“Hey man you should check this out”
I was sitting in my friend’s room, while he was showing me his favourite youtube videos. My internet in 2005 was pretty terrible, and I shared my family’s one computer with my three brothers, so I hadn’t really gotten the chance to browse around what is now my entertainment mainstay.
The video started. The camera pans up on two reddish UNSC Spartans.
“Hey, you ever wondered why we’re here?”
And that was my introduction to Red vs Blue, a company whose content I voraciously consumed from the ages of thirteen to around eighteen. I remember how excited I was when they announced their Let’s Play channel, or when they introduced their first fully 3D-rendered fight scene.
Rooster Teeth represents something important to the gaming community, or at least they did for an acne-ridden 14 year old who played too many video games (me). They were cool nerds. They were rockstars. They told me in a roundabout way that being into games was not only alright, but cool. At some point I did move on, not because I was above it, but because I no longer needed confirmation that being into games was okay.
Yeah I just sailed through high school, no problems
Rooster Teeth remained important to me because of that period of my life, and that’s why I was really excited to attend this year’s RTX Australia. Partly due to nostalgia, but also because I knew that if there’s anything Rooster Teeth is good at, it’s changing. Maybe adapting is the better term, but they’ve stayed relevant for fifteen years – which, accounting for internet time dilation, is almost a century. Very, very few personality based entertainment companies have stayed relevant to a younger demographic – especially as the founding members age into their mid-40s.
So I thought RTX would be like catching up with a friend you haven’t seen since high school. You’ve changed, they’ve changed, but there’s still a soft spot you have after however long. I was disappointed. RTX Sydney was a convention first and Rooster Teeth second… or maybe third? The vast majority of the hall was taken up by booths selling merch almost entirely unrelated to RT. The back of the hall was wall-to-wall stages devoted to the Rooster Teeth crew. However, if you just faced away from that one wall, there was nothing to identify the smorgasboard of booths hawking games merch.
That’s what really bothered me the most – the lack of community space. I know so many people for whom the Rooster Teeth online community were their primary friend group. People have made life long friends through that site, even some of the core members of the Rooster Teeth crew started out as fans. And yet there was little to no space put aside to play games, hang out, and actually meet new people.
I think RTX Sydney can be a great convention. It just needs to tone down the capitalism and bump up the community. That’s what the people are there for.
