When Red vs. Blue first appeared, it hit the internet right in its sweet spot. Even more impressive was that in 2003, said sweet spot didn't even exist. Years before YouTube, the series of animated shorts— created by combining Halo multiplayer footage with overdubbed dialogue—helped cement online video as a worthwhile format. *RvB *was a ridiculous lark that embraced its own existential silliness, its protagonists locked in a contextless struggle with a bunch of identical looking people distinguished only by their armor color. It was Theatre of the Absurd by way of a LAN party, and long before gaming-based video content was a Thing, the series became a fixture of game culture, so beloved that the voice cast played minor roles in the real Halo 3.
But fourteen years is a long time. When Rooster Teeth, the company founded by Red vs Blue's creators, announced that the show's fifteenth season was premiering this month, my first reaction was they're still making that? I wanted to know how a show like that fit in today's online-video landscape, so I visited the company. And in the process, I found exactly what's most interesting about RvB in 2017: it doesn't.
These days, Red vs. Blue is filmed in a small, immaculate room in Rooster Teeth's headquarters, a nondescript office in__ a strip mall on the north side of Austin, TX. __Sixteen white Xbox Ones constitute an episode's director and cast: One of the consoles sets up shots, hosts a multiplayer match, and captures a recording, while the other 15 connected to it to provide the necessary Halo soldiers. A small group of full-time animators and technicians go over the scripts for each episode, blocking them out in digital space the way you would a stage play, and then they run through it. Animators armed with gamepads take on the roles of each character, timing everything to the pre-recorded dialogue. Like all video production, it's a matter of repetition and perfectionism. They do it, then they do it again, and again until it feels right, swearing when the takes don't go precisely as planned.
In 2003, though, things weren't quite so structured. Burnie Burns and Matt Hullum, Rooster Teeth's co-founders, had become friends at the University of Texas, and were working together on early blogs, writing about videogames and whatever else interested them. "I was really into video, so I was trying to record myself playing and post those videos on the site," says Burns, now Rooster Teeth's chief creative officer. "Realizing that I controlled these characters, that they were essentially digital puppets, was a revelation." He came up with the idea to use those digital puppets to create a primitive, but appealingly inexpensive, animation. The first episode of Red vs. Blue, "Why Are We Here?", wasn't much more than a demonstration that this was an achievable idea. "I recorded everybody's lines, then I went away for a weekend, and I came back with the first episode," he says.
The result, a conversation between two soldiers guarding a base, felt like *Waiting For Godot *with pulse rifles. "Are we the product of some cosmic coincidence," asks one of the soldiers, "or is there really a God watching everything? You know, with a plan for us and stuff. I don’t know, man, but it keeps me up at night." Burns' idea, his friends realized, worked.
He wasn't the only person who had had the idea, though. The mixture of animation and in-game tinkering, called machinima ("machine cinema"), first arose in the 1990s. Fans uploaded "demos," in-game recordings of successful tricks or speedruns, on forums dedicated to shooter games like Doom and Quake. In 1996 a Quake clan called the Rangers released "Diary of a Camper," a demo overlaid with imaginary text dialogue among the characters; it's widely considered the first example of the form.
By 2003, machinima had become an incubator for turning games into film narratives—or simply just film. Some told stories, but most were just exploratory. The creators of machinima films looked at game worlds as spaces to be toyed around with, bent and broken, and when the told stories they did so rooted in that playfulness. Warthog Jump, another seminal machinima film created by an individual named Randall Glass, was a self-described physics experiment, twisting Halo's engine to send objects hurtling across the map, to the strains of Sugar Ray, Pink Floyd, and Frank Sinatra.
Like those others,* Red vs. Blue* was interested in toying with the peculiarities of games; however, its primary focus was on telling a funny story. The early episodes were minimalist by both necessity and design, giving Burns a place to deploy his comedy writing within the limited constraints of Halo's game engine, which allowed players to run, shoot, jump, and crouch, but not much else. "We were writing a show that only had six verbs," Burns said.
Those parameters made the core elements—absurd characters, dialogue-driven comedy, and a general sense of silliness—all the more essential. Even the most iconic visual element of the show, the awkward nodding of the characters, was a happy accident. It was a glitch in the way Halo's engine worked; by looking down at a certain angle, you could force a character's model to lower their weapon without their head lowering, giving the impression of them lowering their guard. Move that perspective in just the right way, and you can get their head to bob, offering a basic impression of a person talking.
When Red vs. Blue's popularity took off, it brought machinima into the online mainstream. For a few years, scripted humor content created in and around game engines was an essential part of the gaming community landscape. When YouTube launched in 2005, it immediately became a gathering place for RvB imitators and riffers. There was Arby and the Chief, a pseudo-sitcom starring Halo action figures; *Freeman's Mind *was a playthrough of Half-Life narrated by a comedic and incredibly manic voiceover meant to represent the inner monologue of the game's famously silent protagonist Gordon Freeman. The phenomenon even spread out into sequential art with webcomics like Concerned: The Half-Life and Death of Gordon Frohman, which featured staged *Half-Life 2 *screenshots as panels. One of the first major multi-channel YouTube networks was even called Machinima, and it existed initially to collect much of this work under one creative and monetization umbrella.
Over time, though, the world of online gaming video began to embrace the fast and loose nature of streaming video—and expand away from scripted content. As game-capture technology and video editing software became more affordable, people began streaming their own playthroughs of videogames, and the Let's Play format was born.
Rooster Teeth continued to produce episodes of Red vs. Blue, but the company began branching out into non-scripted forms. RvB co-creator Geoff Ramsey, inspired by his obsession with in-game achievements, founded a YouTube channel called Achievement Hunter. The channel began by posting guides to unlocking certain obscure achievements—then evolved to documenting Easter Eggs in games, highlight reels of funny gameplay clips, and ultimately into longform Let's Plays. "When we transitioned into Let's Plays, I realized these were our bad radio shows," Ramsey says. "These were the Howard Stern Show, the Opie and Anthony Show. The gameplay was the visual component, but the conversation and the comedy around that was the core element."
Now, in 2017, that combination of off-the-cuff commentary and game footage has become the standard Let's Play format, and the videos in the genre garner millions of viewers and even more millions of dollars, across multiple sites like YouTube and Twitch. Achievement Hunter wasn't the origin point of the form, exactly---Let's Plays seemed to emerge in many places at once---but it became a baseline for much of the genre. It's become the dominant form of online gaming video. Maybe online video in general. Even YouTube's Machinima channel, which used to be a destination for the form, is now a haven for Let's Plays, parody videos, and podcasts.
Yet, through it all,* Red vs. Blue *has quietly kept going. The show is now surrounded (and, to an extent, underwritten) by a vast Rooster Teeth media empire, which includes more traditional animation as well as the Achievement Hunter network, board games, videogame development, and a yearly convention. This is what's interesting about the series, and Rooster Teeth in general: its ongoing existence straddles a line between, on the one hand, being an ongoing work of fan-servicing serialized storytelling, and on the other being a small subset of a massive old guard media company, one of the largest ongoing brands in field that has grown exponentially. Red vs. Blue prefigured and helped build the media landscape in which it now exists—and yet it exists now as a living relic, beloved by its fans even as everyone else has moved on to other forms.
For its creators, that's not something to grieve. It's just the way of things. "If you're making scripted content on the internet, you have to accept that you're never going to be number one," Burns says. "There's always going to be some guy who drives a Lamborghini into the ocean, or a cat that fell off a tree branch." Or a guy in the other room, shouting at Minecraft while millions watch along.
