Rooster Teeth

• 1. Introduction

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  Rooster Teeth Productions launched in April 2003 with a web series set in a box canyon, two squads of soldiers arguing about almost nothing. That first production, Red vs. Blue, pulled 20,000 downloads in a single day. The six founders had not expected it to last beyond eight episodes. What happened instead was two decades of animation, live events, podcasts, video games, and original films, all built from Austin, Texas, by a group who had started out reviewing video games while drinking. The questions worth asking: how did a parody machinima series become the seed of a media company with over 45 million YouTube subscribers? What held it together, and what finally tore it apart?

• 2. Drunk Gamers to Rooster Teeth

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  Before there was a company, there was a website called drunkgamers.com, where Burnie Burns, Geoff Ramsey (then going by Geoff Fink), Gustavo Sorola, Dan Godwin, and Jason Saldaña posted video game reviews while intoxicated. They tried to get free games from developers, and according to Ramsey, they "incurred the wrath" of several of those developers in the process. The name change from Drunk Gamers to Rooster Teeth was driven by practicality: no one would give games or advertising to something with "drunk" in the title. Burns described the new name as a way to signal they were going to do "more than that." The name itself is a euphemism for the insult "cockbite," which Burns used in the original Red vs. Blue trailer and called a "touchstone for the audience."

  Burns and Matt Hullum had an earlier collaboration as well. While attending the University of Texas at Austin, they made a 1997 independent film called The Schedule with actor Joel Heyman. That film helped Hullum and Heyman find work in Los Angeles but had limited broader success. Hullum would later become CEO of Rooster Teeth. Heyman, whose connection with Burns and Hullum stretched back to that student film, became one of the six original founders. The early server costs for hosting Red vs. Blue were significant enough that the founders introduced paid "Sponsorships" in 2003 to keep the lights on, paying a co-location facility $13,000 to host their own videos. That membership program eventually evolved into a subscription tier called FIRST, which would later sit at the center of the company's financial collapse.

• 3. Red vs. Blue and the Machinima Era

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  Red vs. Blue tells the story of two groups of soldiers trapped in a desolate box canyon, fighting a civil war over essentially nothing. The parody target was science-fiction films, military games, and military life. Rooster Teeth shot it using the video game Halo, a technique called machinima, which uses game engines as filmmaking tools. The series is now ranked the third longest-running episodic web series of all time.

  The company extended machinima beyond Red vs. Blue into several other projects. In 2005, working with Maybeck Productions, they made PANICS using the game F.E.A.R., a four-episode series about a military team sent to investigate a paranormal disturbance. That mini-series won Best Writing at the 2005 Machinima Film Festival. In 2005 they also collaborated with Paul Marino on Strangerhood Studios, a spin-off commissioned by the Independent Film Channel. That project became the first machinima series ever commissioned for broadcast and took home Best Editing at the same festival. In mid-2006, Electronic Arts hired Rooster Teeth to direct television commercials for Madden NFL 07 and NCAA Football 07. The Madden campaign generated controversy when Indianapolis Colts tight end Dallas Clark objected to how he was depicted, stating he had not seen the commercial but it made him "look like a punk." Rooster Teeth responded by releasing a director's cut in which Clark dominates every position on the field.

• 4. Building the Community

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  On the 4th of October 2004, Rooster Teeth launched a community website and social networking platform after closing their phpBB forums. Burns articulated the philosophy in 2016: "we've always believed we have to have our own corner on the web... we try to have RoosterTeeth.com be our destination." By the time of the company's peak, the site was home to over 2 million registered users, of whom around 135,000 paid for FIRST memberships.

  The community was not just an audience; it fed the company's workforce. Burns estimated in 2014 that "at least a third" of the then-85-person company had started as fans. Among those hired from the community were illustrator Ben McSweeney, who designed the company's logo after Burns found him on the community forums in April 2003; RWBY writer and director Kerry Shawcross; Achievement Hunter members Ray Narvaez Jr. and Jeremy Dooley; and Rooster Teeth Animated Adventures creator Jordan Cwierz. The community was also recruited for production. At RTX 2011, roughly 400 community members dressed as zombies for an episode of the live-action series Immersion. The following year, 1,800 RTX attendees served as extras for the post-apocalyptic short series Day 5, which required shutting down a main road in downtown Austin. In 2016, Fullscreen CEO George Strompolos credited the "insanely powerful community" as a key reason they chose to acquire the company.

• 5. Animation, Films, and Expansion

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  RWBY (pronounced "Ruby") premiered at RTX on the 5th of July 2013, with the episode released on the Rooster Teeth site on the 18th of July 2013. Created and directed by animator Monty Oum and written by Miles Luna and Kerry Shawcross, the series is set in the world of Remnant, populated by supernatural forces and creatures called the Grimm. On the 1st of February 2015, Oum died from a severe allergic reaction during a medical procedure. The series he created continued and eventually became valuable enough that Warner Bros. Discovery gauged buyer interest in it when the company was winding down. In July 2024, the RWBY franchise was sold to Viz Media.

  The feature film Lazer Team marked a different kind of expansion. An Indiegogo campaign launched in June 2014 hit its $650,000 target within 11 hours and ultimately raised just under $2.5 million, making it the second-most-funded film project in Indiegogo history at that time. Production started on the 9th of October 2014, and the film premiered at Fantastic Fest on the 24th of September 2015 before a theatrical release on the 27th of January 2016. Rooster Teeth Animation, founded in 2014 with Gray Haddock as department head, also produced Camp Camp, gen:LOCK, and Nomad of Nowhere, while the company developed original IP video games including RWBY: Grimm Eclipse and the uncooperative multiplayer shooter Vicious Circle, released on Steam on the 13th of August 2019.

• 6. RTX and Live Events

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  RTX began in May 2011 as a small community gathering planned for around 200 attendees. Within minutes of tickets going on sale online, over 500 were accidentally sold. The event outgrew that early ambiguity quickly: by 2012 it had moved to the Austin Convention Center, and by 2015, attendance had reached 45,000. The convention expanded internationally, adding Sydney and London editions, and ran every year from 2011 to 2023.

  The 2011 RTX session also served as a production set. The Immersion episode filmed that day involved Geoff Ramsey and Gus Sorola defending themselves from 400 zombie extras drawn from the audience. Burns credited the company's early fan-organized events, including community-run gatherings such as RvBTO in Toronto and RvBCanWest in Vancouver, as the origin of RTX. A separate live touring event called Let's Play Live debuted on the 20th of February 2015 at the Moody Theater in Austin, featuring Achievement Hunter members performing comedy and playing games before a live audience. Beginning in 2016, Let's Play Live toured multiple cities across North America. Rooster Teeth also hosted annual Extra Life charity streams, raising over $1.2 million in 2017, over $1.4 million in 2018, and over $1.2 million in 2019, all benefiting Dell Children's Medical Center of Central Texas.

• 7. Corporate Ownership and Decline

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  In November 2014, Fullscreen acquired Rooster Teeth for an undisclosed amount. Burns said at the time that the company needed "the resources and tools" to compete against what he described as their real competition: Netflix, HBO, and Amazon. In December 2018, Otter Media restructured Fullscreen, placing Rooster Teeth under Ellation alongside Crunchyroll and VRV. The following year, the company laid off approximately 50 employees, representing 13% of the workforce, announced on the 12th of September 2019 by Hullum. Shortly after, Jordan Levin was named general manager, and most of the founders stepped back from executive roles. Burns resigned in June 2020, and Heyman also said he was laid off that same month.

  On the 6th of March 2024, Levin notified employees the company would close over the coming months. The shutdown announcement cited "fundamental shifts in consumer behavior and monetization across platforms, advertising, and patronage." It was reported that subscribers to the FIRST service had fallen to around one-quarter of their peak, and that Rooster Teeth had been unprofitable for a decade. Most employees left on the 10th of May 2024, and the website displayed a final goodbye message on the 15th of May 2024. In April 2024, The Roost Podcast Network was sold to Night, a talent management company. The RWBY franchise followed to Viz Media in July 2024. In February 2025, Burns acquired the Rooster Teeth brand and a portion of its remaining intellectual property through his company Box Canyon Productions, with a reimagining of The Schedule, the 1997 student film, listed among the planned projects.