General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Funhaus

Funhaus was an American comedy gaming YouTube channel based in Los Angeles, operated as part of Rooster Teeth from February 2015 until April 2024. It was created by the cast of Machinima's Inside Gaming channel, who left that network in January 2015 and joined Rooster Teeth's newly formed West Coast branch, producing gameplay commentary, podcasts, question-and-answer videos, live-action sketches, and animated series.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Active years	February 16, 2015 to April 2024, ending with the shutdown of Rooster Teeth²^•³
Founding cast	Adam Kovic, Bruce Greene, James Willems, Lawrence Sonntag, Matt Peake, Joel Rubin, and Sean Poole, all from Machinima's Inside Gaming²
Channel size	About 1.35 million subscribers, roughly 1.46 billion views, and about 4,151 videos at the time of archival⁴
Largest series	GTA 5, Dude Soup (307), Open Haus (281), Movie Podcast (185), Demo Disk (178)⁵
Most-viewed game	Grand Theft Auto V, with 217,320,865 views across 456 videos⁴
Original production	Arizona Circle (2019), an 8-episode sketch series co-written, directed, and starred in by Elyse and James Willems⁶
Final upload	"Leavin' Ain't a Crime - A Farewell Love Letter from Funhaus", posted April 27, 2024⁴

Origin from Inside Gaming

The channel's founders ran Inside Gaming, a gaming news and commentary operation at the video network Machinima. On January 27, 2015, the Inside Gaming crew announced on their daily news program that they were leaving Machinima; the last episode of the daily aired on January 30 as their farewell to the company.¹ On February 5, 2015, Rooster Teeth co-founder Burnie Burns announced on the Rooster Teeth site that the Inside Gaming crew would join the company under the name Funhaus as part of its newly formed West Coast branch, and the Funhaus YouTube channel was created the same day.¹

The channel accumulated over 81,000 subscribers within a few hours of launch, and Funhaus promised to release its first podcast episode early if the channel reached 100,000 subscribers by Sunday, February 8.⁷^•² Official content began on February 16, 2015.² In addition to their own channel, the cast contributed to Rooster Teeth's news show The Know and appeared on the company's video podcast.²

Format and series

Funhaus described itself as "a comedy channel first, gaming channel second".⁸ Most gameplay videos followed a consistent structure: one crew member, usually Adam Kovic or Lawrence Sonntag, operated the controls while the other co-hosts sat in the background providing comedic commentary, with webcam footage of the crew shown in a corner of the screen.⁹ The channel uploaded videos daily, with most being weekly episodes of recurring shows.⁹

Demo Disk was perhaps the channel's most popular show. It began when a fan gave the group a binder of old demo disks; in each video James Willems picked a disk and handed it to Adam Kovic, who installed and played the game demo while James and Bruce Greene joked over the gameplay. Most of the games were terrible or broken, and every disk's life ended with Bruce snapping it to pieces.⁹

Other recurring formats included Open Haus, a weekly Q&A show in which the crew answered six to seven questions submitted on Reddit threads, and Wheelhaus, the spiritual successor to Steam Roulette, in which the crew played random Steam games.⁹ The archive lists 42 unique series, ranging from Dude Soup (307 videos) and Open Haus (281) to smaller runs such as Ryan's Bargain Bin (11 videos) and Phasmophobia (5 videos).⁵ The channel also produced scripted work: Sex Swing, an animated series voiced by Bruce Greene, James Willems, Joel Rubin, Lawrence Sonntag, and Adam Kovic, and Arizona Circle, the 2019 sketch series from Elyse and James Willems.¹⁰^•⁶

Rivalry with Achievement Hunter

From the day Funhaus began, a rivalry ran between it and Rooster Teeth's other gaming channel, Achievement Hunter, with jokes at Achievement Hunter's expense common in Funhaus videos. When Jon Risinger designed the Funhaus logo, one reason the team chose orange was that it is the opposite color to Achievement Hunter's green. The two groups also competed in videos playing games such as Rainbow Six: Siege, Smite, and GTA 5.⁹

Cast changes

The founding lineup changed over the channel's run. Joel Rubin left in 2016.¹ Elyse Willems joined the crew and later served as co-creative director and lead producer.¹¹ In September 2021, Alanah Pearce announced she was leaving Rooster Teeth, and in January 2022 Matt Peake left Funhaus for the game studio IllFonic.³ The members at the channel's end in April 2024 included James Willems (the only founding member still listed), Omar de Armas, Charlotte Avery, Patrick Brown, Don Casanova, Jacob Fullerton, Ryan Hailey, John Holland, Rick Reveche, Daniel Schneider, Armando Torres, Lindsey Washburn, and Adam Brouillard.¹²

End of the channel

In 2024, Rooster Teeth shut down, ending Funhaus.³ The channel closed with a farewell video, "Leavin' Ain't a Crime - A Farewell Love Letter from Funhaus", which drew 559,158 views, and a two-part livestream titled "THE END OF FUNHAUS"; the final gameplay video, "Are You Ready for the FINAL Funhaus Gameplay?", was posted on April 26, 2024.⁴^•³ The crew also released much of the Rooster Teeth First exclusive content onto the public YouTube channel.³

Over its run the channel earned more than 1.6 billion views according to James and Elyse Willems, who credit Funhaus with thousands of hours of video and live content spanning gameplay, animated series, competition shows, and podcasts.⁶ Community archiving projects such as the Funhaus Archive preserve the full catalog of 42 series for viewing after the channel's end.⁵

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › Unscripted, reality, and web-native series › Web-native and streaming-original series › Comedy, drama, and general-genre web series

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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