Our intrepid reporter Adam Rorke made the journey up the Hume highway to attend the first ever Rooster Teeth expo in Australia. Dubbed RTX the show was host to some amazing games, films, anime and various other pop culture related stalls. Adam has used his time well, managing to get a host of interviews, previews and reports toghether for your entertainment. Welcome to Player2’s coverage of RTX Australia 2016
Interview – Gus Sorola – RTX Australia
Gus is the Co-Founder and thus one of the original members of Rooster Teeth Productions and the voice of Dick Simmons in Red vs Blue. At the start of the RTXAU event, with a beer in hand, we managed to sneak a few minutes with Gus to talk about his initial impressions and more. Read on:
Adam – First impressions, the crowds seem like they’re really happy to have you here, has this exceeded expectations?
Gus – We’ve been planning this for a long time, we’ve done site visits, but yeah it’s crazy to see this many people here, it’s an overwhelming show of support and we’re pretty grateful so far.
Adam – Did you ever think that 13 years ago when this started that you would have such a huge community, following, millions of subscribers on YouTube? I mean it’s pretty big!
Gus – We couldn’t have dreamed anything this big. 13 years ago our dream was, we could continue this and entertain a few people for a year or two, if you had gone back then and told me we’d be here right now doing this I would have called you an absolute liar. At the time, 2003, it didn’t seem like a viable business idea. No one was distributing video on the internet, it didn’t seem like a business that could last.
But I think we hit at the right time, maybe a little ahead of the curve and it’s paid off tremendously. Now doing video on the internet is a common thing and we managed to get there right at right moment.
Adam – How have you managed to maintain that popularity because you guys were the pioneers of this business model, you created it, and these things always evolve, how did you evolve?
Gus – We just tried to continue to make the things that we like and we enjoy. We built a place for people to interact so we built a social media website around the same time Facebook launched, I think within a month. We’ve made a couple of well educated guesses and I think it’s paid off well.
Adam – What about future educated guesses?
Gus – Right now, I think in the next couple of years we’re going to see a flood VR and AR content.
Adam – Are you excited about VR?
Gus – Ah no. I think a lot of its going to be shit, in the case of VR many times the cart’s been put before the horse without really thinking it through. I think there should be incremental steps to get to VR, this is going to sound like an Ad, it’s not an Ad, I think HoloLens is more exciting than VR at this point, where you add elements to your existing field of vision, that makes sense before you step towards full VR.
Adam – Why Australia? RTX has been running for about 4 to 5 years, why was this place on your radar?
Gus – Australia was one of the first places we came to when we first promoted Red vs Blue, we came here in 2004 in Melbourne. We’ve always been received very well, the fan base has been super passionate, and we’re very lucky to have good partners in the region. It just makes sense to have the event here, it’s the perfect storm of fandom and business type stuff coming together.
Adam – This is the first one, I assume this had to be a success, when I looked on the website it was 100% sold out very quickly, so I only assume this is already a success.
Gus – Absolutely, but the way we measure success is that you have to have a balance. If you’re looking at the numbers, yes, selling out is good. But we also want to make sure the attendees a good time and that there’s a good quality experience there. So we have to balance that with activity, so we can’t qualify this a success until we know that people have fun and got their money’s worth.
Adam – What’s the biggest challenges?
Gus – For this event, we brought Michael and Gavin down, but we didn’t announce that, it was a surprise, so that was a challenge keeping that secret for so long and also executing some of the things in here, Centre Stage, which is a crazy technical challenge. Some of stuff got held up in Customs and returned, but most of it made it through ok.
Adam – Thank you so much for having a chat with me, I know you’re very busy and I really appreciate it.
Gus – Cool man, I appreciate it!
Adam Rorke
