I know Rooster Teeth isn’t perfectly game related per se, but their machinimas and miniseries using game assets were transformative for many of us in the gaming community I believe. So I think it fits.
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Rooster Teeth, a studio that pioneered machinima with its Red vs. Blue series and went on to develop a fandom-focused stable of shows, videos, and podcasts, is being shut down by parent company Warner Bros.
Rooster Teeth’s general manager pinned the closure on “challenges facing digital media resulting from fundamental shifts in consumer behavior and monetization across platforms, advertising, and patronage.”
The company’s name is a slightly more polite version of a disparaging remark (“cock bite”) made about the series narrator early on.
Amid allegations and acknowledgments of a crunch culture, discrimination, harassment, and underwhelming or non-existent response from managers, the company underwent a rebrand for its 20th anniversary in April 2023, with a new logo and a new “Just Playing” tagline.
In 2018, Ars features editor emeritus Nathan Mattise visited RTX, calling it the “biggest gaming and Internet event you’ve never heard of.”
Discovery property scuttling, the conglomerate has been on a cost-cutting and catalog-thinning streak of late, potentially driven by tax break opportunities.
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This is sad. Admittedly the company has seen rough times in the past few years, but they didn’t deserve this.
RIP Rooster Teeth
There’s a really excellent documentary on YouTube titled On the Verge of Collapse - the Story of Rooster Teeth. Very much worth watching if you were ever a fan of their work.
I didn’t know anything about rwby but decided to check out a clip after the closure announcement.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPjcCkMYYzY
It went from the running animation looks terrible to being blown away by the moves being chained together to form an incredible sequence. Amazing fight choreography that makes me want to check out the series.
clean choreography but lot of the animations look unpolished first drafts and the 3d rendering is fairly bland
It may not be “pretty” from an aesthetic standpoint, but you watch Yang vs Neo and tell me that’s not outstanding choreography. Early RWBY was hampered by technical limitations, and after they started the transition to a different rendering pipeline, the aesthetic dramatically improved, but at the same time Monty Oum passed away. What I wouldn’t give to see him after he hit his stride and really go ham. To this day I go back and watch Dead Fantasy 2 just for how insanely good it is for a single person to make that. It’s genuinely better than a huge amount of professional fight scenes made today, which is no knock on them, but Monty was truly something else. Every fight was a dance, and Yang vs Neo is in my top best anime fight of all time. Its short, fast, tight, clearly demonstrates Neo’s utter dominance over Yang, and absolutely sells their characters.
Honestly if you’re feeling that way, you might just want to watch fight compilations on YouTube. The fight animations and the rest of the show were worked on almost completely separately, and you’ll have to get through at least season 3 before people stop clipping through objects, or background characters just being shadows.
Is the story good enough to overlook the poor animation outside of the well down fight scenes?
… No, sorry. The world building has such a great potential, but it’s clear that they had no direction after Monty’s death, and there are just so many random plot lines that they try to make stick, and then just never reference again. If it was just incidental stuff it might be possible to overlook, but it’s very foundational elements to the narrative that they just drop for no apparent reason.
