Rooster Teeth

2003videodead

Published September 25, 2026 · Version 4.0.1

Rooster Teeth was an Austin-based digital production company that began as a drunk video game review site in 2000 and blew up with the Halo machinima series Red vs. Blue in 20031. Over two decades it built a sprawling YouTube empire spanning Achievement Hunter, Funhaus and RWBY, before Warner Bros. Discovery shut the studio down in March 20242.

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Overview

Rooster Teeth was a digital production company headquartered in Austin, Texas, with a second office in Los Angeles, best known for the long-running Halo machinima Red vs. Blue and a stable of gaming-focused YouTube channels2. The studio's output ranged from scripted live-action shorts and animated series like RWBY to Let's Plays, podcasts and news programming under The Know brand2.

Its core appeal was a shaggy, insider-comedy sensibility built around a recurring on-camera cast, with staff like Burnie Burns, Geoff Ramsey and Gavin Free becoming minor celebrities among gaming YouTube audiences3. By 2014 the company employed more than 90 people at Austin Studios and had spun out sub-brands including Achievement Hunter, a channel dedicated to gamerscore-hunting bits and Let's Plays that pulled in millions of subscribers on its own2.

Origin & Background

Platform
Roosterteeth.com (origin) / YouTube (viral spread)
Key People
Burnie Burns, Gustavo Sorola, Geoff Ramsey
Date
2003

The company started in the spring of 2000 as drunkgamers.com, a site where founders Burnie Burns, Gustavo Sorola and Geoff Ramsey reviewed video games while drunk. It was renamed and officially relaunched as Rooster Teeth on April 1st, 2003, after sponsors flagged the original name as too unprofessional2. The same relaunch day saw the debut of Red vs. Blue, a sketch comedy series filmed inside Halo: Combat Evolved that hit 20,000 downloads on day one and, by 2004, was pulling roughly a million views per week2.

Rooster Teeth's official YouTube channel launched on May 26th, 2008, initially reposting Red vs. Blue episodes before expanding to the rest of the studio's slate2. An early Red vs. Blue episode uploaded to that channel is preserved as one of the origin videos indexed by Know Your Meme3.

How It Spread

Red vs. Blue's early virality carried Rooster Teeth from a niche machinima site into a full studio. By April 2015 the Rooster Teeth YouTube channel had passed 8 million subscribers and 3 billion views, and roosterteeth.com sat inside Alexa's global top 10,000 with about 75% of traffic coming from the United States3. The company kept expanding on-platform through Achievement Hunter, launched July 28th, 2008, and news vertical The Know, which went live on March 5th, 20143.

In November 2014, Rooster Teeth was acquired by YouTube multi-channel network Fullscreen for an undisclosed sum, a deal Deadline framed as part of a wider land grab for young online-video audiences by traditional-media backers2. Through subsequent parent-company changes the studio eventually landed under Warner Bros. Discovery. On March 6th, 2024, Rooster Teeth's leadership posted a memo on roosterteeth.com announcing the shutdown, blaming the rapidly shifting media business, and the post drew around 230 likes and 560 comments in its first 14 hours1.

Reaction on social media was immediate. Former employee @AndyTheBlanch shared tribute photos of his time at the company that pulled roughly 1,400 likes and 50 reposts within ten hours, while @Armand_Gman's post criticizing rumored sales of Rooster Teeth productions by Warner Bros. hit about 16,000 likes and 2,900 reposts inside 12 hours1.

How to Use This Meme

"Rooster Teeth" is a company name rather than a template, but its productions seeded plenty of reusable bits: Red vs. Blue popularized the phrase "cock-bite" as a running gag, and Achievement Hunter's Let's Play format helped standardize the friend-group commentary style now common on gaming YouTube4.

Frequently Asked Questions