Rooster Teeth Takes Hold Of Machinima’s Animated Treasure Trove In Hopes Of Riches

The king is dead…long live the king.

There was a time when Machinima was HOT. When Youtube was in it’s prime for free content, Machinima was one of the earliest adopters and as such made a nice run out of presenting us with all sorts of series that helped launch the careers of studios like Lowbrow into solid contributors to the marketplace. Eventually, Machinima would get into content deals with the likes of Warner Bros. and Verizon’s go90 service, neither of which panned out, which subsequently lead to the closure of the studio following the AT&T take over.

Rooster Teeth on the other hand has always played the long game. I’ve never known the company to just rely on it’s very popular Youtube account, and instead, made it a concerted effort to put it’s content behind paywall believing that if you build it, “they will come”. With franchises like Red vs Blue, RWBY, and now gen:Lock getting strong footholds in marketplace, Rooster Teeth, in hindsight, did things the correct way and are now doing super well because of it.

Sensing an opportunity to get a hold of some solid producers and intellectual property, Rooster Teeth will be the new homes of a slew of machinima that includes the following:

  • “Hedgehog for Hire”: Sonic is washed up and out of work. He needs cash fast and will do anything to pay the rent. All 100 episodes and eight all-new episodes premiere on March 19.
  • “All Your History Are Belong To Us”: Docu-series that details the game development history of favorite games and developers, including “Call of Duty” and “Halo” and Bungie, Blizzard, and Valve. All episodes start streaming March 22.
  • “Assassin’s Creed Musical”: Musical numbers exploring the feeling and intentions behind the popular game.
  • “Minecraft Horror Story”: Loosely based on FX’s “American Horror Story,” the show follows the story of a cursed house and its different owners and visitors over the course of a century.
  • “Minecraft: The N00b Adventures”: N00bly, Minecraft’s newest player, explores and adventures through the game with his newfound pals Snake and Garfunkel.
  • “Titanfall Dropout”: In-game series about Dex and Gif, two engineers who have to repair and deploy Titans to the pilots they hate.
  • “Boss Battles”: Iconic video game and pop-culture bosses engage in a no-holds-barred battles to the end.

On top of all of this, it was just announced this morning that Rooster Teeth will be helping produce a new Transformers animated series for Netflix in the vein of the not very good Transformers animated series that Machinima was producing for go90. It’s not yet known if the series will be geared towards kids like the first chapter did, or if it will be geared more towards children like the latter two chapters were.

 

[h/t: Variety]