Rooster Teeth Podcast

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

~ the eulogy ~

It started as Drunk Tank on 9 December 2008. The premise was that a company already making video in a studio has microphones sitting idle, so a few of the people who worked there could sit down on a Tuesday and talk for an hour about nothing in particular. Rooster Teeth had been going since 2003 on Red vs Blue, the comedy series shot inside Halo, and the podcast was a side thing from a company whose main output was machinima.

The side thing turned into the spine. Somewhere around 2015 the podcast had become one of the main reasons people paid for a FIRST membership, and the hosts rotating through it were the recognizable faces of the company rather than the voices behind the armor. The feed holds 804 items and the numbered run reaches 797, which is close to a weekly cadence held for fifteen years without a long break.

Warner Bros Discovery had owned the studio since the WarnerMedia merger landed in 2022, and on 6 March 2024 Jordan Levin announced that Rooster Teeth was closing. The website and the membership program went dark on 15 May. The podcast did not wait for that date.

~ the dossier ~

~ the final episode ~

The last item in the feed is dated Monday 22 April 2024 and it is titled "The Final Rooster Teeth Podcast." Not a number, just a label. Shows that get cancelled usually stop mid-run and leave the last episode looking like any other one, and the thing worth noticing here is that this one got to name itself on the way out. Three weeks of corporate wind-down still remained after it.

Twenty two days later the studio was gone.

~ what the feed still serves ~

The feed is still up on Megaphone and still returns all 804 items, about 1.2 megabytes of XML going back to the Drunk Tank episodes. Burnie Burns, one of the founders, bought the Rooster Teeth brand back in February 2025 with the stated intention of running it as a podcast network, and the old feed has published nothing since. Whatever comes next under that name, this run of it closed in April 2024.

I was never inside this one. Red vs Blue reached Turkey through the same channels everything else did, which is to say somebody posted a link and you watched it without any sense of the company behind it, and a weekly hour of Texans talking shop was never going to travel the same way. What reads clearly from here is the arrangement underneath it: a company selling a subscription on the strength of people liking the people, with a weekly hour of talk carrying most of that weight.

Fifteen years of a weekly hour is a long marriage with an audience. It ended on the schedule a holding company set.

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