The series centers on two opposite teams fighting in an ostensible civil war—shown to actually be a live fire exercise for elite soldiers—in the middle of Blood Gulch, a desolate box canyon, in a parody of first-person shooter video games, military life, and science fiction films.

The series concluded with the feature-length movie Red vs. Blue: Restoration, originally intended to be the final season prior to the shutdown of Rooster Teeth, which was released on May 7, 2024.

Rooster Teeth periodically releases self-referential public service announcements and holiday-themed videos, which are generally unrelated to the main storyline and not considered canon.

A special video made for E3 2003 portrays Master Chief, Halo's protagonist, as a larger-than-life member of the army, and the Red vs. Blue trailer and first episode establish that the series is set between the events of the first two games.

Family Shatters originally acted as a non-canonical spinoff involving the characters introduced in Zero but was retroactively made the nineteenth season of Red vs. Blue after the release of Restoration.

Throughout the original series, the Red Team primarily consists of their hotheaded leader Super Colonel Sarge (Matt Hullum), his attentive second-in-command Captain Richard "Dick" Simmons (Gus Sorola), the lazy Captain Dexter Grif (Geoff Ramsey), the oblivious/effeminate Private Franklin Delano Donut (Dan Godwin), and their apathetic Spanish-speaking robot mechanic Lopez the Heavy (Burnie Burns).

The team was later joined by the emotionally scarred Freelancer Agent Washington/"Wash" (Shannon McCormick) at the end of Revelation after first meeting the Reds and Blues during Reconstruction.

[citation needed] Over the years, Red vs. Blue has attracted numerous notable guest stars, namely Ed Robertson, Elijah Wood, Christopher Sabat, The Zellner Brothers, Amber Benson, Dan Avidan, Arin Hanson, SungWon Cho, Ricco Fajardo, Daman Mills, Anthony Padilla, and Ian Hecox.

A partial character introduction released between the original trailer and the first episode featured extensive action and violence, set to Limp Bizkit's song "Break Stuff".

The whole production team eventually quit their jobs and began to work full-time on the series;[16] to generate revenue they created an online store to sell T-shirts.

[25] On March 28, 2011, Rooster Teeth presented the first trailer for Season 9 of Red vs Blue which aired on June 14, 2011, during which time Miles Luna officially joined the company.

Until midway through season 3, audio for the voice actors living in Texas had been recorded in a makeshift soundproof booth in Burns' guest room closet.

During season 1, dialogue for the voice actors living in Los Angeles, California — Joel Heyman, Kathleen Zuelch, and Matt Hullum — was recorded over the phone.

Within a multiplayer game session, the people controlling the avatars "puppet" their characters, moving them around, firing weapons, and performing other actions as dictated by the script, and in synchronization with the prerecorded dialogue.

In the interview on The Screen Savers, Burns described the use of machinima techniques to record the show thus: "It's like normal animation but instead of, y'know, sitting down, drawing everything by hand, we just use controllers.

In Halo 2, pressing down on the D-Pad of the Xbox controller makes the player character appear to hold a weapon in a neutral position, without aiming it at anyone, while looking straight ahead.

[citation needed] To gain unique angles in the series, Rooster Teeth first used a tank in the game to emulate crane shots by standing the cameraman on the turret while it was raised.

Burnie Burns stated in the Season 4 audio commentary that the glitch was something they kept noticing a lot while recording the episodes, and when they discovered how to replicate it they utilized it extensively.

Making the show more ambitious and reliant on computer animation led to extensive planning – fight choreography, storyboards, animatics – for episodes that take months to be completed, in contrast to machinima ones that are done in just a week.

[39][40] Adobe Premiere Pro is used to edit the audio and video together, add the titles, and create some of the special effects not normally possible on the console or in the games used.

As the camera player's view has a heads-up display (HUD), black bars are added in post-production to hide the top and bottom portions containing irrelevant in-game information, creating a letterbox effect.

[50] The following episodes wound up downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, forcing a change on the distribution to peer-to-peer file sharing to cut the increasing server costs.

Although the crew had feared that any contact would be to force an end to the project, Bungie enjoyed the videos and was supportive;[9] one staff member called the production "kind of brilliant".

Darren Waters of BBC News Online called Red vs. Blue "riotously funny" and "reminiscent of the anarchic energy of South Park".

[15] Reviewing the three season DVDs for Cinema Strikes Back, Charlie Prince wrote, "Red vs. Blue is hysterical in large part because all the characters are morons, and so the seemingly intense conflict with the opposing base doesn't exactly work the way you'd think it would.

"[58] Writing for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Wilma Jandoc agreed that the first part of "season 3 ... throws the teams into a ridiculous situation and has limited member interactions, leading to a lack of witty dialogue".

An August 2005 blog entry by Kimi Matsuzaki of 1UP.com displays photographs of soldiers holding various weapons, as well as copies of the first and second season Red vs. Blue DVDs.

[68] In Halo 3 itself, the second campaign scenario features a Red vs. Blue skit, wherein two cast members voice over a soldier attempting to bypass a locked door.

[69] Tavares, Gil, and Roque called it machinima's "first big success",[70] and Paul Marino noted that "the series proved so popular that it not only transcended the typical gamer, it also claimed fans outside the gaming world".

This original setup was intended to help to control bandwidth costs;[51] as of September 2005, the official Rooster Teeth website was serving 400 terabytes of data monthly.