Machinima Transformed Viral Videos. Now It’s Gone—but Its Legacy Is Everywhere
Red vs. Blue is officially over. On Tuesday, Warner Bros. Discovery released Red vs. Blue: Restoration, the final installment in the long-running saga that was once at the forefront of a whole new form of entertainment: web videos created from in-game footage. Machinima signaled a new world where that footage—of Halo, in Red vs. Blue’s case—could power viral clips. That was 2003. Now it seems as if Restoration might be machinima’s swan song.
“Machinima directors use game engines, which allow them to record a scene from any conceivable angle, like a Hollywood director uses a cinematographer,” WIRED wrote in a 2002 piece heralding the potential of this new filmmaking technique. When it launched a year later, Red vs. Blue exemplified those possibilities. The series was created by linking several Xboxes together and recording footage of a Halo multiplayer match, then adding voiceover. The absurdist, existential tone of the dialog was a hilarious counterpoint to (and commentary on) the run-and-gun gameplay of the first-person shooter used to create it. The show’s creators founded a production company, Rooster Teeth, and made more than a dozen seasons’ worth of episodes.
Red vs. Blue would go on to develop a huge fan base and become a geek touchstone in the two decades that followed—which is why Restoration’s release feels like an ignominious sendoff. In March, Rooster Teeth general manager Jordan Levin announced that Warner Bros. Discovery, now Rooster Teeth’s parent company, was shutting down the studio, and it soon became clear that the IP was being split up and sold off for parts. Today, the final installment of Red vs. Blue is being unceremoniously dumped onto streaming platforms with minimal fanfare or promotion.
