At about 5 p.m. one weekday in 2002 in Austin, Texas, Michael Burns clicked a button and uploaded a video to DrunkGamers.com.

It was a website that he and a couple of co-workers had started in their free time. The video was a parody of Apple’s Mac ads, showing a young man (played by Burns’ friend Gustavo Sorola) extolling the “virtues” of gaming on the undersupported Mac.

“Another great thing about the Mac is upgrades,” Sorola says to the camera. “On a PC, you have to open up your case, swap out your video card, change jumpers. On the Mac, when it’s time to upgrade, you just pick it up, throw it away, and go buy another one. Now that’s convenience.”

Burns and Sorola created the video purely for the enjoyment of their gamer nerd friends. But the very next day, one of those friends went to work at his Los Angeles office and dropped in on a friend who was always watching online videos. In 2002, this was not so common. YouTube was still 3 years away. But when the friend saw his buddy Sorola on the screen, he asked his co-worker if he also knew Gus. No, he said, he’d just heard this video was funny. The parody had gone viral in less than 24 hours.

Before the parody ad, DrunkGamers.com had just been for fun. But now Burns, always called “Burnie,” began to understand the power that the internet had to instantly find an audience if the content was good enough.

“It was this weird moment where we realized, man, the world’s just flat,” he told Wired.

Burns, now 39, is the CEO of Rooster Teeth, a company that he and Sorola established one year later to create humorous web video content. Their flagship creation is called Red vs. Blue , a parody of the popular shooter Halo created by adding voice-overs to actual footage pulled from the Xbox game. The 10th “season” of Red vs. Blue will premiere on Monday, May 28.

Burnie Burns is the kind of guy who will call you both “dude” and “man” in the same sentence. He is a film school dropout who created a multimedia empire, adapting along with the internet as it changed its shape. At 10 years old, Red vs. Blue has outlasted most science fiction shows on television. Rooster Teeth has conquered YouTube (it had the eighth most popular non-music channel of 2011) and iTunes (its podcast is the most downloaded one in the crowded Video Games category).

Rooster Teeth is a force to be reckoned with, but it all started in a spare bedroom in an Austin apartment.

When the parody “Switch” ad started taking off, Burns and Sorola were working at an Austin dial-up ISP called teleNetwork. They were friends with another employee there named Geoff Lazer Ramsey. He’d had his middle name legally changed to Lazer “as a joke.” The three became fast friends, starting a website called Ugly Internet in which Sorola and Ramsey penned scathing reviews of aesthetically unappealing websites, then emailed the link to the webmasters. They even wrote petitions to the American Registry of Internet Numbers to have the most egregiously hideous websites’ IP privileges revoked.

“We started getting death threats,” says Sorola. “People started e-mailing us photos of where we live. People were telling us that they were going to stab us in our sleep.”

Ugly Internet soon gave way to Drunk Gamers, which Burns joined. The three would review videogames while inebriated. The site was mostly an attempt to scam free games from publishers’ PR departments. In this sense, it was a failure. The only game they ever got in the mail was the mediocre Xbox game Blinx: The Timesweeper .

“That’s a game about a cat with a vacuum cleaner on its back that can alter time,” Sorola says with a laugh. “We gave it a perfect score. 10 out of 10.”

Burns was taken with another Xbox game — Halo . He’d post video captures of games, sometimes with humorous voice-overs. In August, he posted a trailer for an animated series called Red vs. Blue , promising that episodes would be “coming soon.”

Then they forgot to do it.

Everybody got bored with Drunk Gamers in a few months. The trio shut down the site, replacing all of the content with a photo of Ramsey and Sorola flipping the bird.

That could have been the end of the story, had the editors of Computer Gaming World magazine not been in love with the “Switch” parody and wanted to include it on the promotional CD-ROM that they included with their popular PC gaming mag. They emailed Sorola asking for permission.

“Whenever you get any press at that size, you think it’s going to be the biggest thing ever,” Burns says. He and his friends were flipping out with excitement when they realized something: The video had a link to the now-dead Drunk Gamers site.

“Well, what if we did that Red vs. Blue thing?” one eventually said.

They registered redvsblue.com, added the link to the new version of the parody video, and set to work on actually creating an episode of the promised web series. On April 1, 2003, Rooster Teeth officially formed and uploaded the first episode.





The Machinima Revolution

While first-person shooters had been a popular PC game genre since 1992’s Wolfenstein 3D , things really got into full swing with the landmark 1996 game Quake . With its emphasis on team-based multiplayer deathmatch, Quake started the competitive FPS scene. Players teamed up, formed “clans” and developed battle strategies in a quest to be the best in the world. One of these clans, called the Rangers, did something unexpected with their copies of Quake . Using modified software, they patched together a short film called Diary of a Camper , using the game’s text chat feature to write lines of dialogue and moving the camera independently of the “actors.”

The format caught on. More players started making what were then called “ Quake movies.” Eventually, one of them developed a better term: machinima, a portmanteau of “machine” and “cinema.” An eponymous website appeared in 2000; in 2002 a group of creators got together to found the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences.

Rooster Teeth had no idea that any of this had happened.

“We thought we had invented it,” says Sorola. They’d named what they were doing RenderVision.

But when Academy co-founder Paul Marino saw an episode of Red vs. Blue , he called up Rooster Teeth to tell them that what they were doing had a name. Marino — now the lead cinematic designer on the MMO game Star Wars: The Old Republic — had been creating machinima on his own for years. He saw that Rooster Teeth had something special.

“Their stuff was transcending… the gamer audience,” Marino said. “ Red vs. Blue led the way in a lot of ways.”

Most people had never heard of machinima before seeing Red vs. Blue . This was true for Allen DeBevoise, who is now the CEO of Machinima.com. “They’re pioneers of the field,” he said.

The first episode of Red vs. Blue immediately achieved a level of popularity that Drunk Gamers had never managed. The site was linked to by Slashdot, Penny Arcade, and Fark on the same day. Within a week, it had been downloaded over 20,000 times.

The second episode was exponentially bigger: 250,000 downloads. Soon, Rooster Teeth was seeing numbers north of 750,000 for each show.

“It was like falling up a cliff,” said Burns. “We suddenly had to figure out how to pay $6,000 a month to host a video file.”

Despite its popularity, Red vs. Blue wasn’t making any money.

“People think that if you get a lot of views, the ad truck just shows up at your front door,” Burns said. “That’s just not true.”

Desperate to cut server fees, Burns brought an extra computer with him to work and connected it to a spare Ethernet port in his cubicle. With the extra computer hidden out of sight, Burns was free to go about his regular work day while the machine served up downloads.

Sorola, who was in on the plan to hide the server, says that the scheme didn’t work for long. “The guy who ran technology came in and said, ‘All of the bandwidth in the company is being used in this room.'”

Burns told the tech guy that he didn’t have any idea what was going on, and hurriedly unplugged the machine as soon as no one was looking.

After that incident, Rooster Teeth decided to distribute new episodes with the peer-to-peer BitTorrent service. They posted instructions on their site instructing users about how to use a BitTorrent client to download episodes of Red vs. Blue . It was cheaper than hosting the file directly, but it wasn’t intuitive.

“You had to teach people how to use it,” says Sorola. “And then, when we finally had a DVD to sell, we’d already taught everyone how to steal our DVD.”

On a whim, Rooster Teeth decided to add a PayPal donate button to the site, just to see what would happen.

“The moment we put up the PayPal button, some guy donated $300,” says Burns. “That’s when we realized that if you give somebody a chance to support something on the internet, they’ll do it.”

Around the same time, Burns noticed that almost all of the oldest comments on online videos or posts simply read “first.” Users would click on something, realize that they were one of the first ones to access it, and comment to celebrate. Being first, Burns realized, was a big deal.

In response, Rooster Teeth set up a subscription model that allowed “sponsors” to get early access to new episodes of Red vs. Blue each week for $20 per year. The program continues to be a huge success, earning the company enough money to pay server fees and hire more employees.





Bungie Calling

All the while, Red vs. Blue continued to grow in popularity. At 29, Burnie Burns had become president of teleNetwork, the company where the Rooster Teeth co-founders met. He quit his job and decided to go full time at Rooster Teeth.

At that time, Sorola had set up a system that allowed him to track the IP addresses that downloaded files from their site.

“You could see how things were viral back then,” says Burns. “Somebody at the corporate Dell.com would download an episode. Then you’d see five more from Dell. Then 30 more.”

Soon enough, the videos spread to employees working at Microsoft. “We got one download from Microsoft.com, then 20,” says Burns. “Then, a thousand.”

A day later, the phone rang. It was Bungie, creator of the Halo series.

That phone call might have meant that the party was over. Rooster Teeth had spent months profiting from unlicensed footage created using Bungie’s game, and the Microsoft-owned developer could have sent a cease and desist letter. But it didn’t. Instead, the Bungie rep told Burns that they were fans of the show, and wanted to know how they could make Rooster Teeth’s life easier.

In later Halo releases, Bungie added a button that lowered the player’s gun. This had no point in competitive multiplayer, but made it easier for machinima directors to film their sketches.

Today, Rooster Teeth is a licensed Halo partner. Its relationship with Bungie carried over to 343 Industries, the internal Microsoft studio now in charge of Halo .

“They’ve always been very respectful and protective of the fact that this came from a fan base,” Burns said.

With Microsoft’s official blessing, Red vs. Blue has grown to be a unique and highly popular facet of the Halo universe. Lord of the Rings star Elijah Wood will joins the cast this season as a new character.

But the series is just one part of Rooster Teeth’s business. On its YouTube channel, which recently surpassed 1 billion total views, it hosts a variety of in-game and live-action videos. Their sister site AchievementHunter.com posts popular compilation videos like “Fails of the Weak,” which sees Rooster Teeth employees providing humorous commentary over short clips of players exploding, team-killing, and otherwise failing hard in Halo: Reach .

It debuted a live-action series called “Immersion” which ran for eight episodes last year, and one-off comedy videos like a parody trailer for an Angry Birds movie.

Rooster Teeth’s diversity of content has brought it over 1 million devoted fans that are active on the company’s web forums.

“If somebody’s in the community doing cool stuff, we’ll hire them,” Burns says. One of the company’s more recent hires was plucked from the boards after his “Animated Adventures” series of cartoons based on Rooster Teeth’s podcast became popular.

Rooster Teeth recently moved into a new, 20,000 square foot office space in Austin, and now employs 38 people. It’s a long way to come for a company that started out with no profit model, no office and only a handful of passionate employees.

“When I think about the growth of the company I think about all the different projects we were doing,” says Sorola. “There’s so many possibilities. I’d just like to continue to create content that I enjoy.”