Australian Gamer Feature :: Red vs Blue Interview

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Red vs Blue Interview

AJ interviews Gus and Jason from Roosterteeth (Red vs Blue, Strangerhood) at the Machinima Festival at the ACMI Cinemas in Melbourne

INTRODUCTION : PAGE 1 : PAGE 2 : PAGE 3

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AJ: So, um, anyway, I should probably ask some questions, shouldn't I?

Gus: You have been asking questions! World's worst interviewer, right?

Jason: (laughs)

AJ: You got somewhere to be?!

Jason: (laughs)

AJ: So, you guys must be thoroughly sick of Halo after four seasons, are you sick to death of the game, do you still play it at all?

Jason: I hadn't played it in three or four months, and then the other day, I got drunk and I was like "I'm going on Xbox Live and play Halo" and then I played for like five days straight after that. It still is an addictive game if you start playing it.

Gus: I don't play it so much anymore cos I get so mad cos at this point when people still play online are really good. And I'm only "eh". So I get just really mad and wanna smash my controller every time I play.

AJ: So what's the game at the moment for you then?

Gus: Right now I'm playing Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter and World of Warcraft.

AJ: So you've enjoyed the 360? I've just picked one up. I don't know whether you know, but we've only got ours like, in March, that's how long we had to wait for it, so we're all a bit excited about the 360 at the moment.

Jason: You couldn't buy them in the US until March. They're out but they were sold out everywhere.

AJ: They must've been stockpiling them for us. Graphically how are you finding Ghost Recon..did you play the old Ghost Recon on PC?

Gus: I used to play it on the original Xbox, I don't think I ever played the PC version. Played the first one on the Xbox, it was a really boring, slow horrible game. This is a lot better. The graphics are amazing, it's set in Mexico City and there are some scenes where you fly in a helicopter and it renders this skyline and buildings all the way out to the horizon. The draw distance on the game is nuts.

AJ: So you looking forward to Halo 3 then? Does that mean more work for you guys?

Gus: We hope they're making a Halo 3, I don't know...

AJ: So you haven't seen any sneak peeks.

Gus: No...whenever people ask us about Halo 3, we're like "so what do you know? If you know anything, let us know!"

AJ: Surely you're like, Microsoft's biggest promotional tool for Halo...

Jason: Maybe so!

Gus: (laughs)

AJ: ...they should let you know. Have you had a tour of Bungie before?

Jason: Yeah, we went up to Bungie but they keep all their secret stuff in other rooms. We always go in a clean room ... is that what they call them?

Gus: Nowadays, they've gone to a new studio and they call us back like last September I think it was, and ever since then, every time we go up to visit, they keep us in the lobby. It's like a conference room, it could be any generic conference room in any corporate building anywhere in the world.

AJ: What's the point of visiting then?

Gus: All the cool stuff's outside of the clean room.

AJ: Are you looking at doing any other games in the future with the Xbox 360? I know you've sort of gone across three different games now.

Gus: We're always looking for new games to use, new opportunities. But it's hard ... not every good game is a good game for making videos in. So it's hard to find a game that we enjoy and that is good for making videos in.

AJ: So the Sims 2 ... was that decision based on that it was easy to make movies in or did you enjoy the game prior?

Jason: They sorta asked us to do this. I guess we made an agreement with them beforehand about how we would handle DVD sales and stuff like that, but they didn't pay us to do it. But we sorta decided to do that because we thought it'd be a good idea to have a relationship with EA Games. The Sim2 turned out to actually to sort of a hard game to do machinima.

AJ: I thought that the camera styles and all the stuff that you can do (cos it's got an actual built in sort of movie tool) did that ended up being more of a pain in the ass to do?

Jason: It was harder for us to use that then just use, like Fraps, as what we ... you know the program Fraps?

AJ: No, I'm just a gamer!

Gus: Fraps is a program you can use to capture like, anything that is displayed on your monitor. Like anything in the frame buffer the video card puts out, it's recorded to an AVI file.

Jason: We use that and then like, the three camera mode where you can move around.

AJ: So what made it more difficult?

Jason: With Halo, you have a controller and you have control over every character so you're basically pupperteering on you regular game. In the Sims, you know, you gotta like, click a place you want the guy to go and then have them say whatever his lines are.

Gus: Plus in the Sims you have to worry about lip sync cos they're not all wearing helmets. You have to kinda try to make their expressions.

Jason: Their mouths are hard to match up. Even if you turn free will off and there are cheats that make it so that they're not supposed to do anything you don't tell them to do, but they still do sometimes and they get tired of doing stuff. They get hungry and they fall over and they go crazy and stuff like that.

AJ: So like real actors...

Gus: (laughs)

AJ: So were you surprised when you started doing Red vs Blue that it took off so quickly?

Jason: Yeah, I think so. I mean, it took off really quickly. It took off within what, a week, two weeks?

AJ: Cos I know all the way from here, I was downloading the second episode when it was put up, that's how quick it got around.

Jason: That is crazy!

Gus: We were shocked. I think we started, I think we put the first video up April 1st of 2003 and then May 5th a month later, we were on the same day we were linked on Farks, Slashdot and Penny Arcade.

AJ: That would've been enough to burn your server.

Gus: Yeah, three huge sites, it just exploded. We would've been happy with any one of those sites linking us, three of them doing it on the same day was insane.

AJ: Do you think that's kind of, er - getting a bit off topic here - in terms of distribution of movie and content, do you think that the Internet has kinda exploded in that way with sites like Slashdot that you get instant access to a million people or whatever it is, that you can take something from unknown to superstar literally overnight ... do you kinda find that at all cool?

Jason: Definitely!

Gus: That's what I love about the internet, that's what I love about doing what we do. You don't have to worry about traditional distribution models, you don't have to worry about, you know, the old way of doing things. You make a video you think it's cool, just put it up. Even if you don't have a server now with stuff like Bit Torrent, and other file sharing services, you just put it out there and if people like it, it just takes off.

AJ: Like Star Wars Kid?

Gus: Yeah, just like Star Wars Kid! (laughs)

AJ: You've now got over 400,000 registered users on your forum! I assume you have a lot more than that downloading? I read somewhere that your downloads per month is 400 terabytes?

Gus: Yeah, I think the highest month we ever had was like 488 terabytes ... so close to 500.

AJ: That must cost a shitload.

Gus: It's crazy, to try to supply that. We ran into a strange problem. I think it's when we released episode 50 or 51, where our file server had a gigabit connection to the internet, and...I don't know how technical I can get here...

AJ: Yep, very technical, yep.

Gus: Our file server had a gigabit connection to the internet. And when this video came out, I was monitoring our bandwidth usage, and I saw we were only uploading like, at 750 to 800 megabits, and it was flatlining. And I was like "we're only at 75, 80 per cent capacity here, where's the rest of our bandwidth?" So we did some research and looking around and we realised that the bottleneck was on the disk I/O. That the hard drives could not get data fast enough to the network card to upload to the internet, so we had to build a new faster disc array that could actually transfer data at a gigabit up to the internet.

AJ: Wow, that's... normally you run out of...

Gus: Bandwidth before you...

AJ: Yeah! Well before you run out of disk activity, that's crazy.

AJ: You've just released season four, and I think you're screening season three today, so we're a bit behind for some reason, not quite sure why, but...many more seasons left in it?

Gus: What do you think?

Jason: 15 more? (Laughs)

AJ: 15? So I guess you're getting really rich from this?

Jason: No, I mean there are five of us who get to work it full time which we all feel pretty lucky about.

AJ: So you just gonna milk it until people stop downloading?

Gus: I'll stop doing it when I have the down payment on the Lamborghini.

Jason: Ha ha!

AJ: Get Project Gotham ? it's cheaper!

Gus: (Laughs)

CLICK HERE TO SEE PAGE 3 OF THE INTERVIEW