Red vs. Blue

Before it was a series it was a bit. Burnie Burns had been recording voiceover gags over Halo: Combat Evolved footage for drunkgamers.com, a site run by Geoff Ramsey and Gus Sorola, and one day the group argued over whether the game's Warthog jeep looked more like a puma. That argument, re-created in the second episode, was the spark. A trailer posted on the Drunkgamers site on September 5, 2002, was ignored, and the site soon closed; four months later Computer Gaming World asked to put a different Drunkgamers video on a magazine CD, and Burns and Ramsey realized they needed a website to catch the attention. Red vs. Blue was revived for it, and the first episode, "Why Are We Here?", went up on April 1, 2003.

The setup: two teams in a desolate canyon called Blood Gulch, each base existing only because the other does, waging a supposed civil war that nobody on either side much wants to fight. Burns played Church, Sorola the eager Simmons, Ramsey the lazy Grif, Matt Hullum the hotheaded Sarge, Jason Saldaña the self-styled ladies' man Tucker, Joel Heyman the dim Caboose and Kathleen Zuelch the mercenary Tex. The team had budgeted six to eight episodes of jokes; by the eighth episode they had covered only about a third of the list, and the thing kept growing. Everyone quit their jobs, and a T-shirt store paid the bills.

They did not know the word "machinima" yet; Hullum told GameSpy in 2004 they had assumed they were completely original. But Red vs. Blue is credited with dragging the form out of the underground: it won four awards from the Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences, screened at Lincoln Center, and Bungie, building Halo 2, added a D-pad command that lowers a soldier's weapon so machinima makers could stage dialogue, a feature the journalist Clive Thompson wrote was designed solely to make Rooster Teeth's job easier. Season DVDs sold at Target and Walmart, more than a million of them by the company's 2017 count. The original Blood Gulch Chronicles ended with episode 100 on June 28, 2007; the show carried on through Halo 3 and the games that followed.

Rooster Teeth grew into a studio, then collapsed: its 2024 shutdown turned the final season, Restoration, into a feature-length movie released on May 7, 2024, with an episodic cut following in late 2025. Burns, who had left the company, came back to write the ending, and in February 2025 he bought the rights to Red vs. Blue out of the wreckage.