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'Red vs. Blue' team looks back as hit Web series nears its end

Machinima pioneers are moving headquarters to Austin and working on new projects, some with familiar characters.
By Omar L. Gallaga

One hundred episodes is a long time to be stuck in a virtual canyon with only a few empty military bases, some teleporters and a set of hyper-verbal co-workers.

So the Rooster Teeth team, a group of animators and voice actors headquartered in Buda, is calling it quits on "Red vs. Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles," a ground-breaking Web series that fuses computer-animated footage from the "Halo" video-game series with funny home-brewed dialogue.

Rooster Teeth Productions
The charaters in 'Red vs. Blue' trade snappy dialogue about their jobs as space soldiers, with witty commentary on the absurdity of war in general. The series started about the same time as the war in Iraq.

In its 41/2-year existence, "Red vs. Blue" has become a Web hit. It attracts a million viewers per episode, rivaling the most popular videos on YouTube.com, where many unauthorized "Red vs. Blue" videos end up.

The show is also influential. "Red vs. Blue" helped put the "machinima" movement on the map before Rooster Teeth even knew what the term meant. Machinima is an animation genre that uses a video-game engine to employ a ready-made set of virtual actors, backgrounds and props. You can now see game-based animation all over MTV and the History Channel.

Though it looks like a war game, the "Clerks"-like military satire traffics more in absurd bickering than actual action.

One classic example:

Church: We're gonna send over our Medic. Now, what do we get?

Simmons: You? You're surrendering! You don't get anything except humiliation and ridicule!

Tucker: We've already got that! What else do you have?

Last month, Rooster Teeth's head honcho and chief writer, Michael "Burnie" Burns, announced on the show's fourth anniversary that it would end its run at Episode 100, sometime in June.

It will be an end to five seasons' worth of lewd jokes and witty commentary on the absurdity of war. (It can't be a coincidence that the show's run has been concurrent to the war in Iraq.)

"We think 100 is a great place. Four and a half years is a long time to hold the attention span of the Internet," Burns said at the company's anonymous apartment in Buda where the show is produced. "Now that we have 11 hours of total story that we've told so far, it's gotten to the point where the backstory for a serial show is too much to address in five minutes (the typical length of a 'Red vs. Blue' episode)."

The characters, all of whom have identical full-body armor except for their different colors — including rough-talking Sarge, slacker Grif, idiots Caboose and Donut, sycophant Simmons, robot Lopez, fast-talker Church, tough assassin lady Tex and lothario Tucker among others — will continue in shorter series and humorous public service announcements, which have been longstanding features on the series' DVD sets and on Rooster Teeth's popular Web site, rvb.roosterteeth.com.

Rooster Teeth will be relocating, too. The crew is moving into a location at Seventh Street and Congress Avenue in downtown Austin, where it's likely they'll have a higher profile than the geek getaway in Buda, housed next to a set of railroad tracks. It's a den of Xbox 360s, movie posters, a big-screen TV, lots of computers and a tiny, tiny kitchenette.

With the series at Episode 97 as of this writing, Rooster Teeth is playing out the end of the long-running storyline, which Burns says has been planned for about three seasons.

The show, which was originally intended to be a six-episode series, has expanded well from its Internet roots, even in the age of YouTube freeloading. The company makes most of its money from DVD and T-shirt sales.

Recent screenings at the Alamo Drafthouse Downtown of the show's fourth season (plus many short videos never shown online) sold out. Audience members hooted for their favorite characters and laughed uproariously at lines that seem even funnier when you're not watching alone in front of a computer.

In addition to its "Red vs. Blue" work, Rooster Teeth also does machinima work for game companies. It produced many of last year's commercials for Electronic Arts' massively popular "Madden" football game series and has also worked on projects tied in to games like "F.E.A.R." and "The Sims 2."

Rooster Teeth is currently producing videos to be packaged with the upcoming "Halo 3" game, and episodes of "Red vs. Blue" are sold on Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox Live Marketplace service.

Philip DeBevoise, president of Machinima.com, an online clearinghouse for machinima videos including "Red vs. Blue," said the show blazed a trail for machinima filmmakers with its serialized format and strong writing and performances. "It's been a pioneering venture in the machinima movement," DeBevoise said. "I can't think of any series with so much success, so many episodes and such good work on a consistent level. It will be missed."

The great experiment in mixing moviemaking with game playing has paid off, but while some may be lamenting the end of a long-running series, Rooster Teeth hopes its fans will follow the team out of "Blood Gulch" and share in the team's sense of completion.

Joel Heyman, a Los Angeles-based actor who voices the dumbest character on the show, Michael J. Caboose, promises the blue-hued soldier will definitely be back for more misadventures