The Cult of Red Vs. Blue

From Tom' s Hardware

The world of entertainment has lately been full of remakes, remixes and rehashes. The ultimate remix, though, is the genre called machinima--which is the art of using video games as an acting platform to produce original content. The most popular and one of the earliest products of this art form is the series called Red Vs. Blue, created by a gaggle of funnymen out of Texas. By creating comedy from the game Halo, Red Vs. Blue has become a pop culture phenomenon that appeals to gamers and every day folks alike. It is a hilarious reinvention that actually works.

In the spirit of reinvention, Red Vs. Blue was a show that grew out of a whole other Website entirely. At first, the gang who went on to create Red Vs. Blue, who go under the company name Rooster Teeth Productions, had a whole other site going, drunkengamers.com. Geoff Ramsey, one of the show's producers, says the site was their rather bald-faced attempt at getting game companies to send them free games to review.

"And our genius plan was to review them drunk," Ramsey said. "We thought it would appeal to the alcoholics in our audiences, which we felt were burgeoning up." The game companies weren't laughing, and they "incurred the wrath" of several. "Believe it or not, companies like Nintendo don't necessarily want to be associated with a drunk Donkey Kong," Ramsey said.

Yet a seed was planted within drunkgamers that would soon flourish. Burnie Burns, the chief writer and director of Red Vs. Blue, wrote a lot of game reviews for drunkgamers and he was their XBox guy. At the time, Halo was the only game available for the XBox, so Burnie would record games, and put them online to teach people new tricks and strategies (it was actually the only serious section of drunkgamers). Then Burnie realized he could add voice-overs to the videos to make them funny.

"It slowly just kind of built into 'Hey we can build some kind of linear serial based story out of a video game,'" Ramsey said.

NEXT: The Early Days