I can't remember hearing of Monty Oum until, I think Wednesday, when I spotted a cosplay based on the Rooster Teeth-produced show RWBY on DeviantArt. Right under it was the photographer's comment:
RIP Monty Oum, creator of RWBY.
This one's for you, buddy.
You were a huge inspiration to many of us.
Miss you.
As I scrolled down past the picture into the comments, I couldn't help but notice that for every comment complimenting the artist on her cosplay, there was one saying how sad it was, what happened to Monty.
So I went over to the Rooster Teeth website and found out in very short order just who Monty Oum was and what had happened to him. And that, even though I'd not bothered watching RWBY, I'd been in awe of his work for a good few years now.
Though the tribute video they put together was meaningful, it was the Rooster Teeth Podcast episode where four memebers of the team talked about their time with Monty which really told me about the guy. What I heard... it made me wonder about me. And the rest of us.
I've long held that the Rooster Teeth team are a prime example of what this site is about. It all started as a bunch of guys getting together and having fun playing videogames - one of their earlier sites was drunkgamers.com (which has been offline for ages; I don't think I could find it when they first mentioned it in the early days of their main web series, Red Vs. Blue, a show made entirely in the multiplayer component of the video game Halo). They got together, had fun and started working on ways of sharing that fun with people.
Now, they own their own office building complete with a motion capture studio, produce several lots of web media (including Red Vs. Blue, which is about to commence airing its thirteenth season) and still appear to be having just as much fun as when they started - if not more so, as it's not a sideline or pet project any more. Rooster Teeth is these guys' full time jobs.
So what gets to me about Monty?
A few days ago I re-wrote the About page of this site, and part of that re-write was putting into words just what it was about my guests that made them so interesting to me. It was my wife Vickie who actually nailed it down, in two words: Curiosity and Belief.
Boy, did Monty have both in spades.
Go and listen to / watch that episode of the Rooster Teeth Podcast. You will be amazed at just how much stuff Monty Oum had on the go, often at the same time. Here was a guy who wouldn't even let a looming deadline stop him from taking a week to build a custom set of moving angel wings (possibly for a cosplay). He was curious to the point of voraciousness about pop culture media, and if asked, he'd say that it was part of modern life now to be a fan, to consume and then make something of your own out of what you'd taken in.
As far as I can tell, it was Monty who was the main driving force behind bringing motion capture to the Rooster Teeth Studio. It was him behind the incredible action scenes that suddenly seemed to come from nowhere in Red Vs. Blue, when the soldiers formerly limited to the basic set of moves available to them in game (run, walk, turn, look up, look down,
