Why We’re Here

Hey.

Yeah?

You ever wonder why we’re here?

The beginning.

It’s been a bit of a rubbish week for me for many reasons. But the news about Rooster Teeth has really capped things off.

For those who don’t know what I’m talking about: if you’ve existed on the internet for any length of time in the last 21 years, you have, whether you know it or not, come across something from Rooster Teeth. Red vs Blue, one of the longest-running web series of all time; the vast corpus of gameplay videos from the late Achievement Hunter; animated shows like RWBY; hundreds of stupid comedy sketches, dozens of podcasts… the list goes on and on. They’ve been making dumb stuff on the internet longer than YouTube has existed, and what started as a few blokes playing Halo in someone’s front room turned into something so much bigger. It’s not been smooth sailing – there’s been bad content, there have been bad times, there have been some quite serious scandals. But Rooster Teeth has kept going, and the community that has built up over two decades of making stupid stuff has kept on supporting it.

And it got big. Jokes from AH Minecraft videos ended up in Minecraft. Red vs Blue was so popular that Microsoft added a special button prompt into Halo so that characters could lower their weapons and look more natural when filmed having conversations. The characters of RWBY appeared alongside the Justice League onscreen and on-page. Superman has shared a panel with Ruby Rose!

More than twenty years of work means there are untold thousands of hours of content up there on the internet in so many genres. And it’s all being hastily archived now by a legion of fans, because it’s entirely possible that all this stuff will just disappear in less than two months. Because Rooster Teeth is, out of nowhere, being shut down by its owners, Warner Bros. It’s just… ending, like that. Everyone working there is out of a job. Every show, every podcast, all that work, is being cut off without warning.

And that, to put it mildly, sucks.

I haven’t been there since the beginning. But I’ve been watching RT content for half my life at this point. A friend told me to watch Red vs Blue, and I did. And I loved it. And then I found the sketches, and shows like Immersion. And when Achievement Hunter started experimenting with this hip new trend of ‘Let’s Play’ videos, I watched those too. Every week brought new stuff for teenage me to watch and laugh at. Every Friday I’d log in for another compilation of people playing Halo: Reach very badly and laugh along with Jack and Geoff. By the time I went off to university RWBY had me hooked; this madcap fairytale world with its absurd fight scenes and crazy worldbuilding. It was when Monty Oum, RWBY’s mastermind, died in early 2015 that I first decided to try and write every day, a decision cemented by Terry Pratchett’s death a few months later and a streak that I’ve still kept up almost a decade on. I wouldn’t be the author I am today without the people at Rooster Teeth.

Over the years my tastes changed, as did the content RT put out; I still tuned in for RWBY and a couple of podcasts, but I had other things I’d rather have been watching. But it was still always there. I still listened to the F**ckface podcast every week – just a handful of idiots talking about nothing in particular, but for the most part that same handful of idiots I’d grown up with, watching them talk about nothing in particular, or play games badly, or make dumb jokes. It was always there. It’s always been there. When I needed a laugh, or a pick-me-up, or to relax, there was always some bit of RT, old or new, that would do the trick.

One of the greatest pieces of stupid gameplay ever produced.

And soon there won’t be. And that makes me sad in a way that these words aren’t quite going to be able to convey. I didn’t expect it to last forever; nothing does; but I expected a slow decline, a graceful bowing-out as people moved on and the internet changed. And I didn’t expect it to be soon. Twenty years is a long time. But instead, all of a sudden, it’s all being ripped away. All those idiots I’ve been watching for half my life have just lost their jobs, will soon lose the rights to the things they’ve poured their own hearts and souls into. I’m worried for them. They’ve done so much for me, after all, and for so many other people.

To Warner Bros it’s just a way to claw back some cash. But something very special is being lost in the process. Something that’s been part of my life for most of it, and part of a lot of other lives too.

Nobody really knows what’s happening yet. Maybe the staff will be able to spin off their own versions of their own shows. Maybe someone will pick up the rights to the scripted content like RWBY and keep it going. Maybe the community that has grown up around Rooster Teeth over all these years will pull together and save something from the fire.

Maybe it’ll all just be gone.

I hope not. I hope that even if Rooster Teeth is dead then the people behind it can continue. I hope that the idiots I’ve grown up watching can keep being idiots for as long as they want to, and that if they want to share that stupidity with us, they can. I hope the spirit of this stupid company keeps haunting the internet and the world for a long, long time.

Now I’m going to watch two grown men laugh at people being bad at a decade-old video game. There’s nothing particularly special about this video – it’s just the one I happen to be watching next. But that’s the point. It doesn’t have to be ‘special’, it doesn’t have to be a masterpiece. It’s two people laughing and having a good time. And that’s enough.