When Steve Jobs revealed Bungie’s Halo at MacWorld 1999, it was a completely different game to the industry-shifting first-person shooter that would release just two years later. Back then, the game was third-person, the protagonist of Master Chief was some kind of cyborg, and every design was slightly different.
In 1999, Red vs Blue creator and Rooster Teeth co-founder Burnie Burns, upon catching the game’s trailer on the early internet, assumed the game was some kind of open-world, MMO. While Halo had blown minds upon its reveal, it was a game that hadn’t yet decided what it would be. At E3 2001, the game’s true identity was cemented, and Burns would experience the newly-subtitled Halo: Combat Evolved for the first time in a multiplayer match on the map Burns’ helped become one of the most iconic maps in video game history: Blood Gulch.
In a game of Capture the Flag, Burns would experience Halo for the very first time alongside fellow Rooster Teeth founders Geoff Ramsey, Gus Sorola, and Matt Hullum. Jumping into the game’s four-wheeled Warthog for the first time left a lasting impact. “This is going to sound like it’s lost to time,” Burns tells us. “[Having a game] where your character was different to the vehicle and you could get in and out of the vehicle was a really cool concept for an FPS at the time.”
Just like Halo did, Burns’ web-series of Red vs Blue would also go through its own identity shift. When the show’s trailer, set to Limp Bizkit’s ‘Break Stuff’ was released on September 5, 2002, the show was action-packed and full of drama. By the time it released on April 1, 2003, it was a hilarious sitcom focused on two teams of incompetent soldiers trapped in a boxed canyon in the middle of nowhere. (In fact, the two team’s never even mention the huge Halo ring above their heads.)
“I wanted to separate from what was popular video game videos at the time,” Burns recalls. “One of the biggest video sites at the time was Break.com, and what you saw was just highlight reels of people being really good at Halo. I always felt like if we were going to do action in Halo, why would you watch that? Why wouldn’t you just go play Halo?
“So that’s why we ended up doing mostly narrative and scripted [work]. That’s where my passion lies is in scripted content and dialogue. I love writing dialogue more than anything else. And also, it was just we were really bad at Halo and so we weren’t going to be able to pull that stuff off.”
“One of my main goals in life, honestly, no hyperbole, main goals in life at this point, would be to create a full complete Red vs Blue box set.”
Red vs Blue creator Burnie Burns on his hopes for the future of the web show.
Episode 1 of Red vs Blue, ‘Why Are We Here?’ saw an estimated 3,000 downloads in its first week, although tracking view counts was extremely difficult back then. When the second video launched a week later, around a quarter of a million people watched it. “And then by the end of that month, we were at a million views,” he says.
Red vs Blue was immediately noticed not just by fans, but also by the developers of Halo, and even Xbox. Within months, the two brands were inseparable. Rooster Teeth were given the opportunity to not only continue the show, but were asked to create promotional materials including videos for Xbox kiosks across GameStop stores in the United States to show off new games.
“I told them very clearly what we wanted to do and what we didn’t want to do, and I think they appreciated that,” Burns said. “I remember specifically a conversation where someone said it felt like the worst thing they could do at the time was mess with it. Like, it’s working, it’s working well, everything seems to be fine.”
Red vs Blue was a boon to both the Halo and Xbox brands. In 2003, Xbox was still a new player in the console race and the increasingly booming Xbox business, and the fact that a community had arose from an admittedly silly web show was a powerful boon. As Xbox and Halo continued so did RvB: the show’s popularity was used to test official Microsoft servers, the series was used to test selling videos and TV shows on the Xbox Live Marketplace, and it was used to promote the Halo franchise all the way from Halo 2’s E3 showing to the release of the Halo TV show in 2022.
The two franchises are symbiotic in their popularity, although Halo isn’t currently over like Red vs Blue currently is. The height of Halo’s popularity, the Halo 3 and Reach era, is the height of popularity for RvB, and the drought of Halo’s popularity, the latter years of Halo 5 and the start of Infinite, is the low-point for RvB’s popularity.
“I think that it’s, you know, it’s a licensed, derivative product and it very much is tied to the popularity, I think, of Halo as well, for better or worse,” Burns says. “Rooster Teeth wasn’t all Halo, just like Xbox wasn’t… but yeah, the popularity, I’d say, it trended exactly along the same curves as Halo itself.”
Rooster Teeth’s series would continue for decades, only ending very recently in 2024 with the release of its 18th season, Red vs Blue: Restoration. Red vs Blue had multiple ending points across its run: Season 5, Season 6, Season 8, Season 10, Season 13, Season 15, and Season 18 could all be considered satisfying jumping off points for fans.
Burns describes Restoration as “a love letter, at that point, to the history of Red vs Blue”. While it may be an ending that jumps in front of others, it does so without disrespecting any prior ending and without promoting itself as a definitive end point. “That was very cool to be able to do that,” Burns says. “Even as Red vs Blue was kind of winding down, it had been through a couple different iterations at that point narratively, you know, being able to go back and finish… I don’t take that for granted either. Like it was nice to be able to put a button on the series and tell people, even though I felt like we had done that.”
While Red vs Blue is over right now—“I’m not going to update the AreYouMakingMoreRedvsBlue website,” he says—the show has an enduring legacy that a large number of series never manage to hit. Almost every day, an RvB reference pops up in a video game or a Reddit thread. The iconic Halo meme, “wait, that’s illegal” is a reference to one of the show’s more obscure pieces of side content.
Burns himself is also dedicated to keeping the show accessible with episodes available on YouTube and the movie-length “complete” seasons available on the official Rooster Teeth website. “One of my main goals in life, honestly, no hyperbole, main goals in life at this point, would be to create a full complete Red vs Blue box set,” Burns explains. “Just the physical set itself, I think it’s a longer process than even I anticipated. It’s not just pushing a button like, ‘make box set’, it’s 20 years, excuse me, 25 years coming up, of media in lots of different places.”
There is considerably more Red vs Blue media out there than some fans even realise. Alongside the aforementioned Xbox kiosk videos, there’s over 300 PSAs, promotional videos for Zune, behind-the-scenes content, live-action shorts, and more. While Burns explains that not all of this would be possible on a potential RvB Complete box set, the creator wants at least all 18 seasons packaged into one nifty collection.
As Burns himself works to keep Red vs Blue’s accessible, the Halo community and the developers working on the flagship Xbox franchise are still keeping the series alive. In January 2026, the show’s iconic character Dexter Grif and Dick Simmons were added to Halo’s official 25th anniversary art, and Jazzware’s new Halo Red and Blue figurines have a reference to the show in their official description, which reads: ‘Ever wonder why we’re here?’”
Red vs Blue has made its mark on the world longer than most pieces of media, which isn’t bad for a series filmed within a video game with lines recorded in a spare closet. While Halo itself may be continuing with new books as Red vs Blue takes a well-earned rest, it’s impossible to separate the two, and there will undoubtedly a few references to the plucky machinima series within the upcoming Halo: Campaign Evolved later this year.
As RvB’s legacy remains, Burns has returned to internet content by reviving the Rooster Teeth brand and with his daily podcast Morning Somewhere. Other members of the show are also still working on their own projects with Dexter Grif actor Geoff Ramsey working on The Regulation Podcast and Dick Simmons actor Gus Sorola working on the Dungeons and Dragons podcast Tales From the Stinky Dragon.
