Soon after the Master Chief Collection came to Steam, I bought it. As I played through it, I made sure to document myself becoming a Halo fan. In so doing, I decided to dig into Halo machinima. I've encountered and even watched entire series of machinima before, but I never got into Red vs. Blue, the series that made machinima a big thing. Now that I've watched it all (or most of it), Red vs. Blue is the silliest series of anything that I've ever come across.

The first five seasons are light and nonsensical. Most episodes happen in Blood Gulch, a Halo multiplayer map that depicts a backwater canyon in the middle of nowhere. (Subsequent Halo installments usually have recreations of it, and Red vs. Blue uses them.) Some light time travel shenanigans ensue, but there's an undercurrent of something more serious. There's a story arc that involves aliens, and I love the occasional callbacks to Tucker's kid in later seasons.

The next few seasons dive into the backstory of the Reds and Blues. They go into the details of Project Freelancer, the points of which I was (and still am) confused by. I recall that there were a lot of flashbacks, and I was always wondering where in time any particular episode was. During this time, the show was trying to be way more serious than the comedy could handle. I don't remember laughing hard at any joke, and most episodes only got an occasional chuckle. I think they were trying to be suspenseful, and while I appreciate that their origins were fleshed out, doing it over about 6 seasons feels excessive.

The next 3 seasons take place on Chorus, a seemingly random planet. Looking back on the entire series, these are my favorite. There is a clear threat and goal. There's the classic banter that happened in Blood Gulch, and it doesn't look into the past of characters that I can't keep straight. The protagonists are ever quarrelsome with each other, but are sometimes able to set aside their differences and cooperate with each other and the locals. There are villains interact with the main characters in the present (not the past), and I thought that they were well written, too.

Season 14 is the anthology season that doesn't try to tell any serialized story. The episodes don't build off each other. Instead, it's a bunch of side stories. Unlike the Freelancer stuff, this is mostly done for laughs. Some characters from previous seasons appear, including the numerous Project Freelancer ones, but there's no pretext of seriousness. I enjoyed parts of it, particularly the first episode that was supposed to be the start of an animated series, but never got picked up.

The next three seasons are nicknamed 'the shisno chronicles'. The gimmick here is even more time travel. It starts off kind of cool, but devolves into hard to follow plots. Thinking about it makes my head hurt. After those seasons, a lot of the original crew and voice actors were gone, so the series was taken into a different direction, "Red vs. Blue: Zero". I haven't watched any of Zero, and the consensus is that it sucks. It isn't made in any Halo game (made in Unreal Engine), and the story might as well not be related to Red vs. Blue at all.

During the entire time, dozens of short videos unrelated to the main season stories were released. Most of them are PSAs about absurd premises and situations.

Since the entire series is mostly people wearing space marine armor with sealed helmets, characters nod their heads up and down to show which character is talking. It's probably the trope that Red vs. Blue is most known for. Around season 6, they figured out how to use motion captured animation on characters, and it's unnerving when it's first used. By this point, you've gotten used to the robotic stock animations on characters, then it looks like everything is sliding around on ice.

The series first started with a few guys operating under the name "Drunk Gamers". In 2003, they formed a production company, "Rooster Teeth", doing several video series over time, aside from Red vs. Blue. They cruised along for a while, then in 2014, sold out. Things seemed to be fine, for a while after anyways, but quality was already going downhill. Their parent company restructured, AT&T bought them, and got spun off with Warner Brothers. They got eaten by Hollywood, but the soul was long gone. Earlier this year, Rooster Teeth announced that they were closing, followed my laments by many. It's possible that some deep pocketed fan could buy the rights to this or other series, but for now, this is it.