"Hey...You Ever Wonder Why We're Here?" is the first line of the internet's longest running web series. Uttered by Geoff Ramsey, these words have been played back nearly 10 million times online alone. RoosterTeeth is an entertainment production company that got its foothold creating online content in April of 2003. The company officially started off when Burnie Burns, Gus Sorola, Geoff Ramsey, Matt Hullum, and Jason Saldana began filming their groundbreaking sci-fi comedy series, Red vs. Blue. A series like Red vs. Blue had never been done before. Not only were there very few online series at the time, but no one had made narrative content within a video game like this before. RoosterTeeth took the video game franchise Halo and provided their own movements to the characters, making them actors in a way. They then dubbed their own voices over these digital “actors” to make a cohesive video. The five started working out of Burn’s spare bedroom, barely scraping by.
After a few seasons, the popularity of Red vs. Blue exploded, allowing RoosterTeeth to branch out into even more narrative content. They began to do live action comedy sketches, as well as live action narrative content and podcasts. Today the primary Youtube channel boasts 9.5 million subscribers and 5.6 billion video views. These staggering numbers don’t even include offshoots and secondary channels like Achievement Hunter, LetsPlay, FunHaus or any of the multitude of other channels RoosterTeeth has come to found, which cumulatively hold 45 million subscribers. This overwhelming success has lead to even more content creation and to date the company has produced three major motion pictures and holds records including, but not limited to longest running web series, and longest running sci-fi series. The overall success of this company can be attributed to many things, namely technology, and personality.
As previously mentioned, RoosterTeeth pioneered the field of large scale online content creation, so the technology to distribute their creative work was not yet in place. As a result, they had to create their own online space. Much like the Z Boys of Dog-Town had to develop the technology they used to express their craft, RoosterTeeth did the same. They painstakingly encoded each video in multiple resolutions per file type and spent hours upon hours exporting and uploading the files to their own servers. Not only did RoosterTeeth develop their own space to distribute their craft, but they also built their website as a place for fans to build one of the strongest online communities to date. They still stress the importance of making their own identity on the web and how it contributed to their long lasting success.
Also important to the vast success of RoosterTeeth was the variance in the personalities of its founders but also in the people they hired as they expanded. Each member of the team fit into Csiskszentmihalyi’s description of the creative personality a little bit differently, and they each fill each other’s shortcomings. If there was some area they felt was lacking, they would hire someone to fill that space. Today the company has grown exponentially to 380 employees, all coming from diverse walks of life, possessing their own unique personalities that contribute to the whimsical creative content they produce.
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