Red vs. Blue

Burnie Burns had voiced over gameplay videos on drunkgamers.com before creating Red vs. Blue with Hullum, Ramsey, Sorola, and Saldaña.

Red vs. Blue emerged from Burnie Burns's voiceover-enhanced gameplay videos that he created for a website called drunkgamers.com, which was run by Geoff Fink (later Geoff Ramsey) and Gustavo Sorola. Having played Halo: Combat Evolved extensively, the drunkgamers crew discussed one day whether the Warthog, an automobile in the game, looks like a puma. This discussion, re-created in episode 2, was "the spark for the whole series".[7] Seeing potential for a full story, Burns created a trailer for Red vs. Blue which was released September 5, 2002, on the Drunkgamers website, but it was largely ignored, and, for unrelated reasons, drunkgamers soon closed. Four months later, Computer Gaming World contacted Ramsey for permission to include a different drunkgamers video in a CD to be distributed with the magazine. Ramsey granted permission, but he and Burns felt that they needed a website to take advantage of the exposure from Computer Gaming World. They therefore resurrected Red vs. Blue and re-released the trailer to coincide with the Computer Gaming World issue. The first episode proper was released on April 1, 2003.[8]

Rooster Teeth was initially unaware of the broader machinima movement. In 2004, Co-producer Matt Hullum stated in an interview with GameSpy, "When we first started Red vs. Blue we thought we were completely original. We never imagined that there were other people out there using video games to make movies, much less that it was a new art form with a hard to pronounce name and an official organization."[9]

The nature of Red vs. Blue was different from Burns's initial expectation. A partial character introduction released between the original trailer and the first episode featured extensive action and violence, set to Limp Bizkit's song "Break Stuff". However, as work continued, the focus shifted to situation comedy rather than the heavy action initially implied.[10] Although the series parodies video games, Ramsey noted, "We try not to make it too much of an inside joke. And I think we use more bureaucracy and military humor than anything else, which everybody working in an office can identify with."[11] Rooster Teeth has stated that Red vs. Blue was influenced by Homestar Runner,[12] Penny Arcade,[3] and possibly Mystery Science Theater 3000.[11]

Rooster Teeth initially envisioned Red vs. Blue to be short, but the series grew beyond their expectations. Burns and Ramsey had preconceived a list of jokes for which they allocated six to eight episodes. By episode 8, however, they realized that the series had fleshed out more than expected; they had covered only about one third of their original list.[13] Later in season 1, Burns estimated a series of 22 episodes; however, driven by the series' popularity, he realized that there was more potential story than could be covered in that length,[14] and was able to conceive an extension of the season 1 plot. The whole production team eventually quit their jobs and began to work full-time on the series;[15] to generate revenue they created an online store to sell T-shirts.

On June 16, 2006, Burns announced a five-part mini-series, Red vs. Blue: Out of Mind, which chronicles the adventures of the mercenary Tex after her disappearance in season 4. The mini-series premiered exclusively on the Xbox Live Marketplace,[16] but Rooster Teeth later made it available on their official site.[17]

The original series, The Blood Gulch Chronicles, ended on June 28, 2007, with the release of episode 100. On April 4, 2008, Burns announced a new series, Red vs. Blue: Reconstruction,[18] the group's first Halo 3 series and the beginning of the new Recollection story arc. Several voice actors returned in Reconstruction,[19] which ran from April 5 to October 30, 2008. Rooster Teeth announced plans for a sequel Red vs. Blue series, each separated by a few weeks' break. The mini-series Red vs. Blue: Relocated bridged the gap between Red vs. Blue: Recreation and the previous season. During a Late Nite Jenga Jam podcast, Burnie Burns officially confirmed that the working title of the eighth Red vs. Blue series was "Red vs. Blue: Resolution".[20] The title was later finalized as "Red vs. Blue: Revelation".[21] The first four episodes were previewed at PAX East in March.[22] After five seasons, Rooster Teeth expanded the scope and animation of the show, hiring renowned animator Monty Oum for action scenes, starting with season 8.[23] On April 1, 2010, the premiere of Revelation attracted such a large audience that both roosterteeth.com and Blip.tv (who formerly hosted Rooster Teeth's videos) crashed.[24]

On March 28, 2011, Rooster Teeth presented the first trailer for Season 9 of Red vs Blue which aired on June 14, 2011, during which time Miles Luna officially joined the company.[23] Season 9 acted as a semi-prequel, fleshing out the event surrounding Project Freelancer, one of the key elements of the plot in previous seasons, while continuing the events left off in Revelation.[25] Season 10, which continued Season 9's pattern of showing both stories simultaneously, began on May 28, 2012, and ended on November 5, 2012. The season concluded the Freelancer backstory while setting up the events of Season 11. The first RWBY trailer was shown following the conclusion of the season's credits.

On September 7, 2012, Burnie Burns appeared on What's Trending and confirmed that there would be a Season 11, which premiered on June 14, 2013, and started the Chorus Trilogy.[26] The trilogy picked up where Season 10 left off and returned to a format similar to that of The Blood Gulch Chronicles, having no pre-rendered CGI. The season ended on November 11, 2013. On February 3, 2014, Miles Luna announced Season 12 on Rooster Teeth's website. The season premiered on April 28, 2014, and concluded on September 29, 2014. The final season of the Chorus Trilogy, Season 13, was announced on March 4, 2015, with a release date of April 1, 2015. The season brought back a handful of characters from the series, including Sharkface, the Counselor, Junior, and Sister, and ended with a cliffhanger on September 7, 2015.

On April 1, 2016, a trailer for Season 14 was released, with its first episode airing on May 8, 2016. Breaking from the format of the previous seasons, Season 14 was instead an anthology season, featuring various backstories, such as the trilogy of episodes starring Locus and Felix, and/or non-canon "PSA-type" episodes, such as the third Sarge movie trailer. The season ended on October 16, 2016.

On February 24, 2017, it was announced that Joe Nicolosi, writer and director of the Season 14 episode "The Brick Gulch Chronicles" would be writing and directing Season 15.[27] Its trailer was released on March 30, 2017, and the season itself premiered on April 2, 2017.

Nicolosi returned for Season 16, Red vs. Blue: The Shisno Paradox, where he also had the help of writer Jason Weight. The season premiered on April 15, 2018.[28] While Nicolosi could not return for the seventeenth season due to other commitments within Rooster Teeth, he co-wrote the story with Weight, who was promoted to head writer, and Miles Luna, who penned one of the season's episodes. Machinima animators Josh Ornelas and Austin Clark took over as directors of Red vs. Blue: Singularity, which premiered on March 9, 2019.[29][30]

On January 15, 2020, Season 18 was confirmed to be in development with a brief 3 second clip being shown in a promo trailer for upcoming Rooster Teeth releases.[31] The season, Red vs. Blue: Zero, was scheduled to premiere on October 19, 2020, but was delayed to November 9, 2020.[32] Director Torrian Crawford referred to the season as a “restart” for the series, as it follows a mostly new cast, has cleaner humor, and is more action focused than previous iterations.[33]

On July 7, 2023, at Rooster Teeth's annual convention RTX, it was announced that the series would return for a nineteenth and final season subtitled Restoration, to premiere in late 2023. Hullum was announced to return to direct while Burns, who had since left the company, is returning as lead writer. The trailer retcons the events of the Shisno Trilogy and Zero only as simulations made by Epsilon-Church.[34]

The process by which the show is written has changed as the show progressed. In the first season, Burnie Burns would typically write an episode script on a Sunday afternoon before the episode was to be released on Friday. Scripts were written with minimal planning as the storyline grew beyond the 6 to 8 episodes originally expected. Church's death, as well as the revelation of Tex as a female character, both of which drove most of the season 1 plot, were conceived shortly before their respective episodes began production.

In January 2005, Burnie Burns and Kathleen Zuelch were interviewed in an episode of The Screen Savers on G4. In response to a question regarding any drawbacks to using machinima techniques, Burns responded "There are drawbacks, like it's a very limited world".[35] PC games often allow for the addition and integration of new game assets, such as new levels and textures; console games are much more limited in this respect.[35] "But really what you end up doing is you end up writing around what's in that world, that limited world ... sometimes we sit around and we think 'what can we possibly do with stuff that's in the game?'".[35] As an example, the skull from the Oddball multiplayer mode of Halo was used for the flashback scene in episode 10, in which Tex beats Private Jimmy to death with his own skull.[35]

After the first season, the writing process changed. Matt Hullum was added as a main writer in the next season, and plot events were planned much more in advance. Approximately 40 to 80 pages of rough plot and dialogue are now written out before production on a season begins. In describing the writing process, Burns has said that main plot points are assigned to occur at certain points in a season, and that they would begin writing each episode by asking how much they wanted to advance towards the next plot point.

Dialogue for an entire episode is typically recorded over one or two days and cut together for filming the day after. Until midway through season 3, audio for the voice actors living in Texas had been recorded in a makeshift soundproof booth in Burns' guest room closet. Currently, however, audio is recorded in a professional recording booth in the Rooster Teeth offices in Austin, Texas, with the recordings later being compressed to a slightly lower quality. During season 1, dialogue for the voice actors living in Los Angeles, California — Joel Heyman, Kathleen Zuelch, and Matt Hullum — was recorded over the phone. Afterwards, a second recording studio was set up in Hullum's Los Angeles home. As Hullum moved back to Texas in season 3, Heyman and Zuelch now record their own dialogue. Jason Saldaña and Gus Sorola also recorded audio by phone while temporarily residing in New York State and Puerto Rico respectively.

Nico Audy-Rowland and Jeff Williams

Initially, the first several episodes of the series did not include any music. In May 2003, Nico Audy-Rowland, the bandleader of Trocadero, was introduced to Red vs. Blue and enjoyed the series enough to submit a song about it to Burns, who liked the piece and promptly requested more music for Red vs. Blue. Episode 8, "Don't Ph34r The Reaper",[36] was the first to include music. However, for the release of the season 1 DVD, music was retrofitted into earlier episodes, often during transitions. Trocadero's "Blood Gulch Blues", whose last few measures are now heard during each episode's title sequence, is used as background music for the character introductions on the Red vs. Blue season DVDs. According to Trocadero's website, the song's lyrics are intended to highlight episode 2's joke about the Warthog and the notion that there is as much bickering and fighting within each team as there is conflict between the two sides. In fact, "Blood Gulch Blues" never mentions Red vs. Blue. The song is from the band's debut full-length album Roses Are Red, Violets Are Blue which was released in 2004. The band's style is alternative rock, taking influence from elements of blues, alternative rock, and western types of music. Trocadero continued to provide music for the show from their second and third albums, Ghosts That Linger and Flying by Wire.[26]

Beginning with Red vs. Blue: Revelation, the main score for each season has been crafted by Jeff Williams, the former keyboardist of Trocadero, in addition to many of Trocadero's songs being reused. Williams's soundtracks have genres containing mixed elements of score music, hard rock, and sometimes electronic and rap. Williams often features others on vocals including Lamar Hall, Red Rapper, Barbara La Ronga, Nicole D'Andrea, his daughter Casey Lee Williams, Sandy Lee Casey, and some members of the cast, and collaborates with Steve Goldshein on some tracks. The soundtracks also feature several parody songs, and some songs included are heard in PSAs and Rooster Teeth shorts. With the release of season eleven, Williams moved away from providing music for Red vs. Blue to work on Rooster Teeth's new series, RWBY. Trocadero returned as the sole-provider of Red vs. Blue's score for the first time since season seven, also providing a new theme song "Contact" effectively replacing "Blood Gulch Blues".[26] David Levy joined the music team alongside Trocadero in season 13[37] and has continued to write music for the show since.

Red vs. Blue is mostly recorded using a number of networked Xbox consoles. As the games evolved and Rooster Teeth grew, consoles were changed to eight connected Xbox 360s and later sixteen Xbox Ones. Within a multiplayer game session, the people controlling the avatars "puppet" their characters, moving them around, firing weapons, and performing other actions as dictated by the script, and in synchronization with the prerecorded dialogue. The camera is simply another player, whose first-person perspective is recorded raw to a computer.[38][39] The Apple Macintosh games Marathon and Marathon 2: Durandal were also used in Season 3 for scenes that occur in the distant past; this has the effect of making the graphical quality of the series an indication of time's progression throughout the story. The first five seasons of Red vs. Blue were later reshot in high definition using the PC ports of Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2,[40] which have also been featured in later seasons whenever those games were required.

In the interview on The Screen Savers, Burns described the use of machinima techniques to record the show thus: "It's like normal animation but instead of, y'know, sitting down, drawing everything by hand, we just use controllers."[35] During the earlier seasons, Ramsey developed a technique to handle the gamepad with his foot in case more than four characters were in the scene.[15]

In scenes using the original Halo, a bug was exploited that made it so that by holding a pistol and looking down, the character would appear to be holding the pistol down but looking up, as if more relaxed. At the same time, changing the perspective the head would bob, giving the impression that the character was talking. The glitch also either made vertical movement limited or returned the character's appearance to normal, so characters would have to estimate movements, since they were always looking down.[39]

Bungie eliminated the bug in Halo 2, so that the on-screen characters appear to look up or down correctly. However, Bungie also implemented a new feature that made it possible for Rooster Teeth and others to achieve the same effect as the original bug. In Halo 2, pressing down on the D-Pad of the Xbox controller makes the player character appear to hold his or her weapon in a neutral position, without aiming it at anyone, while looking straight ahead. This also allowed them to move the heads up and down to achieve a more dynamic appearance for some scenes.[41]

In footage made using Halo, a weapon aiming reticle appears in the center of the screen. This reticle appears because, as with most machinima, the camera's view is from the perspective of a weapon-wielding player. The exception to this is footage recorded by killing the camera player's avatar. Footage made using Halo: Custom Edition allowed for a player to act as a free roaming camera, and thus contained no reticle. In Halo 2, a bug in the Oddball multiplayer mode allows the player to drop all weapons, causing the weapon reticle to disappear. This bug has been used in all Halo 2 footage from episode 46 onwards.

To gain unique angles in the series, Rooster Teeth first used a tank in the game to emulate crane shots by standing the cameraman on the turret while it was raised. Later, they found it more practical to stand the cameraman on other characters in the game. This trick has also been used for other purposes, such as standing Donut on two characters to create the illusion that he could jump higher than is possible in the game.[42]

For scenes which include the flag (CTF), only two colors could be used (Sarge's and early Donut's red, and Caboose's blue) as CTF is a team game and only red and blue colors could be used. When the flag used among different colored characters, it is only shown with a standard red or blue character, mixed with scenes with other characters behaving as if it is present.

During recording, there was an issue with the Blue Team's deceased leader, Church. Church appears as a ghost for some parts of the show, and he needed to appear transparent to the viewer. To achieve this, all scenes with ghost-Church had to be recorded twice, once with Church in them and once without him. After the switch to Halo 2, Church's ghost form was portrayed using the "Poor Camo" Armor enhancement.

Another difficulty when recording in Halo 2 was the enormous shadow over Red Base in the map Coagulation. This shadow had a detrimental effect on the appearance of the characters. To avoid this, late in Season 4 a glitch was discovered that allowed a character to appear lit even in a dark area. Burnie Burns stated in the Season 4 audio commentary that the glitch was something they kept noticing a lot while recording the episodes, and when they discovered how to replicate it they utilized it extensively. During the first five seasons, the videos were mostly recorded on the Halo map Blood Gulch and its Halo 2 counterpart, Coagulation, although later episodes have increasingly been recorded on other maps.

Episodes that have been made with the games starting with Halo 3 have used the theater mode camera. The Forge Mode from Halo 4 onward also helped by providing a green screen and the creation of entire areas for certain scenes.[43]

Starting in season 8, action sequences have been made with dedicated animation that involve stunts not possible with the previous game engine. For this, they teamed up with animator Monty Oum, a fan of the series. Making the show more ambitious and reliant on computer animation led to extensive planning – fight choreography, storyboards, animatics – for episodes that take months to be completed, in contrast to machinima ones that are done in just a week.[38][39]

Adobe Premiere Pro is used to edit the audio and video together, add the titles, and create some of the special effects not normally possible on the console or in the games used. Adobe After Effects is also used, typically by Hullum, to create animated props not found in the regular game engine. Examples of these extra props include tombstones in episode 20 and ornaments, presents, and lights in the Christmas 2004 video.

As the camera player's view has a heads-up display (HUD), black bars are added in post-production to hide the top and bottom portions containing irrelevant in-game information, creating a letterbox effect. Most machinima is made with computer games, which often have HUDs that can be easily disabled in one way or another. Console games such as Halo and Halo 2 are often more limited in this respect. In 2010, Rooster Teeth Productions released a remastered edition of The Blood Gulch Chronicles that removed the black bars and aiming reticle existent in previous versions of the series, which was done by re-shooting the first four seasons in the PC versions of Halo and Halo 2.

Red vs. Blue attracted interest immediately; the first episode was featured on Slashdot, Penny Arcade, and Fark on the same day, and had 20,000 downloads within a day.[49] The following episodes wound up downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, forcing a change on the distribution to peer-to-peer file sharing to cut the increasing server costs.[50] Ramsey noted Red vs. Blue also "had a broader appeal than we anticipated", gathering a female following along with the expected demographic of young adult males.[11] Shortly after episode 2, Bungie contacted Rooster Teeth. Although the crew had feared that any contact would be to force an end to the project, Bungie enjoyed the videos and was supportive;[8] one staff member called the production "kind of brilliant".[51] A deal was arranged to ensure that the series could continue to use Bungie's game properties[2] without license fees.[51] The relationship has continued with Bungie's successor in the Halo series, 343 Industries.[50] Red vs. Blue continued to attract more attention, and by April 2004, Kevin J. Delaney of The Wall Street Journal estimated that weekly viewership was between 650,000 and 1,000,000.[2] In a 2006 interview, Strange Company founder Hugh Hancock called the series probably "the most successful machinima productions [sic]" and estimated that it was generating almost US$200,000 annually.[52] Red vs. Blue content was also included with a premium "Legendary" edition of Halo 3.[53]

Red vs. Blue was widely acclaimed within the machinima industry. The first season won awards for Best Picture, Best Independent Machinima Film, and Best Writing at the Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences' 2003 Machinima Film Festival.[54] Two years later, at the 2005 festival, the third season won an award for Best Independent Machinima and was nominated for five others.[55] At the 2006 Machinima Festival, the series was nominated for awards in voice acting and writing, but won neither.[56]

Among film critics, the response was generally positive. Darren Waters of BBC News Online called Red vs. Blue "riotously funny" and "reminiscent of the anarchic energy of South Park".[14] Reviewing the three season DVDs for Cinema Strikes Back, Charlie Prince wrote, "Red vs. Blue is hysterical in large part because all the characters are morons, and so the seemingly intense conflict with the opposing base doesn't exactly work the way you'd think it would."[57] Leggat described the series as "[p]art locker-room humor, part Beckett-like absurdist tragicomedy, part wicked vivisection of game culture and sci-fi action films and games".[58] Ed Halter of The Village Voice dismissed the humor as shallow and described the first season as "Clerks-meets-Star Wars".[59] Leggat defended the humor, arguing, "The literary analog is absurdist drama."[2] It has also been critiqued by academic D. Bruno Starrs as an anti-war film.[60]

Another common criticism of Red vs. Blue was that its season 3 plot was too far-fetched and out-of-character. Charlie Prince wrote, "By the third season, however, the Red vs. Blue idea seems to be running out of steam ... It's not funny so much as just odd."[57] Writing for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Wilma Jandoc agreed that the first part of "season 3 ... throws the teams into a ridiculous situation and has limited member interactions, leading to a lack of witty dialogue".[4] In an about.com review of the season 4 DVD, writer Eric Qualls thought that season 3 was "a little too long, and too complicated, and the jokes were a bit too far apart".[61] Nevertheless, both Prince and Jandoc were optimistic that the series would improve, and Qualls stated that the fourth season had "returned to the series' roots" as "some of the funniest stuff you'll ever see".[61]

Rooster Teeth Productions has created special Red vs. Blue videos for various events. For example, Microsoft has commissioned Red vs. Blue videos for Xbox demo kiosks found in game stores and for a developer conference.[62] Barenaked Ladies has also commissioned videos for their concerts,[2] as frontman Ed Robertson was a fan of the series, and would later voice a character, Captain Butch Flowers.[63] Other videos have been specifically created for gaming magazines, including Electronic Gaming Monthly and Computer Gaming World; gaming conventions, including E3 and the Penny Arcade Expo; and the Sundance Film Festival.

Red vs. Blue has also received praise from soldiers stationed in the Middle East. An August 2005 blog entry by Kimi Matsuzaki of 1UP.com displays photographs of soldiers holding various weapons, as well as copies of the first and second season Red vs. Blue DVDs.[64] Geoff Ramsey later stated in an interview, "We get a lot of merchandise and DVDs out to Iraq and get a lot of great e-mails back."[11]

Red vs. Blue has been acknowledged by Xbox Live through Grifball, a game variant which is featured on the Halo 3 multiplayer; Grifball originated as a joke by Sarge in the 4th season that alluded to inflicting pain on Grif.[65] The notability and impact of Red vs. Blue extends to video games outside the Halo series as well. The developers of the Xbox 360 video game Gears of War, Epic Games, made a reference to a Red vs. Blue gag through an in-game achievement called, "Is it a spider?"; the award is earned for tagging opponents with grenades. Another reference to the series appears on Bungie's website. On a player's Halo 3 profile screen the description of a kill or death with a flag is "Right next to the headlight fluid".[66] In Halo 3 itself, the second campaign scenario features a Red vs. Blue skit, wherein two cast members voice over a soldier attempting to bypass a locked door. Different skits are seen on each difficulty level. In Halo: Reach, Dr. Halsey's office contains a data-file detailing the UNSC's "reaction" to the films. In the expansion pack for Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare, there is an achievement called "Chupathingy," when killing a Chupacabra.

Red vs. Blue is widely credited with attracting public attention to machinima and web-series.[67] The first instance of machinima dates back to the 1990s in the first-person shooter game Quake. A group that called themselves "The Rangers" created a software mod of them typing in the chat box and putting lines of dialogue on the screen. This group named these "videos" Diary of a Camper.[50] Even though Rooster Teeth is not the first to produce machinima, Clive Thompson credited Red vs. Blue as "the first to break out of the underground".[67] Tavares, Gil, and Roque called it machinima's "first big success",[68] and Paul Marino noted that "the series proved so popular that it not only transcended the typical gamer, it also claimed fans outside the gaming world".[69] In 2005, Thompson wrote that "Microsoft has been so strangely solicitous that when it was developing the sequel to Halo last year [2004], the designers actually inserted a special command—a joystick button that makes a soldier lower his weapon—designed solely to make it easier for Rooster Teeth to do dialogue".[51]

Red vs. Blue has motivated the fan base to create the machinima "Sponsors vs. Freeloaders". This series lived on the forums of roosterteeth.com.[70] The series has inspired other machinima productions, including The Codex.[71] Other Halo machinimas that are not necessarily related to, or influenced by, Red vs. Blue are: Arby 'n' the Chief, The Forgotten Spartans, Matchmaking, Spriggs, Rise of the Spartans, Playtime, C n' P, and Sandguardians.

In machinima, Red vs. Blue has been mentioned as the most successful example of the trend toward serial distribution. According to Hugh Hancock, this format allows for gradual improvement as a result of viewer feedback, and gives viewers a reason to return for future videos. Hancock argues that this model was necessary for Red vs. Blue's success: "Sunday night is Red vs. Blue night, just as (in the UK) Thursday used to be Buffy. Had RvB released their films as single downloads of an hour and a half, they'd have had nowhere near the success they currently enjoy."[72] Karen Moltenbrey explains that, machinima films were quite lengthy and were typically not episodic. Rooster Teeth was able to combine these aspects by compiling the episodic adventures into a feature-length film and selling DVDs.[70]