Achievement Hunter

» see achievementhunter.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

it opened as a reference work and closed as a sitcom. in july 2008 geoff ramsey noticed there was no community site anywhere for xbox achievements, a gap he cared about because he and burnie burns, then running rooster teeth, were racing each other for gamerscore after hours. achievement hunter went up on 6 july as a database of guides for unlocking specific achievements, with ramsey and jack pattillo filming the walkthroughs.

the guides stopped being the point around december 2011, when the team started posting let's play videos instead. by 2012 there was a weekly minecraft series and a weekly grand theft auto one, released on fridays and mondays, and the appeal had nothing to do with instruction any more. it was six people in an austin office talking over each other for forty minutes while failing at something.

i played games in the internet cafe years and then stopped having time for them. watching other people play one, weekly, for a decade, is a habit i never picked up and do not really understand from the outside. what is visible from here is the shape of it: a product that survived fifteen years by quietly turning into something else, and then could not survive the thing it had turned into.

~ the dossier ~

~ achievement city ~

the minecraft series ran inside one shared world called achievement city, the downtown core of which gavin free and geoff ramsey built over roughly twenty hours. the crew competed there for possession of the tower of pimps, four gold blocks stacked on a block of obsidian, which had no function in the game and was the only prize that mattered for six years.

the map was retired in april 2018 after accumulating too many bugs to play, and the series moved to a replacement world called achieveland. in november 2019 matt bragg rebuilt achievement city block by block inside the new world as a museum. that is roughly the point where you can see what the product had become. the games were a set for a workplace comedy whose audience had been watching the same room for seven years.

~ the last three years ~

in october 2020 ryan haywood left after explicit photographs leaked and accusations followed that he had groomed fans, some of them underage. rooster teeth said within a day that the two had parted ways over a breach of the code of conduct. pattillo and michael jones came back on stream to denounce him and to announce that videos featuring him were being pulled, which meant deleting years of the archive people had subscribed for.

after that the cast came apart in the ordinary way. jeremy dooley dropped to a recurring role in 2021 after moving back to massachusetts, and matt bragg's full-time job was dissolved in 2022. the people still there had started other things. ramsey and free were making a podcast. pattillo had moved across to inside gaming. the channel kept publishing, but the thing that had made it work, a fixed cast in a fixed room, was gone.

~ the last video ~

rooster teeth announced the dissolution on 18 september 2023 in a reddit post from the supervising producer. the remaining cast were moving to a new channel called dogbark, and the let's play brand was being handed over to ramsey and free's podcast.

the final video went up on 1 october 2023: a let's play of burnout paradise, going for the millionaire's club achievement, with ramsey, pattillo, michael jones and trevor collins. burnout paradise had been the game in the first video too. dogbark published its own last video on 21 april 2024, six weeks after warner bros discovery announced rooster teeth was being wound down, and that july the skeleton crew left behind moved roughly 4,600 old achievement hunter videos off the rooster teeth channel onto the achievement hunter one, so that the archive would at least sit in the right place.

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