When Geoff Ramsey and Jack Pattillo started 'Achievement Hunter,' we expanded heavily into 'let's play'-style gaming videos and have since expanded with a massive roster of gaming talent and multiple channels dedicated just to gaming videos.
Rooster Teeth has always had a big following in the gamer community, and we are lifelong gamers ourselves.
Travel is stressful.
The good thing about feature films is that the budgets tend to scale.
Nothing scales quite the way a sci-fi feature does, I mean, you can always add more visual effects; you can spend a lot of money on the visual fidelity alone.
I think, ultimately, the story of Rooster Teeth is going to be one of longevity.
We recognize that the whole world is kind of moving in this direction to digital distribution, but at the same time, there are still people who only watch movies in a movie theater, and there are some people who only watch certain programs on television or certain things on Netflix.
We didn't join YouTube until late 2008 because when we first looked at it, honestly, I viewed them as a competitor. But then it grew to the point where if you wanted to be part of the conversation, you had to be on YouTube.
The big difference between us and other people who produce content is that we started doing this to make things that we wanted to make.
The initial plan for Rooster Teeth is really different from the initial plan for the group, because we started as a group that was making one show: 'Red vs. Blue.'
If we got $100 million dollars to make a movie, I don't know if we should be making a $100 million dollar movie our first time out.
I started one of the first online video companies way back in 2003.
The moment we put up the PayPal button, some guy donated $300. That's when we realized that if you give somebody a chance to support something on the Internet, they'll do it.
We started about three years before YouTube existed, so we had to host all the videos on our own servers at a co-location facility. When we got so many hits on our first few videos, and we estimated our bandwidth bill was going to be about $12,000 a month, we knew that we had to establish a business model ASAP.
If somebody's in the community doing cool stuff, we'll hire them.
We didn't discover online and think, 'Oh, this is really lucrative. We've got to get on board with it.' We've been here since 2003.
YouTube's algorithm doesn't know what's going on in the world.
We wanted to make movies back in college before Rooster Teeth. Our roots have always been in feature filmmaking, and we've always wanted to go back to it.
When we first started, everything was animated, everything was comedy, and there was really nothing that was longer than about two minutes, because that's all audiences would watch.
Usually, YouTube channels are named after the person that you see on camera... or in the case of ours, it could have been the show, but we didn't even name the company 'Red vs. Blue.' We named it something else to give people the idea that we were going to be doing more than that.
