 2010, respectively, and a video honoring 'Bungie Day' in July 2010 and again for 2011.

Besides The Blood Gulch Chronicles, Rooster Teeth Productions' other Red vs. Blue productions consist of three mini-series—Out of Mind, Recovery One, and Relocated—and three full-length series, Reconstruction, Recreation and Revelation, which compose the Recollections trilogy.

On March 28, 2011, Rooster Teeth released the trailer for "Red vs. Blue" season 9, which was released in Summer 2011, continues the adventures of the Blood Gulch crew along with agents from Project Freelancer. New episodes are released every Monday (except every 4 weeks there's a PSA) at roosterteeth.com^[22] Red vs. Blue: Season 9 began on June 14, 2011^[23]and concluded on November 22, 2011. A tenth season is in the works and a teaser was revealed at PAX east 2012.

Other machinima[link]

In May 2004, at the E3 gaming convention, Rooster Teeth was introduced to The Sims 2 and realized that the game would be suitable for a series that parodied reality television; Electronic Arts agreed.^[24] The result was The Strangerhood, a comedy series that centers on eight strangers who awake one day unaware of where they are or how they arrived there.^[25] Its first season of 17 episodes completed on April 27, 2006.^[26] In 2005, the group collaborated with Paul Marino^[27] on Strangerhood Studios, a spin-off commissioned by the Independent Film Channel.^[28] This spin-off was the first machinima series to be commissioned for broadcast^[28] and won an award for Best Editing at the 2005 Machinima Film Festival.^[29]

Also in 2006, Rooster Teeth partnered with Maybeck Productions to create PANICS, a short series that chronicles the misadventures of Bravo Team a group of soldiers sent to investigate a paranormal disturbance .^[28] The four publicly released episodes were released between September 27, 2005 and October 18, 2005,^[30] and a prequel was released with F.E.A.R. - Director's Edition.^[31] The mini-series won an award for Best Writing at the 2005 Machinima Film Festival.^[29]

In mid-2006, Electronic Arts commissioned Rooster Teeth to direct^[32] commercials for their EA Sports brand of games, including Madden NFL 2007 and NCAA Football 2007, for broadcast on television.^[33] Rooster Teeth released some of this work on their website.^[34] In late November 2006, controversy arose over a Madden NFL 07 commercial, when Indianapolis Colts tight end Dallas Clark complained about his depiction in the commercial.^[35] Hit and tackled multiple times in the advertisement by Philadelphia Eagles players, Clark stated, "I haven't seen the commercial, but I'm upset about it. It makes me look like a punk."^[35] In response, Rooster Teeth posted a director's cut, in which Clark plays and dominates every position.^[36]

Rooster Teeth's other machinima productions are 1-800-Magic, a four-episode mini-series created in 2006 using the game Shadowrun, and Supreme Surrender, a 2008 mini-series made using Supreme Commander.

Live action[link]

[edit] Captain Dynamic

In early 2009, Rooster Teeth first ventured into live-action with a mini-series to promote the online game "City of Heroes", entitled Captain Dynamic. It was based around a team of writers who are hired to use the new content creation tools in the game to promote the worst superhero in the world, Captain Dynamic. Directed by Matt Hullum and written by Burnie Burns, the series starred Ed Robertson of Barenaked Ladies, Rooster Teeth employee actor Joel Heyman, and actor Shannon McCormick.^[37] Rooster Teeth staff and guest actors were used in minor and extra roles. The series also led to the release of an iPhone app called the Awesome Button.

[edit] Rooster Teeth Shorts

Following the positive reception of Captain Dynamic, Rooster Teeth began producing another live-action series, Rooster Teeth Shorts, a sketch comedy which parodies life at their offices in a similar fashion to the webcomic. The series features the staff of Rooster Teeth, who all play caricatures of themselves, as well as occasional appearances from voice actors from some of their machinima series. The first season ran for twenty episodes, which along with the Captain Dynamic mini-series has been released on DVD.

The second season of RT Shorts debuted on April 23, 2010, with new episodes released weekly via the Rooster Teeth website^[38] until a hiatus during late July 2010, during which the team focused all their efforts towards Red vs. Blue episodes. With production on Red vs. Blue complete, weekly RT Shorts episodes began again on August 28, 2010 until the second season's conclusion with its twenty-fourth episode and DVD release in early December. Season 3's DVD can be purchased at a discount when bundled with Season 9.

Shortly before season two's conclusion, Rooster Teeth collaborated with the team behind Mega64, a video game centered comedy series. Together they produced four Rooster Teeth Shorts episodes, which were released on the Rooster Teeth website as the beginning of season three.

[edit] Immersion

Immersion is a series in which Burnie and Griffon test the concepts of video games in real life, such as whether the heckling that sometimes occurs in multiplayer video games would negatively affect the performance of real soldiers. Burnie joked in the company's podcast that the series started as an "elaborate way for [them] to do fun stuff and get paid for it".^[39] Geoff and Gus were the test subjects in all but one episode.

During PAX East in late March 2010, Rooster Teeth teased the series with a pilot episode that tested how easy it would be to drive a car from a third-person perspective. Nothing was mentioned of Immersion until October 2010, when Burnie stated during the company's podcast, The Rooster Teeth Podcast, that production had begun on further episodes.

Soon after, on November 23, 2010, the company released pictures on Reddit of a door in their office turned into a safe-room door from the video game Left 4 Dead in an effort to build hype for the series' debut the following day. The post became the most popular post of the day on Reddit.^[40] Rooster Teeth re-released a tweaked pilot episode the following day to begin the weekly series, which concluded with its seventh episode on January 5, 2011. While further episodes are not currently planned, Rooster Teeth hasn't ruled them out. Burnie stated in his journal, "...you never know what the future might bring".^[41] However, a revisit of this series looks even more unlikely after the departure of Griffon from Rooster Teeth.

A new episode of Immersion premiered on June 17, 2011, after five months on hiatus. The episode's filming took place on May 29, 2011, during Rooster Teeth's convention, RTX, as well as 400 participants dressed as zombies. The episode shows Geoff and Gus defending themselves from a horde of zombies.^[42]

PastCast[link]

A parody of historical events done in the style of modern vlogging on YouTube. This series marks the launch of a new channel from Rooster Teeth Productions called Rooster Teeth Shows.

Future projects[link]

Rooster Teeth moved into a larger office in early September 2010, which they have made into "half a warehouse" in order to allow plenty of room for live action sets.^[43] In the future, they hope to produce a live-action feature-length film.^[44]

Other products[link]

Webcomic[link]

In 2006, Rooster Teeth Productions formed its own webcomic series, Rooster Teeth Comics. The strip satirized the staff members in their regular daily lives, although often pushing each member's personality to the extreme for comedic effect. The humorous situations often related to real life events in the lives of the staff, or other widely recognized current events. It was drawn by Luke McKay, a member of the Rooster Teeth community, and was written by Griffon Ramsey, the wife of Geoff Ramsey. The comics were released three times a week, on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. The first four years of the comic were released in separate collected edition books. On August 20, 2011, Rooster Teeth announced that the webcomics have ended. Books 1-5 are available on iBooks for iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad.

Achievement Hunter[link]

During 2008, Geoff Ramsey's interest in gaming achievements led to the realisation that there wasn't a community-based achievements website, and in turn Achievement Hunter was created, which shares the design, user profiles and forums of the main Rooster Teeth website. The site is run by two full-time Rooster Teeth staff Geoff Ramsey and Jack Pattillo, who regularly release achievement guides, easter egg videos and other game-related videos, and select volunteers from the Rooster Teeth community help moderate the website. The most frequent videos come from employees and some of the said community members Jack, Geoff, Ray, Fragger, Michael Jones, and Mike. Unlike many other achievement-dedicated websites, Achievement Hunter is highly dependent on public contributions and so has guides across many different games and platforms, allowing the site to expand its focus from Xbox 360 games to those on PC, PS3, Steam, iPhone and Windows Phone 7.

In early 2010, Ramsey and Pattillo started a weekly series called Achievement Hunter Weekly Update, commonly abbreviated to AHWU. In it, Ramsey talks about upcoming games while Pattillo talks about gaming news. In line with the community-focus of the Rooster Teeth and Achievement Hunter websites, and similarly to The Rooster Teeth Podcast, each episode's title sequence is created by a member of the community. Late 2010 saw the introduction of two more regular series, Fails of the Weak and Achievement HORSE. The former is a compilation of mistakes and glitches in Halo: Reach with commentary from Geoff and Jack, and in the latter Geoff and Jack play H-O-R-S-E using obstacle courses built with the Forge mode of Halo: Reach and now the level editor in the motorbike platform racing game Trials: Evolution. They further published their videos both on their website, and on other media-sharing sites such as YouTube. Another series is "Rage Quit" in which they take their "test subject", Michael, and have him play a very difficult or very annoying game until "he eventually has an aneurysm and we have to rush him to the emergency room.", in Ramsey's words. In August 2011, Michael became a full-time staff member at Achievement Hunter.

In 2011, Achievement Hunter debuted three new series for its audience. The first, titled This is... featured members of the staff introducing an upcoming gaming title (either Retail or XBLA) and premiered in early March for the game Dynasty Warriors 7. It comes out a day or two after the game comes out. The second series, titled Things to do in: was created in November 2011 and presented viewers and gamers with fun and interesting things to do in games like Saint's Row: The Third and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. The final series, Let's Play, began airing in early December. In this series staff members play different games every week . Things to do in: comes out every Wednesday and Let's Play comes out every Friday. This is... would eventually form a spin-off series known as A Look Back At..., in which members of the Achievement Hunter crew re-introduce old Xbox 360 games that may have been overlooked in their release. This series is also released on Fridays.

Grifball[link]

In late 2007, Rooster Teeth created a Halo 3 multiplayer game-type called Grifball, played on the map Foundry. The idea for the game came from a joke that was cut from an episode promoting the Heroic Map Pack, in which Grif creates the "laziest gametype in the world"; a round of capture the flag where the flag spawns right next to the capture point. Burnie realized that the frantic nature of only having seconds to stop the flag reaching its destination was fun and changed it to the "Assault" gametype so that each team had a point to defend, as well as spawning the players with weapons.^[45]

The name "Grifball" comes from a gag in season four of Red vs. Blue when Sarge exclaims, "This is the best game since Grifball", while trying to shoot Grif down from a ledge. In reference to the joke, Burnie changed the game settings so that players who pick up the ball turn orange, Grif's armor color. Players who pick up the ball will either explode when they plant the bomb or will be killed by an enemy, referencing Sarge's hatred of Grif.

The gametype became so popular that Bungie began to regularly include the gametype in the Double EXP Weekends playlist of Halo 3 matchmaking, making it a ranked playlist for a limited time in December, 2009,^[46] and adding Grifball courts with identical specifications to the original into other maps. In February 2011, Bungie added Grifball to the matchmaking community playlist, as a permanently available gametype.^[47]

Rooster Teeth has organized their own official Grifball leagues, covering the United States, the European Union and Oceania.^[48] McFarlane Toys also released a Grifball action figure. Rooster Teeth created a machinima miniseries based on Grifball, titled Grifball: Expansion, which follows an untalented Grifball team. It was distributed via Halo Waypoint and ran for three episodes. The follow-up miniseries, titled Grifball: Zero Tolerance, Grifball: Franchise Player, and Grifball: Double Agent were released a short time later and also ran for three episodes.

RTX[link]

On May 27–29, 2011 Rooster Teeth held their first official community event in Austin, Texas. Initially planned as a small gathering for 200 people,^[49] demand was so high that over 500 tickets were accidentally sold within minutes of being made available online.^[50] Attendees were treated to a tour of the office, an exclusive t-shirt and the chance to take part in a special episode of Immersion. RTX 2012 will take place on July 7th and 8th.

The Rooster Teeth Podcast[link]

On December 9, 2008, after temporarily reviving a feature on their website from their previous website, drunkgamers.com, where the staff talked about different topics of the week while inebriated with accompanying responses in text with pictures, Rooster Teeth released their first audio podcast, The Drunk Tank, available for download through iTunes, Zune Marketplace and their website. It has since become one of the more popular features of the site, at one point becoming the #1 most downloaded podcast on iTunes, as well as a featured podcast in the iTunes Store. New episodes have been released regularly every Wednesday since April 10, 2009, with occasional special episodes or multiple releases in one week. On June 23, 2010, the podcast changed to a .m4a "enhanced" format which allows listeners to use an interactive "link dump" to be able to view more information on the topics of the week's podcast. In July 2010, Jordan Cwierz, aka JayOrDan, released the first Drunk Tank Animated Adventure (now called Rooster Teeth Animated Adventures). In October 2011 Cwierz was officially hired to produce the animated shorts full time as a feature of the podcast.^[51] On September 28, 2011 Sorola announced The Drunk Tank was to be re-christened The Rooster Teeth Podcast to create a more unified public image for the company.^[52] On August 18, 2010, the podcast was officially implemented into the Rooster Teeth website. To celebrate their 100th episode on February 9, 2011 they released their first ever video podcast which featured Gus Sorola, Geoff Ramsey, Burnie Burns, and Griffon Ramsey.^[53] On January 18, 2012, the podcast gained its first sponsor, Audible.com.^[54]

Since its inception, the podcast has usually featured three or four of the Rooster Teeth staff members as well as the occasional guest such as their musical composer Nico Audy-Rowland or friends or family of the staff members. The main staff members of the podcast include Sorola, Ramsey and Burns with heavy recurring roles from Joel Heyman, Jack Pattillo and Griffon Ramsey (until her departure from the company). The podcast is thus largely comedic commentary on the popular culture of the week, including video games, recent news, website features, sports and upcoming projects as well as highlighting fan-made projects. The podcast also goes onto tangents on subjects not related to what the podcast says it is about in the description. On the Rooster Teeth website the subjects discussed in the podcast can be found under the podcast tab. The podcast regularly pokes fun at the Rooster Teeth members, such as Jack's sudden aggression over small things, and Geoff's tattoos. On October 11, 2011, Griffon Ramsey announced she had quit Rooster Teeth Productions to pursue other careers.^[55]

Pilots[link]

[edit] Red vs. Blue: Animated

Red vs. Blue: Animated was a joint production between Rooster Teeth and animation studio Humoring the Fates. The test piece was screened at PAX 2008. The piece sees Church, Simmons and Grif attempting to battle through a Covenant base to free Sarge and Tex from imprisonment.

At PAX East 2010, it was strongly implied by the staff that Red vs. Blue: Animated did not get picked up. Geoff Ramsey commented, "We're just too lazy to work on it—we like our own schedule; we just can't work with someone elses timeframe." At the 2010 San Diego Comic-Con, Rooster Teeth declared that a lot of the ideas and aspects of Red vs. Blue: Animated had been assimilated into the original Red vs. Blue machinima series through the addition of pre-rendered CGI. It was also said that the CGI elements added to Red vs. Blue were more inline with where they wanted to take the series in the first place and, as such, they have no plans to pursue this avenue at any point in the foreseeable future.

Filmography[link]

Notes[link]

References[link]

Further reading[link]

External links[link]

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