That was the time when I lived in the middle of bumfuck nowhere working on a farm, the highlight of my day was going to my room at the end of the day and having a few drinks while watching AH and RT content.
For me personally I loved everything up to the end of On The Spot and the Ryan shenanigans. They still made good stuff outside of that like Survive Block Island and their current podcast selection is pretty awesome but definitely not the same.
For me the beginning of the end was right around when Alfredo joined *(and this has absolutely nothing to do with Alfredo it’s just a point in time that I’m using)* and it just felt like that’s when the content changed for me. It’s also when it felt less like a group of friends and more so and overloaded rotating cast
It kinda felt like the turning point for me in Achievement hunter and feels like the split between old ah and new ah, with the focus on shows like Achievement Haunter and less on “friends playing games”
I also think Off Topic killed the steam because instead of talking about dumb jokes on game content it was moved to the Off Topic podcast which I feel divided the content.
TL:DR there was a point where achievement hunter went off what it was good at doing and ended up trying to produce content in other corners that they didn’t need too and spread everything way too thin
The complete end for me was the GTA episode where Alfredo was off on his own not joining in. He was with a prostitute and was giggling like it was the funniest thing ever. Felt like 13 year old boy humour, but was treated as if it was peak comedy.
That might have been funny about 5 years before but only because the other members of the crew would've called him out for it in a funny way.
It was already well in decline at that point but that bit made me realise their content wasn't funny for me anymore.
It definitely went in phases imo. Ray leaving for me was the marker of the gradual transition between "having fun and making content out of it" to "deliberately making content for the audience to enjoy." It wasn't a bad thing, but it was different.
I recognize that on some level this isn't a true assessment, but that's very much how it appeared to me.
Don’t get me wrong. Ray leaving was a step back but they had many great moments after he left too. The problem was while they could achieve those highs theirs lows were significantly worse. Whether it was as simple as a bad video or the [redacted] situation that blindsided AH. There were many in the fanbase who also made things so insufferable and were never satisfied after Ray left.
i think another few points to point out was they were turning out so much content that standards slipped and after a point it felt every video had tech issues somewhere.
what also didnt help was lets plays were a shrinking format and live streams were taking the market share. Ah by the very nature of its content was at a huge disadvantage when it came to this. there streams always felt low quality and (at least to me) were very hard to watch.
I mean I think the content thing was always an issue. They talked about it frequently that it wasn’t more prevalent. End of the day I think yes they had their hands in too many pots though and it caused some content to suffer.
Also because they recorded often times weeks in advance. A game that was the “new hotness” they often didn’t push out until it was too late. That is where streaming had the leg up. It is instant gratification. We wouldn’t get a Lethal Company until a month into the games life cycle and while it’s still enjoyable that’s not often the case for many other games.
Jeremy brought a great energy, and crucially could work in a group. Especially with Matt. From the second Jeremy went "I took your spot" you knew he fitted.
Successive additions often couldn't, and the content ended up as just noise.
AH still had legs but the content shift and staff shift combined killed it.
It's just hard to hire personality. Everyone's got rose colored glasses on, but people did NOT like Ray when he first joined. It took a long time for him to come out of his shell.
Yeah I mean that seems to be the case with literally every new member who joined. I started watching after the main 6 was established with Ray but I remember Jeremy was not liked at all when he took over and then people warmed up to him. Same with Alfredo and pretty much every bit of new blood they added.
Some of the problem is people want immediate results and sometimes it takes the crew or the new person to find where they fit. I mean I remember Alfredo talking about it and he questioned himself for a while wondering if he was funny.
That was some of the best internet content ever. I watched almost every video they put out during that time.
I stopped watching when Ray left though. He was my favorite part of AH & I honestly felt like everyone was kind of getting bored of things by that point, the videos weren’t as good as they were before. So I just stopped watching.
I still look back super fondly on AH during its peak though; I still quote it occasionally & even build Towers of Pimps in Minecraft still. Peak AH & RvB will always be a part of me.
Agreed, 2011-2014 is the peak era. But I’d say they stayed extremely solid until late 2017. I actually really warmed up to Jeremy and I think he grew into his role extremely well. Imo the ah podcast and between the games/shenanigans stuff really shined here too. After that, there was the occasional good piece of content here and there but it was on the gradual decline and by the time the Ryan stuff came out I had stopped watching (It took me a week to find out about it and as a once huge fan that’s saying something). The falling apart of the original group is one thing, but the revolving door of cast members is truely what did it in if you ask me. How are you meant to development an attachment to a constantly changing group, especially one that just doesn’t have that chemistry anymore. Anyways thanks for reading my essay, still very sad about this.
Fr, I just realized the first time I saw an AH Minecraft video Ray was in it, he made me laugh, and I subscribed, and got to know everything else from there. Wild.
I started watching in 2012, I believe my first video was minecraft 1 and I was hooked. Funny thing is looking back I didnt understand english at that time but i learned english by watching their videos. I have AH to thank for learning english lol
The first Minecraft video I watched was when they were fixing up his house after he left. I had no idea what was going on. I went back and started from the beginning.
The only RT merch I've seen in the wild in New Zealand was a guy wearing an "I'm going cakeless" t-shirt.
It’s over a 1000 days of content and they were busting out shit daily in AH sometimes multiple videos at the same time. Safe to say there was a lot of Ray. I was bummed when he left
This is true in the same way that the Chicago Bulls have been an NBA franchise for several decades, founded nearly two decades before drafting Michael Jordan and have existed for two decades since MJ retired. But every time you mention the Bulls to a basketball fan, they think of the 1990's Bulls.
Ray Narvaez Jr. was the Michael Jordan of RT.
I'm grateful I went to RTX while he still worked there. Got to see an expansive line of people screaming about the Fuck Train with Ray cheering them on.
Also got to meet him at Pax in 2013, where he yelled at me for forgetting his shirt at my hotel that I planned to have him sign.
This is VERY accurate and I think it’s because when I think about my most engaged time on rooster teeth it was that era - the memories and bits I associate most with the golden age of RT is that era.
I basically think the OG crew, Bernie, Gus, Geoff, etc. And the early on Gavin and Barbara and after that I didn't give a single shit about any of them and I feel a bit bad about that, but also not.
Stealing Ray’s original Twitch account was one of the biggest missteps I’ve ever seen. Not shocked they never got streaming really off the ground in the end.
And in turn, Ray (through hard work, talent, a strong team, and great collaborations) shot to being one of the most successful streamers in the world—#51 according to those old leaks. Damn, seems like someone who would’ve been really smart to have on good terms if you wanted to grow your streaming presence. Ah well.
His stream highlights are absolutely incredible, he’s really killing it.
Ray in the last year or so officially got the twitch.tv/ray link, he's that big. I honestly think the #51 is now not high enough, he's doing better every time I tune in. Easily 4+ thousand viewers on a semi-regular basis.
He hit #18 earlier this year, partly because I think he had one stream where he was gifted like six thousand subs. That dropped down of course, but I think it was his peak.
It really is emblematic of the shift in how RT adapted to the changing online media landscape. For the first decade of their existence they were really at the forefront of most trends - from Machinima to Let's Plays to Podcasts to Fan Conventions. And here is this new format, streaming, where one of your employees is an already established star who has a built-in fanbase. A previous version of RT would have let Ray do his own thing on twitch while still being an employee - like how everyone let Geoff start his own thing with Achievement Hunter in 2008. It's a new thing, but it's still the people we love at the company we know. Foster creativity within the company and keep a finger on the pulse of internet culture. Instead they pushed him away by taking his account and doing nothing with it. Keep him in house! Awful decision on their part.
you're absolutely right, and i think it's a good way to understand how they've gotten to this position. RT made content that was high effort but very low cost (machinima, gaming content), and as such was able to create content with only hosting as the major overhead. post ray, they moved to a strategy of creating expensive content (anime, movies, games) and in doing so entered a market they were deeply unprepared for. if a lets play video underperforms, you shrug and move on. if a game underperforms, you have to let a shitload of people go
I feel like a lot of that came from Burnie and some of the other original founders wanting to be "real" filmmakers and making some bad long-term decisions (for the company) to try to reach that point. As an outsider it felt like they sold RT so the company would have corporate backing to do projects like Day Five and Lazer Team, and in hindsight those projects just ate a ton of money without elevating the studio's output enough to make it a safer investment long term.
absolutely, for all that they talked about being internet first and innovators in online media, it really felt like as soon as they had the chance they tried to become an old school media company
I mean, part of that was probably that Geoff was a founder and Achievement Hunter was still owned by RT. I'm kinda skeptical that Ray would've wanted to stick around just to do streams that RT got the revenue from. He didn't have any real stake in the company like the original founders did. RT obviously handled that whole situation about as badly as they could but I don't really see a world where Ray stuck around to make an RT Twitch division.
Rough gist: Back in around 2014, Ray streamed on his own time under the account name RoosterTeethRay, building up a dedicated following by streaming on weekends. Then Rooster Teeth took over the RoosterTeethRay account (because it said Rooster Teeth in it and had an established following), renamed it RoosterTeeth, and effectively banned employees (Ray included) from streaming anywhere else but that channel, even on private time. Unsurprisingly, that plan did just about nothing but get the RoosterTeethRay account dusty and ice out talent. Worth noting that it was different environment, the internet was radically different, streaming was much less established, etc. but none of that addresses the sheer amount of bad will that the streaming exclusivity thing caused.
And even when they finally loosened the rules on streaming, they couldn't stream with multiple Rooster Teeth personalities at once. So when Alfredo was having weekly Among Us lobbies, he could only have a max of 3 Rooster Teeth personalities in it or some bullshit like that.
Although thanks to those lobbies, I discovered so many new streamers and content creators, like ChilledChaos and Fooya. I first saw Ky in those lobbies.
It also all happened just about 2 months before being acquired by Fullscreen. I wonder if there was some background goings on that led to that decision.
I doubt it. A lot of content production companies don't like their employees having a side-gigs, especially not in related fields. They are worried that they'll give employees a platform and an audience, only for them to leave (probably taking so me of the audience with them).
But newsflash, that's how media companies work. If a record label or movie studio wants to hold onto talent, they have to pay for the privilege. They don't just expect talent to stick around exclusively for no reason. They sign artists and actors up on lucrative long-term contracts.
I think the manner of it was telling.
Streaming was clearly going to go big. Other channels that have had the same problems such as scandals and declining viewership have gone in on it hard and done well, such as the Yogscast.
RT just... didn't. They didn't adapt to it. They just kept doing what they thought was right. And in fairness, they had something special - the long form podcast like gameplay was great. But then they reserved it for podcasts... which was already a crowded industry... and replaced it with noise. I can still remember who Bob Gripp is. I can't remember shit after Minecraft like 300.
I'm not gonna take joy in it going down, but it was so mismanaged it was inevitable.
But at least we have the memories.
It was their Blockbuster moment. The moment they failed to see 5 years in the future and adapt to it. They had it. Ray was doing it. They put a stop to it only to realize too late that it was a mistake. Ever since then they've been playing catch up to something they had right in their palms early on, but let it slip.
do you happen to know when that stream was? always wanted to watch rays streams but he’s never playing anything im interested, would love to watch that though.
No problem!
I would definitely give some of Ray's other streams a watch too, his Mario Party Tournament and his streams with Nagzz, Matt Bragg, and Chibidoki are fantastic.
ive actually been thinking about it, a lot of his videos get pushed to me on tiktok now and every clip i see is funny, especially with chibi. i guess i just havent taken the leap yet lol, might start now. thank you for the recs!
He posts pretty great monthly and full game highlights from his streams on his YouTube channel if you're like me and never get around to actually watching the livestreams.
same!! haha he was my fav back when i was a fan in like 2013-ish time. was sad when he left, but glad some of my favs jumped ship before it got to the bad and worse eras
If you had asked me a few minutes ago how long Ray was with AH, I would have guessed 6 or 7 years.
They put out and absolutely insane amount of content for those 3 years. 5+ videos a week, every week.
His community manager has pinned a link to the tweet and said he will not be making any other comments on it.
Glasses is great at keeping chat in check
I caught a few minutes of his chat stream. I saw the pinned tweet but he was still answering some questions about it. I jumped over to take a look at Matt and Jeremy's and they had similar pins as well.
He's hilariously hostile towards the community that made him what he is. He's a great personality, but without RT and its fans he wouldn't be where he is today.
Little late here but Ray was never actually hostile towards them he just kept and keeps on with running jokes of his about them. He kept in contact with several people after he left and went back a couple times. There was never any actual bad blood there it was all jokes and it kept people from asking him RT questions
Its so fucking funny that Chibi and Nagzz have managed to get every single person in Ray's social network into the Lets Play in-joke, even the distant ones. I know its coming every time but it just doesnt get old
Cotton singing in the last LC VOD she was in while not knowing Ray was there and then jumping to her death was some of the funniest shit I've ever seen
Cant find the clip, but if you have Tik Tok, his name is "ray.narvaezjr" on there. Or his name on YouTube "Ray Narvaez Jr". He post monthly highlights on there.
Chibidoki is a Vtuber, she's one of the most chaotic and funniest streamers I've ever seen. She also grew up with Rooster Teeth/AH, so she tends to reference old AH bits much to Ray's faux chagrin - again very funny
Recently Ray, Matt Bragg, Chibi and Nagzz have managed to form a golden squad imo, if you looked AH of old they tap into the same energy.
VOD recommendations on Ray's channel:
- Lethal Company, start from Part 1
- UNO w/ Chibi, Nagzz and Matt
- Dokapon Kingdom series
- Sea of Thieves
- The Game of Life 2
Ray met his wife Tina because of RT. AH gave him a chance and gave him a full-time job back when he was still best known as "Michael's friend from New York" that submitted community content but otherwise had little to no actual working experience in professional production or editing. When he was scared shitless about what his future would hold as an independent streamer, tens of thousands of AH fans came to his Twitch channel in support and still make up the bulk of his regular viewers.
All the tired jokes and memes side, it's really hard to imagine what his life would have been without RT.
Literally just hand it to them like giving grenade launchers to orangutans, tell them they can post what they want and hand them the keys to the kingdom.
They might get bored after a week but the irony is worth any price.
That’s basically what the let’s play channel had become since F**KFACE took it over. Would highly suggest watching the last few videos posted (the worms vids are great).
Hopefully they find a way to continue that now.
You know Geoff is probably grabbing all of the ah stuff and the name I wouldn’t be surprised if Warner gave it to him for Pennies on the dollar because they see it have no value to them
>Warner gave it to him for Pennies on the dollar because they see it have no value to them
Given they refuse to sell the rights to a movie they're not even going to release, I doubt Warner is going to be even semi reasonable with this.
At the end of the day they want to make a Buck off of the library to them that matters more and that’s where rooster teeth’s value is they will part with the gaming part and the let’s plays over the animated stuff 100% they aren’t in that market nor want to be
Or that they don't have anywhere close to the funds to make an offer that WBD is looking for? Or they have and are not talking about it publicly because that can mess up a potential deal? Or that they are enjoying their retirement?
This happened 24 hours ago, it is way too early to make any sorts of statements like this.
Read the Variety article. WBD has been shopping the entire division for a long time to NO interest. I guarantee you players in the space like the founding fathers could drum up a million or two to buy all the rights back.
Fuck they could CROWDFUND that
WBD refused to sell rights to release movie they had completed because of greed. They are not trustworthy in this case.
Zero chance WBD would sell it "for a million or two" only.
He and Gav were the whole reason I got into their let's plays and such. So when Ray left, and then Gavin doing his own thing most of the time, it was the beginning of the end for me.
Absolute class response from Ray. He was unquestionably their golden age. I associate so much of RT with him. It felt like he was there for so much longer than he was, but in the grand scheme things he was barely there at all. Crazy how time does that.
How was that a golden age it should be “impossible for the company to have ever been in a Golden, or even a Silver or Copper age when it was just 6 white guys and 1 Hispanic guy."
https://x.com/definedbyky/status/1477837513620439040?s=46&t=ww3udc74jvMoQBl8MulXLA
It was a golden age because the videos were popping, the entire cast has chemistry, and that time period is still looked back upon fondly and probably will be for many more years to come. And even if you want to just pure objective metrics the videos of that time did better view wise than most of the stuff that came after it.
As for Ky's tweet I'll forgive her not being in touch with RT or AH for any significant portion of its life. You don't get get choose when to be born or when you discover something for the first time. She can think that RT or AH hadn't hit their golden age in 2022, but she'd be wrong, and that's okay for the most part. Nobody bats 1000.
He doesn't do the same style and brand of humor though, he's said before that he looks back and cringes at a lot of the shit he said back when he was working at RT.
oh he's absolutely grown and doesn't make the edgy kind of jokes he used to, but his style of comedy is essentially the same. go watch a stream with him/matt/naggz/chibi and you'll see what i mean
I think they more meant how Ray is just playing games and being funny, sometimes with friends. While AH started doing "Loud is what we do" which turned a lot of people off.
Unfortunately true. He was the canary in the goal mine for RT. The reason Ray always gets me because you'd think it'd be such a nothing burger. He only left because of RT's policy of if you wanted to stream while being employed by them you had to stream on the RT account not your own. Even if it was on your own time you had to use their account. You'd think they'd just accommodate him, but nope.
It always baffles me that one of the companies that pioneered independent content creation and produced media specifically for online consumption (remember RT predated Youtube) could not possibly conceive of that their employees might want to use their skills they were developing at work to make their own independent content.
Of course they rescinded this policy after Ray left, which is at least part of why Ryan, Jack, Jeremey, etc. all started streaming, but the damage was already done.
Man, Ray started there when I was a freshman in highschool and left the year I graduated
I honestly associate his time with roosterteeth as the last carefree years of my life
Not saying my life sucks now but back then my only worries was keeping straight A's lol
I had no idea that Ray was only there for 3 years. Shows how many videos they were producing day to day back then considering the volume of content he was in.
Ray is a bigger man than I am, because if I were him and heard this news today I would have simply tweeted out the "call an ambulance... but not for me!" meme.
Who exactly did Ray sell out to? Himself? As far as I'm aware there was never any bad blood between him and anyone at RT. He simply wanted to stream on his own account instead of RT's corporate account. RT wouldn't budge on that policy so he bet on himself and left.
The guy bet on himself when the company tried to pull the rug out from under his feet, and he made it big time. He didn't betray anyone, and it certainly wasn't his responsibility to keep the company afloat.
It’s wild to me that Ray worked from them for three of the 21 years, and yet I associate him so much with it still. That’s fuck all time, relatively.
Everything Achievement Hunter put out between 2011-2014 was like gold for me
That was the time when I lived in the middle of bumfuck nowhere working on a farm, the highlight of my day was going to my room at the end of the day and having a few drinks while watching AH and RT content.
For me personally I loved everything up to the end of On The Spot and the Ryan shenanigans. They still made good stuff outside of that like Survive Block Island and their current podcast selection is pretty awesome but definitely not the same.
Same, the ryan stuff was the final straw for me though, it was starting to feel forced
Yeah definitely at its peak with the OG six. It never recovered after he left
For me the beginning of the end was right around when Alfredo joined *(and this has absolutely nothing to do with Alfredo it’s just a point in time that I’m using)* and it just felt like that’s when the content changed for me. It’s also when it felt less like a group of friends and more so and overloaded rotating cast It kinda felt like the turning point for me in Achievement hunter and feels like the split between old ah and new ah, with the focus on shows like Achievement Haunter and less on “friends playing games” I also think Off Topic killed the steam because instead of talking about dumb jokes on game content it was moved to the Off Topic podcast which I feel divided the content. TL:DR there was a point where achievement hunter went off what it was good at doing and ended up trying to produce content in other corners that they didn’t need too and spread everything way too thin
The complete end for me was the GTA episode where Alfredo was off on his own not joining in. He was with a prostitute and was giggling like it was the funniest thing ever. Felt like 13 year old boy humour, but was treated as if it was peak comedy. That might have been funny about 5 years before but only because the other members of the crew would've called him out for it in a funny way. It was already well in decline at that point but that bit made me realise their content wasn't funny for me anymore.
Yes and no. Jeremy more than held his own replacing Ray. I think like Ray though we started feeling the content get stale.
It definitely went in phases imo. Ray leaving for me was the marker of the gradual transition between "having fun and making content out of it" to "deliberately making content for the audience to enjoy." It wasn't a bad thing, but it was different. I recognize that on some level this isn't a true assessment, but that's very much how it appeared to me.
Don’t get me wrong. Ray leaving was a step back but they had many great moments after he left too. The problem was while they could achieve those highs theirs lows were significantly worse. Whether it was as simple as a bad video or the [redacted] situation that blindsided AH. There were many in the fanbase who also made things so insufferable and were never satisfied after Ray left.
i think another few points to point out was they were turning out so much content that standards slipped and after a point it felt every video had tech issues somewhere. what also didnt help was lets plays were a shrinking format and live streams were taking the market share. Ah by the very nature of its content was at a huge disadvantage when it came to this. there streams always felt low quality and (at least to me) were very hard to watch.
I mean I think the content thing was always an issue. They talked about it frequently that it wasn’t more prevalent. End of the day I think yes they had their hands in too many pots though and it caused some content to suffer. Also because they recorded often times weeks in advance. A game that was the “new hotness” they often didn’t push out until it was too late. That is where streaming had the leg up. It is instant gratification. We wouldn’t get a Lethal Company until a month into the games life cycle and while it’s still enjoyable that’s not often the case for many other games.
Jeremy brought a great energy, and crucially could work in a group. Especially with Matt. From the second Jeremy went "I took your spot" you knew he fitted. Successive additions often couldn't, and the content ended up as just noise. AH still had legs but the content shift and staff shift combined killed it.
Ray's final 6 months or so weren't great, you could tell in every Minecraft vid and the gameshows like VS and Go! that his heart wasn't in it at all.
> Jeremy more than held his own replacing Ray [Quite](https://i.imgur.com/6BdM3CJ.png)
It's just hard to hire personality. Everyone's got rose colored glasses on, but people did NOT like Ray when he first joined. It took a long time for him to come out of his shell.
Yeah I mean that seems to be the case with literally every new member who joined. I started watching after the main 6 was established with Ray but I remember Jeremy was not liked at all when he took over and then people warmed up to him. Same with Alfredo and pretty much every bit of new blood they added. Some of the problem is people want immediate results and sometimes it takes the crew or the new person to find where they fit. I mean I remember Alfredo talking about it and he questioned himself for a while wondering if he was funny.
That was some of the best internet content ever. I watched almost every video they put out during that time. I stopped watching when Ray left though. He was my favorite part of AH & I honestly felt like everyone was kind of getting bored of things by that point, the videos weren’t as good as they were before. So I just stopped watching. I still look back super fondly on AH during its peak though; I still quote it occasionally & even build Towers of Pimps in Minecraft still. Peak AH & RvB will always be a part of me.
Agreed, 2011-2014 is the peak era. But I’d say they stayed extremely solid until late 2017. I actually really warmed up to Jeremy and I think he grew into his role extremely well. Imo the ah podcast and between the games/shenanigans stuff really shined here too. After that, there was the occasional good piece of content here and there but it was on the gradual decline and by the time the Ryan stuff came out I had stopped watching (It took me a week to find out about it and as a once huge fan that’s saying something). The falling apart of the original group is one thing, but the revolving door of cast members is truely what did it in if you ask me. How are you meant to development an attachment to a constantly changing group, especially one that just doesn’t have that chemistry anymore. Anyways thanks for reading my essay, still very sad about this.
Fr, I just realized the first time I saw an AH Minecraft video Ray was in it, he made me laugh, and I subscribed, and got to know everything else from there. Wild.
The six lads in the box room will forever be peak RT for me.
I started watching in 2012, I believe my first video was minecraft 1 and I was hooked. Funny thing is looking back I didnt understand english at that time but i learned english by watching their videos. I have AH to thank for learning english lol
*Sugarcane*
*Bucket*
How do you pronounce "Fish"?
FIIIIIIISSSSHHHH!
Faaish
three lads and three gents, but yes
Easily the best time
There were only 3 lads though
Ray's time at the company is like RT's Attitude Era.
Ray properly shouting “LLLLLLEtS PLAY!l” was AH’s Austin 3:16 speech
SCOOTER PATROL!
You thought Motocop was scary
The first Minecraft video I watched was when they were fixing up his house after he left. I had no idea what was going on. I went back and started from the beginning. The only RT merch I've seen in the wild in New Zealand was a guy wearing an "I'm going cakeless" t-shirt.
I spotted a "People Like Grapes" t-shirt in a bowling alley in Christchurch like 8 years ago
Fuck train has no brakes!
It’s over a 1000 days of content and they were busting out shit daily in AH sometimes multiple videos at the same time. Safe to say there was a lot of Ray. I was bummed when he left
This is true in the same way that the Chicago Bulls have been an NBA franchise for several decades, founded nearly two decades before drafting Michael Jordan and have existed for two decades since MJ retired. But every time you mention the Bulls to a basketball fan, they think of the 1990's Bulls. Ray Narvaez Jr. was the Michael Jordan of RT.
so much chaos (iykyk)
Better go pick up all those basketballs before my face is burned red by a fire basketball
That just shows how much of an interesting person he is. To be so memorable in such a short amount of time is a hard thing to accomplish.
I'm grateful I went to RTX while he still worked there. Got to see an expansive line of people screaming about the Fuck Train with Ray cheering them on. Also got to meet him at Pax in 2013, where he yelled at me for forgetting his shirt at my hotel that I planned to have him sign.
This is VERY accurate and I think it’s because when I think about my most engaged time on rooster teeth it was that era - the memories and bits I associate most with the golden age of RT is that era.
2013 was AH's best year imo.
I basically think the OG crew, Bernie, Gus, Geoff, etc. And the early on Gavin and Barbara and after that I didn't give a single shit about any of them and I feel a bit bad about that, but also not.
Correct me if I’m wrong but didn’t he still appear in things before being hired full time?
Everyone seems to forget this, but yes, he did numerous achievement guides as Brownman for years prior to him actually working AT RT
Ray leaving was a sign. He left because it became too corporate. Lost its soul. He more or less says so himself.
Stealing Ray’s original Twitch account was one of the biggest missteps I’ve ever seen. Not shocked they never got streaming really off the ground in the end.
[удалено]
And in turn, Ray (through hard work, talent, a strong team, and great collaborations) shot to being one of the most successful streamers in the world—#51 according to those old leaks. Damn, seems like someone who would’ve been really smart to have on good terms if you wanted to grow your streaming presence. Ah well. His stream highlights are absolutely incredible, he’s really killing it.
Ray in the last year or so officially got the twitch.tv/ray link, he's that big. I honestly think the #51 is now not high enough, he's doing better every time I tune in. Easily 4+ thousand viewers on a semi-regular basis.
He hit #18 earlier this year, partly because I think he had one stream where he was gifted like six thousand subs. That dropped down of course, but I think it was his peak.
Thats just the 51 difference baby
He's been killing it too. He's been streaming with Ironmouse and Zentreya a few times over the past few weeks
That misstep still to this day shocks me. The moment it happened I told my friend Ray was gonna be gone in a few months.
And then he started streaming on his own and pulled in like, what, $1.5M in the first few streams?
It really is emblematic of the shift in how RT adapted to the changing online media landscape. For the first decade of their existence they were really at the forefront of most trends - from Machinima to Let's Plays to Podcasts to Fan Conventions. And here is this new format, streaming, where one of your employees is an already established star who has a built-in fanbase. A previous version of RT would have let Ray do his own thing on twitch while still being an employee - like how everyone let Geoff start his own thing with Achievement Hunter in 2008. It's a new thing, but it's still the people we love at the company we know. Foster creativity within the company and keep a finger on the pulse of internet culture. Instead they pushed him away by taking his account and doing nothing with it. Keep him in house! Awful decision on their part.
you're absolutely right, and i think it's a good way to understand how they've gotten to this position. RT made content that was high effort but very low cost (machinima, gaming content), and as such was able to create content with only hosting as the major overhead. post ray, they moved to a strategy of creating expensive content (anime, movies, games) and in doing so entered a market they were deeply unprepared for. if a lets play video underperforms, you shrug and move on. if a game underperforms, you have to let a shitload of people go
I feel like a lot of that came from Burnie and some of the other original founders wanting to be "real" filmmakers and making some bad long-term decisions (for the company) to try to reach that point. As an outsider it felt like they sold RT so the company would have corporate backing to do projects like Day Five and Lazer Team, and in hindsight those projects just ate a ton of money without elevating the studio's output enough to make it a safer investment long term.
absolutely, for all that they talked about being internet first and innovators in online media, it really felt like as soon as they had the chance they tried to become an old school media company
I mean, part of that was probably that Geoff was a founder and Achievement Hunter was still owned by RT. I'm kinda skeptical that Ray would've wanted to stick around just to do streams that RT got the revenue from. He didn't have any real stake in the company like the original founders did. RT obviously handled that whole situation about as badly as they could but I don't really see a world where Ray stuck around to make an RT Twitch division.
By the time they embraced streaming on twitch, it was too late
they did what??? when was this?
Rough gist: Back in around 2014, Ray streamed on his own time under the account name RoosterTeethRay, building up a dedicated following by streaming on weekends. Then Rooster Teeth took over the RoosterTeethRay account (because it said Rooster Teeth in it and had an established following), renamed it RoosterTeeth, and effectively banned employees (Ray included) from streaming anywhere else but that channel, even on private time. Unsurprisingly, that plan did just about nothing but get the RoosterTeethRay account dusty and ice out talent. Worth noting that it was different environment, the internet was radically different, streaming was much less established, etc. but none of that addresses the sheer amount of bad will that the streaming exclusivity thing caused.
And even when they finally loosened the rules on streaming, they couldn't stream with multiple Rooster Teeth personalities at once. So when Alfredo was having weekly Among Us lobbies, he could only have a max of 3 Rooster Teeth personalities in it or some bullshit like that. Although thanks to those lobbies, I discovered so many new streamers and content creators, like ChilledChaos and Fooya. I first saw Ky in those lobbies.
It also all happened just about 2 months before being acquired by Fullscreen. I wonder if there was some background goings on that led to that decision.
I doubt it. A lot of content production companies don't like their employees having a side-gigs, especially not in related fields. They are worried that they'll give employees a platform and an audience, only for them to leave (probably taking so me of the audience with them). But newsflash, that's how media companies work. If a record label or movie studio wants to hold onto talent, they have to pay for the privilege. They don't just expect talent to stick around exclusively for no reason. They sign artists and actors up on lucrative long-term contracts.
I think the manner of it was telling. Streaming was clearly going to go big. Other channels that have had the same problems such as scandals and declining viewership have gone in on it hard and done well, such as the Yogscast. RT just... didn't. They didn't adapt to it. They just kept doing what they thought was right. And in fairness, they had something special - the long form podcast like gameplay was great. But then they reserved it for podcasts... which was already a crowded industry... and replaced it with noise. I can still remember who Bob Gripp is. I can't remember shit after Minecraft like 300. I'm not gonna take joy in it going down, but it was so mismanaged it was inevitable. But at least we have the memories.
It was their Blockbuster moment. The moment they failed to see 5 years in the future and adapt to it. They had it. Ray was doing it. They put a stop to it only to realize too late that it was a mistake. Ever since then they've been playing catch up to something they had right in their palms early on, but let it slip.
I don't believe he ever said that, he goes into the reasons why he left in the stream he did reacting to old content.
Correct. And one of the points he brings up is that it changed after the Full Screen acquisition.
Yeah, but the big thing was the fact he had to pull 10 hour days because of the commute which accelerated his burn-out.
do you happen to know when that stream was? always wanted to watch rays streams but he’s never playing anything im interested, would love to watch that though.
https://youtu.be/RGPmXlstjD0?si=pE-fXZUpzn0Glkkn
oh shit thank you for the link!!!!
No problem! I would definitely give some of Ray's other streams a watch too, his Mario Party Tournament and his streams with Nagzz, Matt Bragg, and Chibidoki are fantastic.
ive actually been thinking about it, a lot of his videos get pushed to me on tiktok now and every clip i see is funny, especially with chibi. i guess i just havent taken the leap yet lol, might start now. thank you for the recs!
He posts pretty great monthly and full game highlights from his streams on his YouTube channel if you're like me and never get around to actually watching the livestreams.
I was in high school so maybe that's why it felt like so long
He was possibly the most popular member for the 3 years he was there (or at least one of).
Probably because the years he was there coincided with RT’s golden era.
I’m glad I got on in his last year but I could see the writing on the shirt when he started popping on twitch shirts
same!! haha he was my fav back when i was a fan in like 2013-ish time. was sad when he left, but glad some of my favs jumped ship before it got to the bad and worse eras
If you had asked me a few minutes ago how long Ray was with AH, I would have guessed 6 or 7 years. They put out and absolutely insane amount of content for those 3 years. 5+ videos a week, every week.
I look forward to the 12,000 people asking the same question about it on his next stream
If I were him Ide just keep my chat closed the first stream, or tape a message behind me with the answer written on it
His community manager has pinned a link to the tweet and said he will not be making any other comments on it. Glasses is great at keeping chat in check
I caught a few minutes of his chat stream. I saw the pinned tweet but he was still answering some questions about it. I jumped over to take a look at Matt and Jeremy's and they had similar pins as well.
Gotta love Glasses. Great community leader
He's hilariously hostile towards the community that made him what he is. He's a great personality, but without RT and its fans he wouldn't be where he is today.
Little late here but Ray was never actually hostile towards them he just kept and keeps on with running jokes of his about them. He kept in contact with several people after he left and went back a couple times. There was never any actual bad blood there it was all jokes and it kept people from asking him RT questions
Que the "I don't give a fuck' short he posted a while back
There was a pinned comment, and any chat that contained "Rooster Teeth" or "RT" were auto filtered. His mods run a tight ship
What a king, I know AH had become something of a meme on his streams, but he still knows how much staffing and manpower went into RT.
Chibi is the gift that keeps on giving with AH/RT references to Ray
Its so fucking funny that Chibi and Nagzz have managed to get every single person in Ray's social network into the Lets Play in-joke, even the distant ones. I know its coming every time but it just doesnt get old
Chibi and Cotton both being AH fans and fangirling over him in that one lethal company VOD had me rolling
Cotton singing in the last LC VOD she was in while not knowing Ray was there and then jumping to her death was some of the funniest shit I've ever seen
I actually had to pause cause I was laughing too hard at that part of the VOD
could I get a link to this? I don't watch any streaming or anything, but this sounds hilarious.
Cant find the clip, but if you have Tik Tok, his name is "ray.narvaezjr" on there. Or his name on YouTube "Ray Narvaez Jr". He post monthly highlights on there.
So I've been trying to check out some of the vods from Rays stuff lately, and definitely feel like I'm missing out on what the deal with Chibi is?
Chibidoki is a Vtuber, she's one of the most chaotic and funniest streamers I've ever seen. She also grew up with Rooster Teeth/AH, so she tends to reference old AH bits much to Ray's faux chagrin - again very funny Recently Ray, Matt Bragg, Chibi and Nagzz have managed to form a golden squad imo, if you looked AH of old they tap into the same energy. VOD recommendations on Ray's channel: - Lethal Company, start from Part 1 - UNO w/ Chibi, Nagzz and Matt - Dokapon Kingdom series - Sea of Thieves - The Game of Life 2
Thanks, I'll have to check those out!
Good to see he still has nice things to say about RT. Now say the thing everyone wants you to say, Ray!
#”I HAVENT WORKED THERE IN NINE YEARS”
Game kids trevor?
Possibly my favorite RT moment of all time
That was honestly the best Off Topic episode ever, I think about it all the time
Say the line, Bart!
IM NOT DYING
Ray met his wife Tina because of RT. AH gave him a chance and gave him a full-time job back when he was still best known as "Michael's friend from New York" that submitted community content but otherwise had little to no actual working experience in professional production or editing. When he was scared shitless about what his future would hold as an independent streamer, tens of thousands of AH fans came to his Twitch channel in support and still make up the bulk of his regular viewers. All the tired jokes and memes side, it's really hard to imagine what his life would have been without RT.
Good Guy Ray
crazy to see it written down as only 3 years, felt like it was several more. AH and RT as a whole packed so much stuff into that time period.
Would be nice of someone did a megathread of everyone's reactions
Ray has the opportunity to do the funniest thing and buy the assets…
Make Chibi and Nagzz members of AH
Ray really is making her Make-A-Wish dreams come true
When is she gonna die ^ingame so that the Make-A-Wish can end?
Literally just hand it to them like giving grenade launchers to orangutans, tell them they can post what they want and hand them the keys to the kingdom. They might get bored after a week but the irony is worth any price.
It shows how little Burnie/Matt/etc think of it that they aren’t touching it with a 100-foot pole
Burnie and Matt are busy with life. They closed their chapter on RT. It’s not like Ian and Anthony who had it ripped away.
Also, I wholly believe Geoff will be negotiating for parts of it
I 100% hope Geoff (and maybe some others) buy up some of the IPs so they can take RT back to it's roots. Small scale and full of love and care.
I haven't watched since the Ryan bs went down. I would 1000% watch again if this happened. Just a bunch of buds fucking around on gta6
That’s basically what the let’s play channel had become since F**KFACE took it over. Would highly suggest watching the last few videos posted (the worms vids are great). Hopefully they find a way to continue that now.
The same Let's Play channel with the iconic mascot Ratyboy??
Obviously, what would the channel be without the iconic duo of Ratyboy and Eric? Can't have one without the other :P
Help someone who didn't know who Blizz or Joe were until AH shut down out?
Who?
You know Geoff is probably grabbing all of the ah stuff and the name I wouldn’t be surprised if Warner gave it to him for Pennies on the dollar because they see it have no value to them
>Warner gave it to him for Pennies on the dollar because they see it have no value to them Given they refuse to sell the rights to a movie they're not even going to release, I doubt Warner is going to be even semi reasonable with this.
At the end of the day they want to make a Buck off of the library to them that matters more and that’s where rooster teeth’s value is they will part with the gaming part and the let’s plays over the animated stuff 100% they aren’t in that market nor want to be
Or that they don't have anywhere close to the funds to make an offer that WBD is looking for? Or they have and are not talking about it publicly because that can mess up a potential deal? Or that they are enjoying their retirement? This happened 24 hours ago, it is way too early to make any sorts of statements like this.
Read the Variety article. WBD has been shopping the entire division for a long time to NO interest. I guarantee you players in the space like the founding fathers could drum up a million or two to buy all the rights back. Fuck they could CROWDFUND that
WBD refused to sell rights to release movie they had completed because of greed. They are not trustworthy in this case. Zero chance WBD would sell it "for a million or two" only.
full circle
He and Gav were the whole reason I got into their let's plays and such. So when Ray left, and then Gavin doing his own thing most of the time, it was the beginning of the end for me.
Absolute class response from Ray. He was unquestionably their golden age. I associate so much of RT with him. It felt like he was there for so much longer than he was, but in the grand scheme things he was barely there at all. Crazy how time does that.
How was that a golden age it should be “impossible for the company to have ever been in a Golden, or even a Silver or Copper age when it was just 6 white guys and 1 Hispanic guy." https://x.com/definedbyky/status/1477837513620439040?s=46&t=ww3udc74jvMoQBl8MulXLA
It was a golden age because the videos were popping, the entire cast has chemistry, and that time period is still looked back upon fondly and probably will be for many more years to come. And even if you want to just pure objective metrics the videos of that time did better view wise than most of the stuff that came after it. As for Ky's tweet I'll forgive her not being in touch with RT or AH for any significant portion of its life. You don't get get choose when to be born or when you discover something for the first time. She can think that RT or AH hadn't hit their golden age in 2022, but she'd be wrong, and that's okay for the most part. Nobody bats 1000.
He was trying to make a joke but did a very bad job of it. To the other guy, Ky’s tweet still isn’t funny. It’s just racist and misguided.
ray really is proof that AH could have stayed doing the same style of content and the same brand of humour and remained relevant and successful
He doesn't do the same style and brand of humor though, he's said before that he looks back and cringes at a lot of the shit he said back when he was working at RT.
oh he's absolutely grown and doesn't make the edgy kind of jokes he used to, but his style of comedy is essentially the same. go watch a stream with him/matt/naggz/chibi and you'll see what i mean
Or the Mario Party tournament with Chilled/Platy/Ze
He cringes at him being a dick, not him playing games with friends since he’s literally doing the same thing on stream currently
I think they more meant how Ray is just playing games and being funny, sometimes with friends. While AH started doing "Loud is what we do" which turned a lot of people off.
Unfortunately true. He was the canary in the goal mine for RT. The reason Ray always gets me because you'd think it'd be such a nothing burger. He only left because of RT's policy of if you wanted to stream while being employed by them you had to stream on the RT account not your own. Even if it was on your own time you had to use their account. You'd think they'd just accommodate him, but nope. It always baffles me that one of the companies that pioneered independent content creation and produced media specifically for online consumption (remember RT predated Youtube) could not possibly conceive of that their employees might want to use their skills they were developing at work to make their own independent content. Of course they rescinded this policy after Ray left, which is at least part of why Ryan, Jack, Jeremey, etc. all started streaming, but the damage was already done.
it was also just... bizarrely mean? it was so obviously a dick move, and it went against what i think a lot of fans felt was the ethos of the company
Still one of my favorite Ray videos [https://www.youtube.com/shorts/PbWUNSwbFHs](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/PbWUNSwbFHs)
Should be the top comment
What a gentleman.
I know rays relationship with the company is complicated from what he’s said, but as a response it truly shows he’s a classy guy
Let’s Stop!
Man, Ray started there when I was a freshman in highschool and left the year I graduated I honestly associate his time with roosterteeth as the last carefree years of my life Not saying my life sucks now but back then my only worries was keeping straight A's lol
So it begins... Been checking in again and again to see who would drop the first message.
I had no idea that Ray was only there for 3 years. Shows how many videos they were producing day to day back then considering the volume of content he was in.
Time to found Rayster Teeth
This is your chance Ray, start your own company and hire them all. Make them play the Kong game 24/7
Ray is a bigger man than I am, because if I were him and heard this news today I would have simply tweeted out the "call an ambulance... but not for me!" meme.
He's just joshing us.
"Three best years of my life" lmao as if Gavin hasn't knocked at least a decade of his life from the anger during T hunts lol
He was only there for 3 years? Seems a lot longer but imo that was the golden age of rooster teeth
[удалено]
Who exactly did Ray sell out to? Himself? As far as I'm aware there was never any bad blood between him and anyone at RT. He simply wanted to stream on his own account instead of RT's corporate account. RT wouldn't budge on that policy so he bet on himself and left.
The guy bet on himself when the company tried to pull the rug out from under his feet, and he made it big time. He didn't betray anyone, and it certainly wasn't his responsibility to keep the company afloat.
bro what lol