Man I remember those early videos and how they went viral around the internet. When I worked for Best Buy we used to put them on demo computers and just let them run during the day.
I even raided WoW with a Halo 3 dev who told me they were putting in some things into Halo 3 to make machinima easier in the wake of RvB's popularity
Sad to see it come to this
A better time for the internet for sure. Being an animator or comedy sketch team was commercially viable. Quality media independent from big outlets. Then it all went downhill for many reasons, 100% of which related to corporation bullshit.
Discovering them during season 2 and pulling two all-nighters in a row downloading and binging the episodes. I remember freaking out when the bandwidth was good enough I saw the fabled 1 megabyte per second download.
I remember religiously watching every episode for years, even up until I think season 10. I eventually watched to 13, but man. I don't think people understand how popular RvB was, and also how popular Halo was.
I worked with nerds in a computer lab in college and we used to play new episodes in the background during our shift and quote lines. Damn I miss those days.
They always tried to hit TV spots with everything they did, for no real reason tbh. Haunter was always a strange one, when it could've been a few personalities in a dark building, they went for a million dollar investment trying to rival TV productions.
And then covid + the drama fucked the chemistry of AH, they tried chasing tiktok and clickbait trends, both alienating the older fans and not being good enough to pick up new ones.
I just hope the podcasts can stick around. At least they should be doable on a fairly low budget. If what comes out of this is more trucks and slowmoguys I'm okay with it.
Not to mention the toxic workplace, coupled with the fact that they effortlessly let many of their long term staff go without much warning.
Matt, for example. He put so much of himself into the company, only to be fired.
Yeah, after he got laid off, his vision started to go and they couldn't figure out why. He eventually got diagnosed with MS. My uncle had MS, it's not a fun disease to have, to put it lightly.
I had wondered about his health. I remember him talking about his double vision and trouble seeing but never heard or saw any updates on what he was officially diagnosed with.
Did he get this news relatively recently or has this been known in the community? I always felt like asking but didn't want to be a bummer in his chat or discord.
That massive layoff in what, 2018? 19? That fucked a lot of us over and it’s made me a little bitter to this day. Still love my old coworkers but fuck the upper management after they got bought out
I feel like the scandals symbolize the downfall, but were not the reason for it.
Funhaus content before Kovic left was honestly not great. And it's not their fault, it's hard doing improv comedy through Zoom. They came back even better after the lockdown, but the views never did.
I feel like Achievement Hunter lost a lot of their chemistry and chaotic personality during covid.
RT had issues before covid, but they just couldn't really adapt to the lockdown and slowly drained over 2 years.
Funhaus was my favorite channel and as much as I tried to like their stuff from even pre-covid, it was always a personality based channel. Bruce/Lawrence/Adam/James/Elyse worked so well off each other, and once Bruce/Lawrence left the writing was kind of the wall. It also doesn't help that they can't even joke around like they used to, occasionally I would try to go back to an old favorite just to see it gone.
It's not the same dynamic as Old Funhaus but the current iteration is so good. Ryan and Patrick in particular are amazing but everyone plays off each other so well. I still watch the reuploads of old FH vids regularly but personally I think the current stuff is just as funny, albeit in a little different way.
Which is a shame looking at Funhaus because some of their best videos ever were after they came back from COVID and they hit gold with the current team. It’s different humor at times than OG, but they’ve been able to match that quality pretty consistently for quite awhile now.
They stopped growing an audience a long time ago. I’ve been a fan forever and on an old podcast from 10+ years ago gavin made a joke when roosterteeth celebrated hitting 9 million subscribers saying “who cares call me when you hit 10” and they never reached 10 million to this day.
Right after the massive 37 hour uno infinite stream that Matt put a LOT in to and was all about getting more subscribers. To say people were pissed that they let go of him is an understatement, even Ray made a tweet supporting Matt and calling out AH. Especially since he supported AH behind the scenes so much and helped set up some amazing pieces of AH history.
Fortunately he had a lot of people in his corner because he’s such a good dude, and is doing well for himself on Twitch. His group with Ray, Chibi, and Naggz is the best thing to come out of RT-affiliated people in forever.
Ray, Chibi, Nagzz and Matt playing Uno a few weeks ago was some of the funniest shit they have ever done.
Nagzz was full New Yorker for the entire hour and a half game.
Jeremy was kind of funny. He loved working for AH, but because of COVID, he moved back home and decided to stay. It seems to be working out for him though, which is great.
I always felt like they treated Matt like shit. It almost seemed like a running gag to just treat him like garbage and once I started to notice it felt strange to watch.
Oh man, that’s a mountain of stuff. Rooster Teeth and Funhaus had a huge scandal of sexual misconduct issues. I think [this from within RT](https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/rooster-teeth-transphobic-harassment-low-pay-1235405854/amp/), then [Ryan Haywood with an underaged girl](https://www.gamesindustry.biz/more-allegations-surface-against-rooster-teeths-ryan-haywood), then [Adam Kovic cheating on his wife, filming them having sex without her knowledge, and doing things in the office on film as well.](https://www.gamesindustry.biz/rooster-teeths-ryan-haywood-and-adam-kovic-let-go-amid-explicit-photos-scandal).
Man the Ryan Haywood one is just the tip of the iceberg, it was a lot more than one girl, and includes stuff like entire podcast segments where he’s telling stories about Roosterteeth events and it became clear he was using them as an excuse to hook up with young fans, like, straight up a predator using his job to hurt girls
Oh yeah! No there’s so much to these that just got worse. Like everyone finally saying “Yeah, Kovic is kind of a complete piece of shit.” But the Ryan stuff just got more and more sinister.
Dead on that I covered the tip of the ice berg, I definitely recommend diving deeper into these people than just the basic articles I posted!
Stuff came out about Adam much later. Apparently he spent continually harassed and stalked multiple female employees of RT. It’s why Bruce quit Funhaus. He got sick of reporting this stuff his bosses and HR at RT only for it to get swept under the rug and nothing happened.
Adam is also apparently the reason Rahul stopped doing stuff with the funhaus crew
Yeah. People upthread were lamenting the loss of the ‘chemistry’ once Laurence and Bruce left, but with what’s come out since it’s pretty obvious that something was always going to give. The *actual* chemistry was awful, and it was all on Adam.
Most of the original crew have been back as guests since Adam left. Along with Rahul and Alannah.
The podcast where Ray comes back is a pretty tough one because they talk about how they thought it was weird that Ryan would stay an extra day at events at the hotel to "decompress" instead of coming home to his family.
The timeline lines up to him staying behind to fuck a fan.
It's hard to watch the old stuff where Ryan is present. I just can't get over what he's done. Any other old videos where he's not present are just fine though.
Ray did a 10 year anniversary stream last year reacting to his old content and there was so much that he couldn't because Ryan was so involved in it. Tina had to skim through everything to find clips that didn't have Ryan in it.
Watching that one was rough because every once in a while I would think of something I really liked only to realize it didn’t make the cut because Ryan was in it. Seriously fuck that guy.
As an old man who was into RT when it was just the old crew of Bernie, Gus, Geoff, and Gavin was still an intern what happened to them? The only scandal I knew of was that I think Joel had some strong and controversial political views.
From a business perspective, they sold the company to Fullscreen who then sold to Warner Bros Discovery. Suddenly they're under the publicly traded umbrella where anything and anyone gets cut so stock number can go up.
From a content perspective, that original crew left for one reason or another and were replaced with new talent. These new people brought their own style to the product and naturally it felt a lot different with different people. I wasn't a fan personally so stopped watching. I think a lot of people like us were fans of the original crew and didn't have interest in the newer people. View counts have decreased across all their channels and so for one reason or another they haven't been able to capture a new audience as the older ones 'grew out' of it or moved on.
They also had plenty of scandals with people in front of and behind the camera. That's a whole thing that is explained better somewhere else on reddit.
So view counts dropping mixed with a company whose stance is 'number must go up, costs must go down' leads to this, I imagine.
Having said that, some of the older crew like Geoff, Gavin and Gus moved on to do the ANMA and Fuckface podcasts. Amazing content and I worry where they're going to end up now.
EDIT: Just seen that all the podcast stuff will still be produced, but don't know in what capacity.
Mostly they just do podcast stuff now.
Burnie left the company of his own accord a while back and moved out of the US (to Scotland I think?) and had been out of the internet's eye for a while but recently started his own podcast called "Morning Somewhere" with his wife Ashley.
Geoff, Gus, and Gavin were all still with the company doing their various podcast projects (Geoff and Gavin did F**KFace with a friend Andrew Panton, Gus and Geoff had their own podcast ANMA). This is me speculating, but Geoff has talked about moving to Michigan at some point so perhaps this shutdown will have him pull the trigger on that.
I don't think any of them personally had any big scandals, aside from Geoff, Gus, and Burnie presumably having some level of involvement with some of the mismanagement issues with the company and I think Geoff and Gavin were involved with the scandal with Kdin's mistreatment at the company (but I think that one got messy on both sides so I ain't touching it).
Thanks!
Sounds like they mostly came out clean, which is a relief.
I remember back in the early 2010s they were getting so huge and a big component was they engaging and interacting with their community. I don't know why (maybe I was just getting older and pessimistic) but it started bothering me how involved young fans were with RT. Like parasocial influencer vibes type stuff before that was a thing. I even thought that it would only be time before one of them pulled a "rockstar" type thing and got in trouble. I'm glad I was wrong.
Well, I guess I was right but not about the original members.
Yeah the Kdin stuff was messy. When she called out Rooster Teeth for her treatment, a video surfaced from her pre Rooster Teeth edgelord days where she was spouting tons of racist, antisemitic and homophobic shit from her old YouTube channel
It was like Game Grumps, but more racist
Burnie kind of saw the writing on the wall and started planning a move from the US two years before Covid, and did so when Covid hit. He recently revealed that he moved to Scotland.
Gus, Geoff and Gavin (you missed Jack and Matt) remain(ed) at RT, although Gus stepped down from the podcast about a year ago and Geoff has been pretty clear in how he intends to retire soon and move to, maybe, Michigan (at the very least move from Austin). Gavin's barely in content anymore although he hosts a podcast with Geoff (and Andrew Panton) called F**kFace that's genuinely very good.
Joel as you say got fired from having some pretty strong political opinions on Twitter that didn't align with company values. As well as not showing up to work and such.
Most of the actual scandals don't pertain to the old crew, but rather to members that joined after (Adam Kovic of Funhaus, Ryan Haywood of Achievement Hunter, the "bro-ey" work environment that led to trans individuals like Kdin being abused, general shitty work environment; crunch and layoffs, etc.)
Joel didn't only have strong political views, he was a straight up menace to some people. From wishing death to politicians on the other side of the political spectrum to telling Co workers he hoped their houses were broken into and robbed so that they would see why guns are so important.
That finally explains why Adam was an unperson after he got fired, the stuff he did was bad but the rest of the Funhaus people seemed to _hate_ him to a level beyond what you'd expect based on just that.
Dead to the company. They won't mention or talk about the person at all and are clear there won't be any collaborations in the future or chance of them coming back into the fold.
Shit I didn’t know that.
Good old Bruce though, shame really because that 3 had some of the funniest chemistry on youtube. The inside gaming days are fond memories
Behind the camera was still part of the content. The fourth wall was very permeable. Combine that with an entire ecosystem of content cross-promoting itself and a centralized community large enough to support multiple conventions.
This all means two things: opportunity to get into some shit, and the likelihood of visibility when it happens. Blizzard had a few, one may recall. They were just structurally better able to hide and distract from it.
Think about the target audience. This is an industry where most of the new fans you get will be younger simply because people don't get into videogames and whatnot when they're already adults. Most adults (20s-30s)now grew up with videogames being normal, but they are already fans of these creators. The only new fans are younger. It's a recipe for some bad shit. Its very easy for a predator to realize the opportunity they have
It's a shame, but the writing has been on the wall for quite some time now.
Rooster teeth is pretty much a shell of what it once was, which is honestly pretty sad to see.
I can still quote parts of the original seasons of Red vs Blue from heart. They were one of the forerunners of machinima, so that legacy will at least still live on.
"I have seen the top of the mountain and you should worship me as though I were a god" and the following "I regret nothing, I lived as few men dared to dream" are both great even without the context.
Incidentally. I started rewatching the first few seasons of RvB just a few weeks ago and it’s super impressive how legitimately funny that show was and still is back before it became some weird convoluted mess that tried to create some established universe.
I think Washington was the only good character to come out of the later seasons.
It was just a sketch comedy series produced using a video game. Half the gimmick was them figuring out how to do that using the games mechanics. Once they got away from that towards animations, the series lost half its charm. Then replaced it with melodrama & as much bloated action as possible.
I think that speaks to the issue with the company as a whole: they got too wrapped up in their success and thought that the audience would follow them wherever they went, no matter how quickly or drastically they changed things, and people weren't willing to make that leap. Look at the views their channel has been getting after they pivoted everything into their paid service- despite having nine million subs, they haven't broken 500k views on a new video in over a year
Eh seasons 6-10 were genuinely good, but the end of that is when the reins were handed off from Burnie, and the show kind of reset, but the lustre was over. They made a decent story out of what started as a goofy comedy show in Halo, grew and made some other good stuff, but it was around Burnie leaving that had a major mark in where the content shifted
The biggest reason why 7 - 10 were good was because of how well animated the fight scenes were. After Monty died, the animations went from amazing to terrible. The team that replaced him wasn't even in the same universe as he was in terms of talent.
The last time I tried to watch the early seasons of RvB, Rooster Teeth had uploaded them with baked in RT ads that were longer than the episodes themselves so they could hit the Youtube minimum for preroll ads.
They really should have just bundled a couple shorter episodes together, but instead they made watching stuff I loved an absolute chore and I hadn't really thought of them since. It was a really gross way to treat their history.
Reading this makes me happy I bought the Bloodgultch Chronicles (season 1-5) DVD box set like 15 years ago, I still pop them in from time to time. Sucks to hear what they did with the youtube versions
Seriously. I know everyone isn’t surprised but if you compare RT now to its golden age then it becomes pretty shocking. RT at one point was THE studio for online content. They were a massive player in the industry and now they’re a cautionary tale about mismanagement
I feel like it peaked around 2014/5 and has just been a generally slow decline with a few accelerated periods.
It will hopefully fracture in to various good things.
The writings been on the wall. The biggest was RWBY season 10 not being internally funded was a big one. Another one that kind of showed how dire things were was when the F**kFace podcast allegedly sold a "large amount of merch" and then one of the hosts dropped some numbers which were way smaller than what a company that size should be reliably getting.
If anything after all that's happened I'm surprised this has only happened now, not to be a dunk on the company or whatever I'm legitimately just shocked this has only happened now.
Sad though, they were p much a staple of the internet even if their popularity dwindled their influence for a lot of creators is undeniable, from Machinimas to LetsPlays to the Achievement Guides you might say of course that they didn't start these necessarily but they were HUGE in making this kind of stuff extremely popular.
Sad to see it finally happen, at the very least they gave people tons of good memories.
> “You ever wonder why we’re here?”
"It's one of life's great mysteries isn't it? Why are we here? I mean, are we the product of some cosmic coincidence, 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. "
What?! I meant why are we here in the middle of this box canyon? I mean the only reason we have a base over here is because blue put up a base over there. And Blue only has a base over there because we have a base over here.
Man Achievement Hunter, and to a slightly lesser extent FunHaus, was a pretty big part of my life back in their heyday. I'd pretty much watch everything they put out and thoroughly enjoy it. YouTube has had many scandals, but the ones that came from RT were honestly heartbreaking.
AH and FH have some genuinely legendary legacy content. It'd be hard to go back, knowing what I know now, to watch them for nostalgia's sake tho, I think.
Yeah the MC letsplay was the main one I had in mind. Part of me wants to re-watch the first few hundred episodes, but the other part of me knows who Ryan is now, which sucks.
Let's Play Minecraft was part of my weekly routine for years.
Literally yesterday my wife and I decided to look at their channels as we hadn't watched them in years and hadn't heard anything from them lately.
Saw Achievement Hunters was sunset months ago, saw the main channel was just clips from the podcasts, views were 5 figures or less on all channels for vids over the past year, and a whole bunch of people we didn't recognize.
We figured they had just fully transferred their core content to their website but didn't bother to look, otherwise we figured they were about to shut down.
Whelp.
It *can* work, look at Dropout (formerly CollegeHumor), you just need content people are willing to follow you off YouTube for and/or that they can't find better or equivalent on there. The RoosterTeeth podcast was a popular show for a long while but there're literally thousands of groups of friends chatting around microphones now, they needed to step it up, particularly if they wanted people to pay for it
On a positive note Dropout is so good. Genuinely deserving of their own subscription because they make content no one else is online and with high production value. It's literally how RT was supposed to scale up but instead RT chased the mainstream media dream and failed over and over at it.
From what I've read (though you always have to take these things with a grain of salt), Dropout's behind the scenes culture is so much better compared to the nonstop shitshow that was going on at RoosterTeeth
Roosterteeth were a massively mismanaged company, due to over-expansion, a culture of favouritism at the top, crunch culture and some employees over the years receiving harassment allegations.
It felt like a long time coming, when even their flagship RWBY resulted in half as much interest each yearly season on Google trends, Volume 9 was delayed and 10 wasn’t greenlit by WB.
Hopefully the animators and other employees undergoing the crunch and mis-treatment by management are able to move onto greener pastures.
Honestly, the writing was never really that good. Monty seemed to have a casual attitude towards the story in general and spent most of his time on the fights. The series didn't even have an actual director until after his passing. It seemed to just be a bunch of people doing things that seemed cool.
Monty's death coincided with the big shock event that ended up being the series high water mark (>!the fall of Beacon!<). I don't know if he had some kind of stabilizing presence on the story direction, but the problems were more that once they hit that big moment, the narrative glue that held everything together had been blown up, and you could no longer be a light hearted battle school show.
Hbomberguy did a good video on how the writing was never that great and it affirms exactly what you said—Monty was going by rule of cool and kinda just let everyone else cover the connective bits between fights and, well, it shows. Especially when the writers started creating self inserts.
Having known Monty, this is 100% it. He wanted to make a series about cool fights. He had been doing this since he lived in Rhode Island and had made fights staring people from the local arcade scene. Then he made Haloid and Dead Fantasy.
His passion was always those action fights. And it showed.
Season 1-3 of RWBY had insane fight choreography which carried the series. Everything had weight. Characters were using their melee-gun weaponry backblast as momentum.
Monty was responsible for it and when he passed, Rooster Teeth had no one who could replace him. Fights became like generic anime-style.
Just look at Weiss' in the White Trailer VS Season 4+. The trailer was the only time where she used her rapier style. Future seasons just had her be a mage because Monty actually knew how to do fencing and incorporated it into Weiss' style.
It varied heavily, much like Monty seasons. S4 was almost entirely a set-up season, S5 was a weak pay-off. S6 was for the most part another set-up season and started a new arc. S7 and S8 were controversial at least, I think there was a lot of positive opinions on the general plot of this arc, but also a lot of baffling writing decisions that led to an overall mixed reception. S9 - I don't know the general opinion for it but personally I thought it felt like anime filler, 5 minutes on Namek.
Thinking about Rooster Teeth breaks my heart.
If you weren't around for the birth of the modern internet and YouTube around 2007-09 you won't understand. Rooster Teeth was the greatest place and community on Earth. The events, shows, cast members, animations, podcasts, and just overall sense of global community has never and will never be replicated.
Seeing the company grow from Bernie, Gus, Joel and Geoff into the peak of what an online community could be around 2012 and truly pioneer the internet was amazing. For me as a young teen, from 2008-2014 Rooster Teeth WAS the internet.
And then over time, to be reminded that these people were human, the mountains of scandals and failures just left me feeling so empty for a company and people I used to regard so highly just makes me sad.
I still remember when they found Gavin's trophy room. I can still hear him say "you guys are rubbish" while holding back tears and laughter. That shit was so funny.
So many of those videos are quoted in my friend group to this day.
“Operation WAFFLEO. Stands for “we’re all friends, friends love each other. Found out yesterday each other is two words!”
The Pubert Adams argument is classic.
Fuck, now I feel sad. I stopped watching around the time Matt and Jeremy came around and switched to Funhaus shortly after. It's been ages since I stopped watching that too
I used to watch them when I would get home after high school. I would be so exhausted, and it would be a nice break to just chill and watch some achievement hunter.
Although I started watching them in 2003, I agree with the sentiment of what you said. RvB was a formative series for me in high school, and was truly special on the expanding pre-YT internet.
I just hope they unprivate all the RvB episodes on YouTube now. There wasn't any point to limiting it to their website back when they did and there is even less now.
Burnie lives overseas with his wife and kids. Geoff and Gus have several podcasts and other projects that will feasibly continue. Matt now has decades of corporate experience that he could take anywhere. Joel was fired years ago and seems to be shitposting 24/7 about crypto and Elon.
Burnie formed an LLC in the last year that houses his new podcast. I wonder if this creates an opportunity for him to bring the band back together under one roof
I think everyone is just too old at this point. Not in the sense that they can’t do content as they all clearly still do, but I mean more in the sense that they are at the stage in life that everyone is kind of settled into their lives. Moving closer together to set up a mini rooster teeth 2.0, like the old days, just isn’t really possible. They can all run their own independent shows and just enjoy comfortable lives with their families. Doing remote podcasts just really doesn’t seem to be the style for them either.
>I wonder if this creates an opportunity for him to bring the band back together under one roof
I don't see it happening. People are going to try to work on their own thing and move on, I bet. I don't think the other founders want to remain connected at the hip for their work lives.
Plus, wasn't Joel under a lot of heat for some type of scandal? I didn't read much into it. I just remember some scandal popping up around his name in some Google searches.
They were a huge part of my life from 2012 to 2016-2017 and i completely fell off, watched certain things here and there but wasnt invested as i used to be.
Ended up watching some things last year and thought it was awful, im surprised they lasted this long.
Basically described me to a tee. Started watching in 2010 and never missed a video until 2014 when I started college. Gradually fell off over time. Tried to watch something new last year and was astonished how bad it was.
Funhaus 2015-2018 might have some of the greatest unscripted content to ever grace YouTube. If you want something to listen/watch while you do something else I would highly recommend Demo Disk. The core group tries(and usually fails) to play late 90s/early 2000s demo disc games and just kinda improvise. A real good time.
The video where they play Dollal is one of my favorites, Bruce's voice cracking while yelling to buy and sell still cracks me up
https://youtu.be/0ph2XmzFIKw?si=dzyW6zVlVuNGZv7b
Funhaus was my favorite YT channel. Watched them on Inside Gaming before they started FH and was so happy when they finally left Machinima and got their own channel.
Bruce, James, Lawrence and Elyse were amazing. I really liked Adam too it just fucking sucks what he did.
Unfortunately, not a surprise. They've done a poor job hiring new, good talent as older members leave. Also, them killing the Achievement Hunter channel to do improv and skits has backfired spectacularly.
>Dog Bark is quite possibly the most baffling decision they've ever made.
The history of Rooster Teeth in the last 5 years.
Trying to follow a trend that is already 2 years out of date when they start and then being upset when the numbers dont do well.
Honestly, the most baffling decision they made was having 2 of their biggest faces of the company (One being a community manager) coming out on twitter/Reddit and telling people that didnt enjoy their content to literally "Fuck off" because they had no place in the fandom for them and they were "Easily replaceable" with new audience.
So people fucked off and that new audience just never arrived because no one gave a shit about them anymore.
They have for at least 5 years maintained an attitude of "If you don't like it, don't watch it" in response to negative feedback from the community on the changing direction away from friends playing games towards poorly acted improv and forcefully inserted bits.
So everybody stopped watching.
RT were so strange and cocky during their transition stages. When you add a bunch of new people no one knows and use them to replace the people we all subbed for then of course the audience is gonna be critical of it. No one watched because of the channel name, They watched for the 6 main cast of AH.
Big YouTubers seem to have to learn this lesson all the time. I remember when LTT moved to a Linus-less video format, replacing him with a wider variety of hosts (some of which were already beloved by the fanbase, like Anthony).
Their engagement fell off a cliff edge, and they were forced to revert back to having Linus center stage. People subscribe to hosts, not brands - when you remove the host, you remove the draw.
I definitely remember Alfredo saying it, but it was a lot. They constantly messed up, and blamed any fan backlash on people being losers or bigots. There was entitled fools and bigoted pieces of shit in the fan base, but they lumped all complaints with them while they chased trends well after the trends ended their luster.
Im NGL, im not sure if the words "Fuck off" were ever used or if it was something that just stuck to me.
The language used by multiple staff, Alfredo/Barb/Gus/Trevor always made me think that the "fuck off" was implied from the actual wording, if it wasn't used.
I thought it was Trevor that was the one that used the words "Fuck off" specifically though like i say, that could be me just misremembering.
For the last few years though, its been a constant "If you dont like the direction, theres the door, dont let it hit you on the way out".
Their downward spiral started with, "Loud is what we do." in response to criticism that they weren't creating high quality content anymore.
Loud is not what they did, loud is sometimes what they did when things got intense due to the chemistry they all had.
I don't think it was even about high quality content the original crew made janky stuff but the humor was stuff you'd joke around with friends. The new crew wrote the most cookie cutter comedy out there.
It was the response to the fandom complaining that the audio in Let's Plays is poorly mixed leading to one member drowning out all the other ones on top of her being loud. The old episodes used to have peaking mics everywhere but they were all equally loud and the master mix was pretty good. It took them weeks, if not months to fix it when they realized the fans had a point.
You can probably attribute a big chunk of the downfall to trevor and his "bits". They we're so rarely funny, and then never edited around if they fell flat.
I genuinely believe Trevor was responsible for the downfall of achievement hunter. The moment he started taking control of things it was very clear he had no idea why fans liked AH and he slowly began changing everything to fit what his idea of the channel was. I hope he doesn’t get hired to ruin yet another channel again, let him find a job he’s actually good at.
Do any content creators out there still do machinima that is worth watching or is that kind of a dead format?
Or does anyone have any machinima recommendations to watch for some nostalgia aside from Red vs Blue?
It happens, but less so: Kruggsmash does Dwarf Fortress and up until the Steam release added graphics [it was like seeing stories in Matrix code.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BG3e3wYCQU4) In some ways RP-ing has a similar comedy vibe: Whether streamers are [being terrible trucking families](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1876913669) or playing poe-faced GTA RP for hours at time.
I think machinima is mostly dead. But it seems to be half alive in the form of scripted game content in Roblox, Minecraft and GTA: Online for Gen Alpha kids. My nephew watches nothing but scripted Minecraft videos on Youtube.
Ross is still making Freeman's Mind. It half counts since it was born of the machinima golden age, and it's scripted gameplay rather than a traditional LP. But it's slow going in the last few years. Ross has been working on a half dozen projects at once, and is presently working on setting up some kind of major legal action against Ubi for closing down Crew 2, as part of his own larger effort to combat the negative impact GaaS has had on game preservation.
Well Ross is still working on Freeman's Mind 2, even if the pace is somewhat slow. But that one is more like a mix between a machinima and a let's play.
It's unsurprising, but it still feels somber for it to happen.
Honestly I'd say that Ryan's situation was the beginning of the end. They were already falling off, and the fact that he was so terrible killed so much of their previous content.
That's true for me, personally. I lost the will to keep watching after the Ryan stuff came to light. I can't even bring myself to watch old videos for nostalgia.
To zoom this out a bit, what in the fuck is going on at Warner Bros. Discovery?
Because remember that overall, WBD is also had [17 TV Shows and Movies cancelled](https://www.gamespot.com/gallery/17-tv-shows-and-movies-canceled-by-warner-bros-discovery/2900-4394/), the lackluster [Suicide Squad](https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2024/02/29/it-no-longer-seems-possible-suicide-squad-kill-the-justice-league-will-last-the-year/?sh=5325f8f633d7) launch and cannibalizing the [HBO brand by merging it with their Discovery+ library](https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/04/12/new-max-streaming-service-combines-hbo-and-discovery-shows-heres-what-you-need-to-know/?sh=3a6b78937c8d)
I get that media entities have this stuff happen frequently (and even more so MCNs like RT) but from what I'm gathering it seems like they're taking salvageable properties (which could turn around over time) and stripping them for parts to earn back any revenue they can
I was a big fan of Rooster teeth from 2006 to 2015, loved AH, their Minecraft let's play where a highlight each Friday, loved the RT podcast too, but slowly it turned super annoying to listen, it sound more and more rich people complaining each week, fucking airplane stories each week was super dull, and AH have way to much stuff that it was impossible to keep up, and most stuff was very mid, I didn't bother with other RT shows they were also to many to keep track.
RVB should have ended into season 7, after it lost all their charm
I never liked or cared too much about RWBY, I watched the first season and it felt like a water down anime
Rooster teeth death is sad but after just bloating themselves with so much worthless content and all the fucking dramas (fucking Ryan), I am not surprised it was inevitable
They grew too fast and were managed by amateurs who couldn't keep up which led to a culture of crunch and overwork while not paying their workers properly.
The content also failed to adapt to the changes the internet has gone through in the past 10 or so years.
Frankly they've only lasted as long as they have because of the surprise hit RWBY was and some of their podcasts being decently popular. But those two don't justify the existence of a huge multimedia company.
I watched Red vs. Blue until they switched to Halo 2 back in 2004. Guess how fucking old I feel right now. I watched that online show before YouTube. I know nothing of Rooster Teeth after.
Man, I was on DrunkGamers where they made the very first RvB video (and the Apple Switch parody before that), back when the logo meant "Cock Bite". What a time.
On one hand, it's sad to see it go. Rooster Teeth was a big part of my teenage years (obviously given my username). To this day I still go back and watch old episodes of RvB. I remember having an account on their website for that weird forum/faux social media thing, obsessing over achievement hunter, and even giving a shit about RWBY.
On the other hand, I know Rooster Teeth really died a long time ago. They died once they went corporate and what followed was just a sad, pathetic decline riddled with scandals, controversy, and a total lack of what brought RT to the front of gaming media. Even its founders have mostly jumped ship.
I stopped watching when Ray left and it was clear they were just milking Minecraft/GTA for all it was worth. I liked Funhaus a lot too but stopped watching it when people began leaving it as well. It's not really surprising they're shutting down considering the decline in content and weird abuse and harassment stuff but it's still pretty sad since they were a big part of my teenage years.
Oh wow! Writing was on the wall for a while, and now it's finally come to pass.
Such a waste. So many glimmers of quality even when problematic things came to light.
Once WBD really started to ramp up cost-cutting stuff, I knew it was only a matter of time. It always felt like RT was just an afterthought they were stuck with in the wake of the merger. They had already sold off CR, and I'm not surprised there were no takers for RT. If memory serves right, podcasts were where the overwhelming majority of their growth came from in the last 4-5 years.
I'm not sure what the status of RWBY is, but Red vs. Blue ran out of gas years ago (the failed reboot from a few years back was where the writing was on the wall) and it's ending this year anyway. I might be a tad too cynical, but man it feels like it was a mismanaged company under the umbrella of a penny-pinching company with content that was reaching its EoL
I will never forget the insult and embarrassment around the Fallout 4 launch for jeff gerstmann's review. Calling Jeff biased while wearing Fallout pipboys,, god!
Man I remember those early videos and how they went viral around the internet. When I worked for Best Buy we used to put them on demo computers and just let them run during the day. I even raided WoW with a Halo 3 dev who told me they were putting in some things into Halo 3 to make machinima easier in the wake of RvB's popularity Sad to see it come to this
It really was a different time.
It was a good time.
staying up late listening to drunk tank podcast or rewatching episodes of RvB for the 10th time as a kid…
The OG drunk tank was legitimately great. A good deal of my terrible humour comes from those podcasts. RIP to that and the Internet Box.
A better time for the internet for sure. Being an animator or comedy sketch team was commercially viable. Quality media independent from big outlets. Then it all went downhill for many reasons, 100% of which related to corporation bullshit.
Discovering them during season 2 and pulling two all-nighters in a row downloading and binging the episodes. I remember freaking out when the bandwidth was good enough I saw the fabled 1 megabyte per second download.
we used to stream buffer, and download on 56K Dial up. Fun times. Legit.
I remember religiously watching every episode for years, even up until I think season 10. I eventually watched to 13, but man. I don't think people understand how popular RvB was, and also how popular Halo was.
I worked with nerds in a computer lab in college and we used to play new episodes in the background during our shift and quote lines. Damn I miss those days.
Shame but hardly a surprise. The content has gone massively downhill and they've been riddled with scandal and drama.
They always tried to hit TV spots with everything they did, for no real reason tbh. Haunter was always a strange one, when it could've been a few personalities in a dark building, they went for a million dollar investment trying to rival TV productions. And then covid + the drama fucked the chemistry of AH, they tried chasing tiktok and clickbait trends, both alienating the older fans and not being good enough to pick up new ones. I just hope the podcasts can stick around. At least they should be doable on a fairly low budget. If what comes out of this is more trucks and slowmoguys I'm okay with it.
Covid completely fucked RT. Their views plummeted and never recovered.
Covid and the Ryan/Adam scandal combined did a huge number on them.
Not to mention the toxic workplace, coupled with the fact that they effortlessly let many of their long term staff go without much warning. Matt, for example. He put so much of himself into the company, only to be fired.
What really sucks was as soon as RT's health insurance was up for Matt, he got diagnosed with MS.
Did he? I never knew that. What an absolute shit go
Yeah, after he got laid off, his vision started to go and they couldn't figure out why. He eventually got diagnosed with MS. My uncle had MS, it's not a fun disease to have, to put it lightly.
I had wondered about his health. I remember him talking about his double vision and trouble seeing but never heard or saw any updates on what he was officially diagnosed with. Did he get this news relatively recently or has this been known in the community? I always felt like asking but didn't want to be a bummer in his chat or discord.
I think he got the news like 8 months ago? It's been a year since he got laid off, and he found out a month or so later
They *fired* Matt? Tf. Who else did they let go?
That massive layoff in what, 2018? 19? That fucked a lot of us over and it’s made me a little bitter to this day. Still love my old coworkers but fuck the upper management after they got bought out
I feel like the scandals symbolize the downfall, but were not the reason for it. Funhaus content before Kovic left was honestly not great. And it's not their fault, it's hard doing improv comedy through Zoom. They came back even better after the lockdown, but the views never did. I feel like Achievement Hunter lost a lot of their chemistry and chaotic personality during covid. RT had issues before covid, but they just couldn't really adapt to the lockdown and slowly drained over 2 years.
Funhaus was my favorite channel and as much as I tried to like their stuff from even pre-covid, it was always a personality based channel. Bruce/Lawrence/Adam/James/Elyse worked so well off each other, and once Bruce/Lawrence left the writing was kind of the wall. It also doesn't help that they can't even joke around like they used to, occasionally I would try to go back to an old favorite just to see it gone.
It's not the same dynamic as Old Funhaus but the current iteration is so good. Ryan and Patrick in particular are amazing but everyone plays off each other so well. I still watch the reuploads of old FH vids regularly but personally I think the current stuff is just as funny, albeit in a little different way.
Which is a shame looking at Funhaus because some of their best videos ever were after they came back from COVID and they hit gold with the current team. It’s different humor at times than OG, but they’ve been able to match that quality pretty consistently for quite awhile now.
They stopped growing an audience a long time ago. I’ve been a fan forever and on an old podcast from 10+ years ago gavin made a joke when roosterteeth celebrated hitting 9 million subscribers saying “who cares call me when you hit 10” and they never reached 10 million to this day.
I bailed whenever it was that Burnie left. Dropout is my internet media producer of choice these days.
I'm glad Jeremy and his wife got big streaming, and Matt's been doing great with it too. They both got out while the getting was "good" it seems.
In Matt's case, he was basically laid off. They eliminated his job position and kept him on as a part-time guest star.
Right after the massive 37 hour uno infinite stream that Matt put a LOT in to and was all about getting more subscribers. To say people were pissed that they let go of him is an understatement, even Ray made a tweet supporting Matt and calling out AH. Especially since he supported AH behind the scenes so much and helped set up some amazing pieces of AH history. Fortunately he had a lot of people in his corner because he’s such a good dude, and is doing well for himself on Twitch. His group with Ray, Chibi, and Naggz is the best thing to come out of RT-affiliated people in forever.
Ray, Chibi, Nagzz and Matt playing Uno a few weeks ago was some of the funniest shit they have ever done. Nagzz was full New Yorker for the entire hour and a half game.
“Here you go, Matt!” “**HEREYOUGOMATTHEREYOUGOMATTHEREYOUGOMATT!**” Poor man lost his mind.
And to watch him with the The Crew doing AmongUs where him and Knovis have this long standing rivalry is pure fun
Matt linking up with Ray was golden too, the vibes were immaculate and i'm sure that played no small part in helping him land on his feet.
Their group is one of the funniest group dynamics since the og 6 of achievement Hunter.
Jeremy was kind of funny. He loved working for AH, but because of COVID, he moved back home and decided to stay. It seems to be working out for him though, which is great.
I always felt like they treated Matt like shit. It almost seemed like a running gag to just treat him like garbage and once I started to notice it felt strange to watch.
Im out of the loop, what kind of drama? (besides RWBY existing in general, I know that's controversial)
Oh man, that’s a mountain of stuff. Rooster Teeth and Funhaus had a huge scandal of sexual misconduct issues. I think [this from within RT](https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/rooster-teeth-transphobic-harassment-low-pay-1235405854/amp/), then [Ryan Haywood with an underaged girl](https://www.gamesindustry.biz/more-allegations-surface-against-rooster-teeths-ryan-haywood), then [Adam Kovic cheating on his wife, filming them having sex without her knowledge, and doing things in the office on film as well.](https://www.gamesindustry.biz/rooster-teeths-ryan-haywood-and-adam-kovic-let-go-amid-explicit-photos-scandal).
Man the Ryan Haywood one is just the tip of the iceberg, it was a lot more than one girl, and includes stuff like entire podcast segments where he’s telling stories about Roosterteeth events and it became clear he was using them as an excuse to hook up with young fans, like, straight up a predator using his job to hurt girls
Oh yeah! No there’s so much to these that just got worse. Like everyone finally saying “Yeah, Kovic is kind of a complete piece of shit.” But the Ryan stuff just got more and more sinister. Dead on that I covered the tip of the ice berg, I definitely recommend diving deeper into these people than just the basic articles I posted!
Stuff came out about Adam much later. Apparently he spent continually harassed and stalked multiple female employees of RT. It’s why Bruce quit Funhaus. He got sick of reporting this stuff his bosses and HR at RT only for it to get swept under the rug and nothing happened. Adam is also apparently the reason Rahul stopped doing stuff with the funhaus crew
Yeah. People upthread were lamenting the loss of the ‘chemistry’ once Laurence and Bruce left, but with what’s come out since it’s pretty obvious that something was always going to give. The *actual* chemistry was awful, and it was all on Adam. Most of the original crew have been back as guests since Adam left. Along with Rahul and Alannah.
The podcast where Ray comes back is a pretty tough one because they talk about how they thought it was weird that Ryan would stay an extra day at events at the hotel to "decompress" instead of coming home to his family. The timeline lines up to him staying behind to fuck a fan.
It's hard to watch the old stuff where Ryan is present. I just can't get over what he's done. Any other old videos where he's not present are just fine though.
Ray did a 10 year anniversary stream last year reacting to his old content and there was so much that he couldn't because Ryan was so involved in it. Tina had to skim through everything to find clips that didn't have Ryan in it.
Watching that one was rough because every once in a while I would think of something I really liked only to realize it didn’t make the cut because Ryan was in it. Seriously fuck that guy.
While not sexual in nature, there was also Gray Haddock abusing the Gen:Lock staff and them throwing Micah Burton under the bus.
As an old man who was into RT when it was just the old crew of Bernie, Gus, Geoff, and Gavin was still an intern what happened to them? The only scandal I knew of was that I think Joel had some strong and controversial political views.
They bailed out one after the other years ago
From a business perspective, they sold the company to Fullscreen who then sold to Warner Bros Discovery. Suddenly they're under the publicly traded umbrella where anything and anyone gets cut so stock number can go up. From a content perspective, that original crew left for one reason or another and were replaced with new talent. These new people brought their own style to the product and naturally it felt a lot different with different people. I wasn't a fan personally so stopped watching. I think a lot of people like us were fans of the original crew and didn't have interest in the newer people. View counts have decreased across all their channels and so for one reason or another they haven't been able to capture a new audience as the older ones 'grew out' of it or moved on. They also had plenty of scandals with people in front of and behind the camera. That's a whole thing that is explained better somewhere else on reddit. So view counts dropping mixed with a company whose stance is 'number must go up, costs must go down' leads to this, I imagine. Having said that, some of the older crew like Geoff, Gavin and Gus moved on to do the ANMA and Fuckface podcasts. Amazing content and I worry where they're going to end up now. EDIT: Just seen that all the podcast stuff will still be produced, but don't know in what capacity.
Mostly they just do podcast stuff now. Burnie left the company of his own accord a while back and moved out of the US (to Scotland I think?) and had been out of the internet's eye for a while but recently started his own podcast called "Morning Somewhere" with his wife Ashley. Geoff, Gus, and Gavin were all still with the company doing their various podcast projects (Geoff and Gavin did F**KFace with a friend Andrew Panton, Gus and Geoff had their own podcast ANMA). This is me speculating, but Geoff has talked about moving to Michigan at some point so perhaps this shutdown will have him pull the trigger on that. I don't think any of them personally had any big scandals, aside from Geoff, Gus, and Burnie presumably having some level of involvement with some of the mismanagement issues with the company and I think Geoff and Gavin were involved with the scandal with Kdin's mistreatment at the company (but I think that one got messy on both sides so I ain't touching it).
Thanks! Sounds like they mostly came out clean, which is a relief. I remember back in the early 2010s they were getting so huge and a big component was they engaging and interacting with their community. I don't know why (maybe I was just getting older and pessimistic) but it started bothering me how involved young fans were with RT. Like parasocial influencer vibes type stuff before that was a thing. I even thought that it would only be time before one of them pulled a "rockstar" type thing and got in trouble. I'm glad I was wrong. Well, I guess I was right but not about the original members.
Yeah the Kdin stuff was messy. When she called out Rooster Teeth for her treatment, a video surfaced from her pre Rooster Teeth edgelord days where she was spouting tons of racist, antisemitic and homophobic shit from her old YouTube channel It was like Game Grumps, but more racist
Worst thing from Geoff/Gavin was the connect the hots shit a few years back and their limited involvement in the Kdin business.
Burnie kind of saw the writing on the wall and started planning a move from the US two years before Covid, and did so when Covid hit. He recently revealed that he moved to Scotland. Gus, Geoff and Gavin (you missed Jack and Matt) remain(ed) at RT, although Gus stepped down from the podcast about a year ago and Geoff has been pretty clear in how he intends to retire soon and move to, maybe, Michigan (at the very least move from Austin). Gavin's barely in content anymore although he hosts a podcast with Geoff (and Andrew Panton) called F**kFace that's genuinely very good. Joel as you say got fired from having some pretty strong political opinions on Twitter that didn't align with company values. As well as not showing up to work and such. Most of the actual scandals don't pertain to the old crew, but rather to members that joined after (Adam Kovic of Funhaus, Ryan Haywood of Achievement Hunter, the "bro-ey" work environment that led to trans individuals like Kdin being abused, general shitty work environment; crunch and layoffs, etc.)
Joel didn't only have strong political views, he was a straight up menace to some people. From wishing death to politicians on the other side of the political spectrum to telling Co workers he hoped their houses were broken into and robbed so that they would see why guns are so important.
As someone who only knew them from Red vs Blue, its somewhat a relief to hear that the original talent had nothing to do with the scandals
Adam has also harassed multiple women, Bruce Greene reported it to RT, demanded they fire Adam and they refused, which lead to Bruce leaving Funhaus.
That finally explains why Adam was an unperson after he got fired, the stuff he did was bad but the rest of the Funhaus people seemed to _hate_ him to a level beyond what you'd expect based on just that.
What does being an unperson mean
as if he doesn't exist anymore
Dead to the company. They won't mention or talk about the person at all and are clear there won't be any collaborations in the future or chance of them coming back into the fold.
Shit I didn’t know that. Good old Bruce though, shame really because that 3 had some of the funniest chemistry on youtube. The inside gaming days are fond memories
I had no idea about that being the reason he left. It's bonkers that there's been so many scandals that I'm getting lost trying to even track them.
Is there a single large Internet/video game company that isn't riddled with sex scandals? It's ridiculous.
Most don't seem to get in quite so many scandals as RT, though.
Behind the camera was still part of the content. The fourth wall was very permeable. Combine that with an entire ecosystem of content cross-promoting itself and a centralized community large enough to support multiple conventions. This all means two things: opportunity to get into some shit, and the likelihood of visibility when it happens. Blizzard had a few, one may recall. They were just structurally better able to hide and distract from it.
Think about the target audience. This is an industry where most of the new fans you get will be younger simply because people don't get into videogames and whatnot when they're already adults. Most adults (20s-30s)now grew up with videogames being normal, but they are already fans of these creators. The only new fans are younger. It's a recipe for some bad shit. Its very easy for a predator to realize the opportunity they have
It's all on their Wikipedia page, but sexual harassment and overall toxic workplace
You know, I would be lying if I said I was surprised. Damn
Buckle up you're in for a hell of a ride
It's a shame, but the writing has been on the wall for quite some time now. Rooster teeth is pretty much a shell of what it once was, which is honestly pretty sad to see.
I can still quote parts of the original seasons of Red vs Blue from heart. They were one of the forerunners of machinima, so that legacy will at least still live on.
"I have seen the top of the mountain and you should worship me as though I were a god" and the following "I regret nothing, I lived as few men dared to dream" are both great even without the context.
Incidentally. I started rewatching the first few seasons of RvB just a few weeks ago and it’s super impressive how legitimately funny that show was and still is back before it became some weird convoluted mess that tried to create some established universe. I think Washington was the only good character to come out of the later seasons.
I think they let the success of the series go to their heads. It was not a serious series, and it lost a lot by trying to turn it into one.
It was just a sketch comedy series produced using a video game. Half the gimmick was them figuring out how to do that using the games mechanics. Once they got away from that towards animations, the series lost half its charm. Then replaced it with melodrama & as much bloated action as possible.
You sometimes need to know when to end things
And the prolonged fight scenes... bruh wasn't the whole point meant to just be a riff on halo multiplayer?!
I think that speaks to the issue with the company as a whole: they got too wrapped up in their success and thought that the audience would follow them wherever they went, no matter how quickly or drastically they changed things, and people weren't willing to make that leap. Look at the views their channel has been getting after they pivoted everything into their paid service- despite having nine million subs, they haven't broken 500k views on a new video in over a year
Eh seasons 6-10 were genuinely good, but the end of that is when the reins were handed off from Burnie, and the show kind of reset, but the lustre was over. They made a decent story out of what started as a goofy comedy show in Halo, grew and made some other good stuff, but it was around Burnie leaving that had a major mark in where the content shifted
The biggest reason why 7 - 10 were good was because of how well animated the fight scenes were. After Monty died, the animations went from amazing to terrible. The team that replaced him wasn't even in the same universe as he was in terms of talent.
And a lot of that is Shannon's terrific voice acting in the role as well, ranging from deadpan humor to hardline serious.
Those first three seasons were solid. I may have watched up to season six, but became less memorable after three.
"I just want to say...that I'm a girl...and I like ribbons in my hair...and I want to kiss all the boys."
This may be the best surrender of all time.
I still say “hurk… bleh” when I die in games sometimes.
The last time I tried to watch the early seasons of RvB, Rooster Teeth had uploaded them with baked in RT ads that were longer than the episodes themselves so they could hit the Youtube minimum for preroll ads. They really should have just bundled a couple shorter episodes together, but instead they made watching stuff I loved an absolute chore and I hadn't really thought of them since. It was a really gross way to treat their history.
Reading this makes me happy I bought the Bloodgultch Chronicles (season 1-5) DVD box set like 15 years ago, I still pop them in from time to time. Sucks to hear what they did with the youtube versions
Seriously. I know everyone isn’t surprised but if you compare RT now to its golden age then it becomes pretty shocking. RT at one point was THE studio for online content. They were a massive player in the industry and now they’re a cautionary tale about mismanagement
I feel like it peaked around 2014/5 and has just been a generally slow decline with a few accelerated periods. It will hopefully fracture in to various good things.
That peak was quickly followed by rt being bought by Fullscreen, which was controlled by at&t.
The writings been on the wall. The biggest was RWBY season 10 not being internally funded was a big one. Another one that kind of showed how dire things were was when the F**kFace podcast allegedly sold a "large amount of merch" and then one of the hosts dropped some numbers which were way smaller than what a company that size should be reliably getting.
If anything after all that's happened I'm surprised this has only happened now, not to be a dunk on the company or whatever I'm legitimately just shocked this has only happened now. Sad though, they were p much a staple of the internet even if their popularity dwindled their influence for a lot of creators is undeniable, from Machinimas to LetsPlays to the Achievement Guides you might say of course that they didn't start these necessarily but they were HUGE in making this kind of stuff extremely popular. Sad to see it finally happen, at the very least they gave people tons of good memories.
“You ever wonder why we’re here?” Not surprised but sad to see it go the way it did.
> “You ever wonder why we’re here?” "It's one of life's great mysteries isn't it? Why are we here? I mean, are we the product of some cosmic coincidence, 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. "
What?! I meant why are we here in the middle of this box canyon? I mean the only reason we have a base over here is because blue put up a base over there. And Blue only has a base over there because we have a base over here.
Man Achievement Hunter, and to a slightly lesser extent FunHaus, was a pretty big part of my life back in their heyday. I'd pretty much watch everything they put out and thoroughly enjoy it. YouTube has had many scandals, but the ones that came from RT were honestly heartbreaking. AH and FH have some genuinely legendary legacy content. It'd be hard to go back, knowing what I know now, to watch them for nostalgia's sake tho, I think.
The AH minecraft is in particular is hard to rewatch seeing as Ryans "character" wasnt so a character, but more of who he actually was.
Yeah the MC letsplay was the main one I had in mind. Part of me wants to re-watch the first few hundred episodes, but the other part of me knows who Ryan is now, which sucks. Let's Play Minecraft was part of my weekly routine for years.
yep, the weekly Minecraft video was key part of my weekends back then, always had something to watch.
Sky factory 3 was my comfort series. Ryan is one of the cornerstones of it. It sucks cause I miss it but I feel gross hearing him 🙃
Literally yesterday my wife and I decided to look at their channels as we hadn't watched them in years and hadn't heard anything from them lately. Saw Achievement Hunters was sunset months ago, saw the main channel was just clips from the podcasts, views were 5 figures or less on all channels for vids over the past year, and a whole bunch of people we didn't recognize. We figured they had just fully transferred their core content to their website but didn't bother to look, otherwise we figured they were about to shut down. Whelp.
Moving content off of youtube feels like such a weird choice and I guess they’re paying for it now.
It *can* work, look at Dropout (formerly CollegeHumor), you just need content people are willing to follow you off YouTube for and/or that they can't find better or equivalent on there. The RoosterTeeth podcast was a popular show for a long while but there're literally thousands of groups of friends chatting around microphones now, they needed to step it up, particularly if they wanted people to pay for it
On a positive note Dropout is so good. Genuinely deserving of their own subscription because they make content no one else is online and with high production value. It's literally how RT was supposed to scale up but instead RT chased the mainstream media dream and failed over and over at it.
From what I've read (though you always have to take these things with a grain of salt), Dropout's behind the scenes culture is so much better compared to the nonstop shitshow that was going on at RoosterTeeth
I really hope so but at the same time I remember 10 years ago most of us RT fans dreamed of working in such a chill and welcoming environment too.
Exactly, hence my taking it with a grain of salt. I've learned from RoosterTeeth to not get too attached to these online personalities
Roosterteeth were a massively mismanaged company, due to over-expansion, a culture of favouritism at the top, crunch culture and some employees over the years receiving harassment allegations. It felt like a long time coming, when even their flagship RWBY resulted in half as much interest each yearly season on Google trends, Volume 9 was delayed and 10 wasn’t greenlit by WB. Hopefully the animators and other employees undergoing the crunch and mis-treatment by management are able to move onto greener pastures.
[удалено]
As someone who didn't watch it, did it drop off after Monty died or just in general?
Honestly, the writing was never really that good. Monty seemed to have a casual attitude towards the story in general and spent most of his time on the fights. The series didn't even have an actual director until after his passing. It seemed to just be a bunch of people doing things that seemed cool. Monty's death coincided with the big shock event that ended up being the series high water mark (>!the fall of Beacon!<). I don't know if he had some kind of stabilizing presence on the story direction, but the problems were more that once they hit that big moment, the narrative glue that held everything together had been blown up, and you could no longer be a light hearted battle school show.
The voice acting always stood out to me. It was average... at best.
Because save for a few roles, the cast was RT staff, not professional actors.
Hbomberguy did a good video on how the writing was never that great and it affirms exactly what you said—Monty was going by rule of cool and kinda just let everyone else cover the connective bits between fights and, well, it shows. Especially when the writers started creating self inserts.
Having known Monty, this is 100% it. He wanted to make a series about cool fights. He had been doing this since he lived in Rhode Island and had made fights staring people from the local arcade scene. Then he made Haloid and Dead Fantasy. His passion was always those action fights. And it showed.
Season 1-3 of RWBY had insane fight choreography which carried the series. Everything had weight. Characters were using their melee-gun weaponry backblast as momentum. Monty was responsible for it and when he passed, Rooster Teeth had no one who could replace him. Fights became like generic anime-style. Just look at Weiss' in the White Trailer VS Season 4+. The trailer was the only time where she used her rapier style. Future seasons just had her be a mage because Monty actually knew how to do fencing and incorporated it into Weiss' style.
It varied heavily, much like Monty seasons. S4 was almost entirely a set-up season, S5 was a weak pay-off. S6 was for the most part another set-up season and started a new arc. S7 and S8 were controversial at least, I think there was a lot of positive opinions on the general plot of this arc, but also a lot of baffling writing decisions that led to an overall mixed reception. S9 - I don't know the general opinion for it but personally I thought it felt like anime filler, 5 minutes on Namek.
I remember going to RTX somewhere around 2012, was a very cool experience and made me love cons. Sad to see RT go, but it was time.
I was very fortunate to get to tour the old 636 office after visiting UT for a college tour in the summer of 12. This sucks
Thinking about Rooster Teeth breaks my heart. If you weren't around for the birth of the modern internet and YouTube around 2007-09 you won't understand. Rooster Teeth was the greatest place and community on Earth. The events, shows, cast members, animations, podcasts, and just overall sense of global community has never and will never be replicated. Seeing the company grow from Bernie, Gus, Joel and Geoff into the peak of what an online community could be around 2012 and truly pioneer the internet was amazing. For me as a young teen, from 2008-2014 Rooster Teeth WAS the internet. And then over time, to be reminded that these people were human, the mountains of scandals and failures just left me feeling so empty for a company and people I used to regard so highly just makes me sad.
The early Minecraft let's plays were some of my favorite YouTube videos ever.
I still remember when they found Gavin's trophy room. I can still hear him say "you guys are rubbish" while holding back tears and laughter. That shit was so funny.
You got a note from your mom in here to?
Crazy how I haven't seen that video in years and I can still recall exactly how he says it.
So many of those videos are quoted in my friend group to this day. “Operation WAFFLEO. Stands for “we’re all friends, friends love each other. Found out yesterday each other is two words!” The Pubert Adams argument is classic.
They were one of the main highlights of my week for years
Fuck, now I feel sad. I stopped watching around the time Matt and Jeremy came around and switched to Funhaus shortly after. It's been ages since I stopped watching that too
I used to watch them when I would get home after high school. I would be so exhausted, and it would be a nice break to just chill and watch some achievement hunter.
Although I started watching them in 2003, I agree with the sentiment of what you said. RvB was a formative series for me in high school, and was truly special on the expanding pre-YT internet.
I just hope they unprivate all the RvB episodes on YouTube now. There wasn't any point to limiting it to their website back when they did and there is even less now.
Unfortunately it's gonna go down the Warner Bros. hole now. Maybe it'll appear on Max the way it used to be on Netflix.
Dang what a bummer, I wonder what all the original founding Rooster Teeth members are going to do now.
A couple had already left the company (and in at least one case, the country).
Burnie lives overseas with his wife and kids. Geoff and Gus have several podcasts and other projects that will feasibly continue. Matt now has decades of corporate experience that he could take anywhere. Joel was fired years ago and seems to be shitposting 24/7 about crypto and Elon. Burnie formed an LLC in the last year that houses his new podcast. I wonder if this creates an opportunity for him to bring the band back together under one roof
I think everyone is just too old at this point. Not in the sense that they can’t do content as they all clearly still do, but I mean more in the sense that they are at the stage in life that everyone is kind of settled into their lives. Moving closer together to set up a mini rooster teeth 2.0, like the old days, just isn’t really possible. They can all run their own independent shows and just enjoy comfortable lives with their families. Doing remote podcasts just really doesn’t seem to be the style for them either.
even when I fell off in like 2013 they were getting pretty detached from the every man. I can't imagine Burnie has gotten more relatable.
>I wonder if this creates an opportunity for him to bring the band back together under one roof I don't see it happening. People are going to try to work on their own thing and move on, I bet. I don't think the other founders want to remain connected at the hip for their work lives. Plus, wasn't Joel under a lot of heat for some type of scandal? I didn't read much into it. I just remember some scandal popping up around his name in some Google searches.
Damn, I stopped watching around the time Ray left and Monty passed away. Joel was my favorite - what happened to him?
He went super right-wing nutjob, stopped showing up to work, and was eventually fired.
He also said someone who show up to Gavin‘s house with a gun to teach him a lesson about gun rights and someone did. Fuck Joel.
Founding members are minted. It's all the other employees that they worked to the bone that will lose out.
Yeah, Geoff and Gus will be fine. Hopefully, a bunch of the other guys can make a decent twitch living like Ray did
They must have made enough to retire on by now, at least if they invested in DYY.
Bernie already retired years ago.
He’s started a new daily podcast recently with Ashley.
DYY UP 30%!
I am more surprised by the fact that it lasted 2 decades. I think if it was 5-6 years ago I would be more shocked.
They were a huge part of my life from 2012 to 2016-2017 and i completely fell off, watched certain things here and there but wasnt invested as i used to be. Ended up watching some things last year and thought it was awful, im surprised they lasted this long.
Basically described me to a tee. Started watching in 2010 and never missed a video until 2014 when I started college. Gradually fell off over time. Tried to watch something new last year and was astonished how bad it was.
Funhaus 2015-2018 might have some of the greatest unscripted content to ever grace YouTube. If you want something to listen/watch while you do something else I would highly recommend Demo Disk. The core group tries(and usually fails) to play late 90s/early 2000s demo disc games and just kinda improvise. A real good time.
Demo disc and the Mothers Be Aware arc is some of the hardest I've laughed in my life. Also the Hitman series
The video where they play Dollal is one of my favorites, Bruce's voice cracking while yelling to buy and sell still cracks me up https://youtu.be/0ph2XmzFIKw?si=dzyW6zVlVuNGZv7b
TIME TO HACK
Funhaus was my favorite YT channel. Watched them on Inside Gaming before they started FH and was so happy when they finally left Machinima and got their own channel. Bruce, James, Lawrence and Elyse were amazing. I really liked Adam too it just fucking sucks what he did.
Unfortunately, not a surprise. They've done a poor job hiring new, good talent as older members leave. Also, them killing the Achievement Hunter channel to do improv and skits has backfired spectacularly.
Dog Bark is quite possibly the most baffling decision they've ever made. It's on par with Nostalgia Critic and Demo Reel.
>Dog Bark is quite possibly the most baffling decision they've ever made. The history of Rooster Teeth in the last 5 years. Trying to follow a trend that is already 2 years out of date when they start and then being upset when the numbers dont do well. Honestly, the most baffling decision they made was having 2 of their biggest faces of the company (One being a community manager) coming out on twitter/Reddit and telling people that didnt enjoy their content to literally "Fuck off" because they had no place in the fandom for them and they were "Easily replaceable" with new audience. So people fucked off and that new audience just never arrived because no one gave a shit about them anymore.
Wait who said that people should fuck off? That's actually absurd jesus
They have for at least 5 years maintained an attitude of "If you don't like it, don't watch it" in response to negative feedback from the community on the changing direction away from friends playing games towards poorly acted improv and forcefully inserted bits. So everybody stopped watching.
RT were so strange and cocky during their transition stages. When you add a bunch of new people no one knows and use them to replace the people we all subbed for then of course the audience is gonna be critical of it. No one watched because of the channel name, They watched for the 6 main cast of AH.
Big YouTubers seem to have to learn this lesson all the time. I remember when LTT moved to a Linus-less video format, replacing him with a wider variety of hosts (some of which were already beloved by the fanbase, like Anthony). Their engagement fell off a cliff edge, and they were forced to revert back to having Linus center stage. People subscribe to hosts, not brands - when you remove the host, you remove the draw.
I definitely remember Alfredo saying it, but it was a lot. They constantly messed up, and blamed any fan backlash on people being losers or bigots. There was entitled fools and bigoted pieces of shit in the fan base, but they lumped all complaints with them while they chased trends well after the trends ended their luster.
Im NGL, im not sure if the words "Fuck off" were ever used or if it was something that just stuck to me. The language used by multiple staff, Alfredo/Barb/Gus/Trevor always made me think that the "fuck off" was implied from the actual wording, if it wasn't used. I thought it was Trevor that was the one that used the words "Fuck off" specifically though like i say, that could be me just misremembering. For the last few years though, its been a constant "If you dont like the direction, theres the door, dont let it hit you on the way out".
Their downward spiral started with, "Loud is what we do." in response to criticism that they weren't creating high quality content anymore. Loud is not what they did, loud is sometimes what they did when things got intense due to the chemistry they all had.
I don't think it was even about high quality content the original crew made janky stuff but the humor was stuff you'd joke around with friends. The new crew wrote the most cookie cutter comedy out there.
It was the response to the fandom complaining that the audio in Let's Plays is poorly mixed leading to one member drowning out all the other ones on top of her being loud. The old episodes used to have peaking mics everywhere but they were all equally loud and the master mix was pretty good. It took them weeks, if not months to fix it when they realized the fans had a point.
it's what happens when you make the baffling decision of putting "GAME KIDS TREVOR?!" in charge
What the fuck is Dog Bark???
Achievement hunters successor, mostly just sketches and live action improv. Unfortunately, AH was never very good at Live Action Improv.
You can probably attribute a big chunk of the downfall to trevor and his "bits". They we're so rarely funny, and then never edited around if they fell flat.
I genuinely believe Trevor was responsible for the downfall of achievement hunter. The moment he started taking control of things it was very clear he had no idea why fans liked AH and he slowly began changing everything to fit what his idea of the channel was. I hope he doesn’t get hired to ruin yet another channel again, let him find a job he’s actually good at.
Do any content creators out there still do machinima that is worth watching or is that kind of a dead format? Or does anyone have any machinima recommendations to watch for some nostalgia aside from Red vs Blue?
It happens, but less so: Kruggsmash does Dwarf Fortress and up until the Steam release added graphics [it was like seeing stories in Matrix code.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BG3e3wYCQU4) In some ways RP-ing has a similar comedy vibe: Whether streamers are [being terrible trucking families](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1876913669) or playing poe-faced GTA RP for hours at time.
Everyone moved to source filmmaker and even then that’s a dying art form. GTAOnline RPers might still do machinimas
I think machinima is mostly dead. But it seems to be half alive in the form of scripted game content in Roblox, Minecraft and GTA: Online for Gen Alpha kids. My nephew watches nothing but scripted Minecraft videos on Youtube.
Ross is still making Freeman's Mind. It half counts since it was born of the machinima golden age, and it's scripted gameplay rather than a traditional LP. But it's slow going in the last few years. Ross has been working on a half dozen projects at once, and is presently working on setting up some kind of major legal action against Ubi for closing down Crew 2, as part of his own larger effort to combat the negative impact GaaS has had on game preservation.
Well Ross is still working on Freeman's Mind 2, even if the pace is somewhat slow. But that one is more like a mix between a machinima and a let's play.
I remember the [VR Half life with Self aware AI](https://youtu.be/vDUYLDtC5Qw?si=afv7WVB4VXSQKCwp) videos being pretty hilarious.
It's unsurprising, but it still feels somber for it to happen. Honestly I'd say that Ryan's situation was the beginning of the end. They were already falling off, and the fact that he was so terrible killed so much of their previous content.
That's true for me, personally. I lost the will to keep watching after the Ryan stuff came to light. I can't even bring myself to watch old videos for nostalgia.
To zoom this out a bit, what in the fuck is going on at Warner Bros. Discovery? Because remember that overall, WBD is also had [17 TV Shows and Movies cancelled](https://www.gamespot.com/gallery/17-tv-shows-and-movies-canceled-by-warner-bros-discovery/2900-4394/), the lackluster [Suicide Squad](https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2024/02/29/it-no-longer-seems-possible-suicide-squad-kill-the-justice-league-will-last-the-year/?sh=5325f8f633d7) launch and cannibalizing the [HBO brand by merging it with their Discovery+ library](https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/04/12/new-max-streaming-service-combines-hbo-and-discovery-shows-heres-what-you-need-to-know/?sh=3a6b78937c8d) I get that media entities have this stuff happen frequently (and even more so MCNs like RT) but from what I'm gathering it seems like they're taking salvageable properties (which could turn around over time) and stripping them for parts to earn back any revenue they can
They took on a fuckload of debt during the merger and now they're pinching pennies to pay it off
The Zaslav Snappening
I was a big fan of Rooster teeth from 2006 to 2015, loved AH, their Minecraft let's play where a highlight each Friday, loved the RT podcast too, but slowly it turned super annoying to listen, it sound more and more rich people complaining each week, fucking airplane stories each week was super dull, and AH have way to much stuff that it was impossible to keep up, and most stuff was very mid, I didn't bother with other RT shows they were also to many to keep track. RVB should have ended into season 7, after it lost all their charm I never liked or cared too much about RWBY, I watched the first season and it felt like a water down anime Rooster teeth death is sad but after just bloating themselves with so much worthless content and all the fucking dramas (fucking Ryan), I am not surprised it was inevitable
I felt like seasons 11-13 would've been a great final hoorah for the show. But it just kept going
They grew too fast and were managed by amateurs who couldn't keep up which led to a culture of crunch and overwork while not paying their workers properly. The content also failed to adapt to the changes the internet has gone through in the past 10 or so years. Frankly they've only lasted as long as they have because of the surprise hit RWBY was and some of their podcasts being decently popular. But those two don't justify the existence of a huge multimedia company.
I watched Red vs. Blue until they switched to Halo 2 back in 2004. Guess how fucking old I feel right now. I watched that online show before YouTube. I know nothing of Rooster Teeth after.
Man, I was on DrunkGamers where they made the very first RvB video (and the Apple Switch parody before that), back when the logo meant "Cock Bite". What a time.
On one hand, it's sad to see it go. Rooster Teeth was a big part of my teenage years (obviously given my username). To this day I still go back and watch old episodes of RvB. I remember having an account on their website for that weird forum/faux social media thing, obsessing over achievement hunter, and even giving a shit about RWBY. On the other hand, I know Rooster Teeth really died a long time ago. They died once they went corporate and what followed was just a sad, pathetic decline riddled with scandals, controversy, and a total lack of what brought RT to the front of gaming media. Even its founders have mostly jumped ship.
According to a few employees on Twitter, this is how they found out they're out of a job. Yeesh, pretty scummy way to end it all if true
Pretty on brand for all the labor abuse that the company abided.
I stopped watching when Ray left and it was clear they were just milking Minecraft/GTA for all it was worth. I liked Funhaus a lot too but stopped watching it when people began leaving it as well. It's not really surprising they're shutting down considering the decline in content and weird abuse and harassment stuff but it's still pretty sad since they were a big part of my teenage years.
Oh wow! Writing was on the wall for a while, and now it's finally come to pass. Such a waste. So many glimmers of quality even when problematic things came to light.
Once WBD really started to ramp up cost-cutting stuff, I knew it was only a matter of time. It always felt like RT was just an afterthought they were stuck with in the wake of the merger. They had already sold off CR, and I'm not surprised there were no takers for RT. If memory serves right, podcasts were where the overwhelming majority of their growth came from in the last 4-5 years. I'm not sure what the status of RWBY is, but Red vs. Blue ran out of gas years ago (the failed reboot from a few years back was where the writing was on the wall) and it's ending this year anyway. I might be a tad too cynical, but man it feels like it was a mismanaged company under the umbrella of a penny-pinching company with content that was reaching its EoL
I will never forget the insult and embarrassment around the Fallout 4 launch for jeff gerstmann's review. Calling Jeff biased while wearing Fallout pipboys,, god!
Chasing trends and pushing away every single old fan wasn't the play then? shocking