by Kashif Ali
“…You see, I think drugs have done some good things for us. I really do. And if you don’t believe drugs have done good things for us, do me a favor. Go home tonight. Take all your albums, all your tapes and all your CDs and burn them. ‘Cause you know what, the musicians that made all that great music that’s enhanced your lives throughout the years … rrreal fucking high on drugs …” - Bill Hicks.
Substitute the drugs for the bottle, and the musicians for video game reviewers. What do we get? drunkgamers. com (long defunct) where video games were reviewed drunk. The ingenuity of that makes me want to blow a big wet one, even though I’m sure it couldn’t have meant much for the games being reviewed. But who am I to get in the way of men and their ambitions, with the men in question here being Burnie Burns, Geoff Ramsey and Gustavo Sorola.
Fast forward a couple months and lo presto, drunkgamers.com passes away under absolutely inconspicuous circumstances and a week later; Computer Gaming World lets the boys at Rooster Teeth Production (roosterteeth.com) (the three men formed said production group and were assaulted by and united with other inappropriate people during the course of time) know that a particular video of theirs was wanted.
Figuring they needed to make big on this opportunity and short of hijacking the magazine and plastering their mug shots all over its cover, the crew decided to point the video to the redvsblue.com website, which hosted the Red vs. Blue trailer. Now, armed with rather modest expectations, which didn’t exceed producing a few episodes of RvB and letting it die and fester in cyber purgatory, the people at Rooster Teeth were pleasantly (I only presume) surprised when their expectations were rapidly molested. Consequently, voices from Burns past were summoned, namely, Matt Hullum and Joel Heyman, and the machinery was set into motion.
Origins, Plot and Respect
Burnie Burns, having played Halo: Combat Evolved till his vision was permanently marked with a weapon aiming reticule, got into a little discussion with the Rooster Teeth crew, where the discussion wanted to transform a battle vehicle into a Puma. More specifically, the credibility of the Warthog being called the Warthog was questioned, since it looked suspiciously feline, a Puma to be exact. This little epiphany planted the seed for Red vs. Blue in the mind of Burns and here we are, reaping its fruits.
So, what is RvB and why have I been yammerin’ on about it and will I ever make sense? Let’s start with the “how“.
In a nutshell: Red vs. Blue, a serial based around ‘Halo’verse, is by and large filmed with interconnected Xbox consoles, with the first-person perspective acting as our camera man. The first-person feed is recorded to a computer, juxtaposed with a multiplayer game session, where the people controlling the various characters move them around, fire weapons and carry out other functions as dictated by the script, in sync with dialogues which are prerecorded. Welcome to the world of Machinima.
At this point, a discreet nod to the people at Bungie who helped the people at Rooster Teeth with a slight modification to Halo 2 What this mod effectively did was to enable the character to hold the weapon in a neutral position while looking straight ahead (nodding included), therefore, allowing a more realistic approach to the dialogue centric scenes. RvB premiered on April 1st, 2003 and the original series ended with 100 episodes on the 28th of June, 07, not to mention the various special edition videos released over the years. On the 26th of March, 08 the pilot episode of “Red vs. Blue: Reconstruction”, which is created from the Halo 3 engine, was aired and will run for 20 episodes. All episodes can be viewed online from any of the following websites, Machinima, Archive, FilePlanet and Google Video.
This brings us to the “what” of RvB.
RvB takes us into the world of two warring soldier teams in the middle of a canyon, called Blood Gulch. However, given the individual idiosyncrasies of these well armed and highly incompetent soldiers, conquest of the other remains an elusive goal. We have the Red Team in one corner, led by Sarge (Matt Hullum) who sounds like a throwback to the good ol’ days of Sgt. Hartman. He’s also the only character, from either team, who seems serious about the whole war and killing bit. He is supplemented by Grif (Geoff Ramsey), a man with no ambitions, Simmons (Gustavo Sorola), your proverbial brown nose right-hand-leg-liver of the Sergeant and Donut, the rookie who gets on everyone’s nerves and steadily inches towards absolute retardation.
The Blue Team is lead by the reluctant Church (Burnie Burns), whose sarcasm keeps the team alive and interesting. Tucker (Jason Saldana), Caboose (Joel Heyman) and Sheila (Yomary Cruz) the tank, bring up the rear. Caboose seems like the mirror, minus the red, image of Donut, with Tucker existing solely to be as difficult as Church is reasonable. Sheila has issues. Various recurring characters jump in and out of the scenes and add to the merriment and grenade lobbing. The repartee is a joy to behold and never gets forced. Sample the following from season 1,
Church: The whole thing was over before it even started. Poor Jimmy was the last one to go. Tex walked up to him, pulled Jimmy’s skull right out of his head and beat him to death with it.
[Cut to Tucker at Blood Gulch]
Tucker: Wait a second… how do you beat someone to death with their own skull? That doesn’t seem physically possible.
Church: That’s exactly what Jimmy kept screaming.
[Cut back to Tex at Sidewinder, beating Jimmy to death with his own skull]
Jimmy: This doesn’t seem physically possible! [Dies]
Finally, we come to the “why” of RvB.
Why? Well… why not?
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