Rooster Teeth

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

~ the last words ~

the first time i saw red vs blue was probably 2004 or '05, a.wmv pulled off the wire at someone's pc in an internet cafe in ankara. it played for a couple minutes, two grey suits arguing about why they were standing on a hill in a video game, i thought it was funny and forgot about it. that was my whole orbit around rooster teeth.

anyway, rooster teeth started on april 1 2003 in austin texas with burnie burns and five other cofounders. the original product was red vs blue, a comedy shot inside halo: combat evolved by puppeteering the player characters and recording the screen. machinima as a form had existed since quake, but red vs blue was the first show that ran weekly and built a recognizable cast of voices. by '04 it was the most-traded video file at lan parties and on file-share sites, often passed around before youtube even existed as a destination.

i was not in the rooster teeth fandom by any reading. honestly, that fandom was a specific texas-flavored thing. the company opened the rt forum and then started the rt podcast in december '08. achievement hunter launched the same year as the gaming arm, which became its own larger channel within a few years. by 2011 the company had its own annual convention in austin called rtx and a paid first program that read like a small cable subscription, a couple hundred thousand people who wanted episodes early and ad-free.

this part you had to be in the english internet for, and i was. still, the studio absorption pattern is what carried it the rest of the way. fullscreen bought rooster teeth in november '14 and rolled it into otter media's ellation by late 2018. the warnermedia merger pulled the whole stack into warner bros discovery by april '22. jordan levin announced the closure on march 6 2024. the site and the first program went dark on may 15.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

red vs blue is the thing rooster teeth will be remembered for. the series ran from april '03 into the late twenties before the studio closed, the format defined what machinima could look like as a weekly comedy rather than a one-off short. the joke was always about two squads of soldiers who had forgotten why they were fighting, with the camera locked to the helmet of one of them. that is still the dominant memory of halo for a lot of people who never finished the campaign.

the rest of the catalog was a slow expansion outward. rwby was an anime-styled cg series that ran from 2013 with its own large fandom. achievement hunter became the let's-play arm, funhaus came in via a 2015 absorption of inside gaming staff who had been pushed out of break.com. each piece had its own audience, the holding shape never quite fit together as a single brand.

~ the fall ~

by 2019 the warner side of the merged otter media stack was bigger than the rooster teeth piece and the company kept getting reorganized. layoffs ran in 2020 and again in 2023. monty oum, the rwby creator, had died in february '15 at thirty three from a routine medical procedure. burnie burns left in 2020. by 2023 the founder bench was mostly gone and the company was a wholly-owned subsidiary inside a much larger media holding (or whatever it was called now).

david zaslav took over warner bros discovery in april '22 and started a multi-year cost cut. rooster teeth was a fit on that list, twenty one years old with a long-running paid audience but no obvious place in a discovery channel and cnn portfolio. the march 6 2024 announcement was a six week wind down. the website served read-only archives until may 15 then redirected to a goodbye page.

~ what got buried with it ~

burnie burns acquired the rooster teeth brand back through his box canyon productions vehicle in february 2025, ten months after the shutdown, with the stated plan of running it as a smaller indie podcast network. the youtube channel and the back catalog moved with the brand. it is not the same operation, more a memorial-with-a-pulse than a continuation. the warner bros discovery shaped rooster teeth, the one that ran rtx and the first program, ended on may 15 2024.

i was not part of the rooster teeth audience, but the closure was a noticeable event in the english web. it was one of the first deaths of a 2003-vintage video studio that had been continuously operating, longer than youtube itself had existed (youtube started in '05). the company outran most of the things that killed its peers, the machinima inc shutdown of 2019 and the fullscreen wind down a few years later. it took a corporate merger that had nothing to do with it to actually close the door.

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