Video games are no longer just ‘video games‘. Whilst they take on many different forms, more often than not, the games that make the most impact on the player and popular culture are those that are immersive, cinematic and tell a story that pierces the emotions in such a profound way that it’s comparable to the effect that great movies have. The examples of this are many, with the Ezio Trilogy of Assassin’s Creed, God of War and Grand Theft Auto V notable exhibits that spring to mind. Then we have the Red Dead Redemption duology, two games that tell arguably the most compelling tale in the gaming world.
Red Dead Redemption arrived in 2010 via Rockstar Games. It tells the story of reformed outlaw John Marston. Set during the decline of the American frontier in 1911, the player finds modernity starting to encroach on the country, with Marston’s old life also catching up with him. Government agents hold his wife and son captive to force him to work as a hired gun for them in order to bring three members of his old gang to justice. An open-world masterpiece that touches on the themes of violence, faith, law and order, racism, masculinity and many more, it says everything about its quality that 13 years later, it still holds up to most scrutiny.
In 2018, Rockstar arrived with the long-awaited follow-up to the 2010 game in the form of Red Dead Redemption 2. Serving as a prequel to the tale of Marston, the story is set in a fictionalised United States in 1899 and follows the story of Arthur Morgan, a prominent member and outlaw in the Van der Linde gang, which also features a young John Marston. Again grappling with the decline of the Wild West, Morgan faces off against the government, the emerging world of big business and personal betrayals in this expansive saga.
One of the most emotionally substantial and thorough games ever made, it is one of the finest examples of video games as an art form. If people thought that the story of Marston in the 2010 arrival couldn’t be topped, that of Morgan – which intertwines with that of the former – is something else entirely. Its impact on the player is so profound that it leaves an indelible mark.
There’s no surprise that the Red Dead Redemption games managed to be so profound, as it was something that the writers and developers set out to do from the beginning, with a clear concentration on cinema. As explained in a 2010 Vanity Fair article, brotherly duo Dan and Sam Houser, who co-founded Rockstar Games, said their target was “ageing gamers”, people between 18 and 35 who still play video games but find other mediums more stimulating. Accordingly, they took proceedings up a few levels with this offering. They used motion-capture technology to imitate realistic, cinematic action and implemented the Euphoria system, which gives characters and animals believable reactions to physical contact.
The Houser brothers also spent a great deal of time developing in-depth storylines that were more sophisticated than anything they’d ever done, despite already producing a host of Grand Theft Auto games, Bully and the Max Payne series. Although Rockstar had always strived to create releases that are as rich as movies and television, with Red Dead Redemption, they refined their approach. “We aren’t just aspiring to be like movies,” Dan Houser told the publication of Red Dead Redemption. “We’re aspiring to go beyond the scope of movies.”
To prepare for and inspire their 2010 hit, the team at Rockstar told Vanity Fair that they watched “an enormous number” of movies before going into production. “Obviously, we’re trying to tell a visual, narrative-driven story, so we’d be foolish not to borrow from films,” Houser said. For instance, when Marston finds himself in Mexico, classics such as The Wild Bunch and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre were two inspirations, with the action sequences, from visual techniques to shoot-out scenes, also looking to non-westerns such as Heat.
Elsewhere, when speaking to Game Fan later that year, it was put to Red Ded Redemption designer Christian Cantamessa that the western genre had been portrayed in many different ways in popular culture, from the iconic spaghetti westerns that made Clint Eastwood to the HBO series Deadwood. Asked where exactly his game drew its inspiration from, Cantamessa offered a more comprehensive account of how westerns, and particularly those of Clint Eastwood such as Unforgiven, made their mark.
He said: “Earlier Rockstar Games tended to have direct inspirations within pop culture as we needed to draw with pretty broad brush strokes on PS2, but, since we moved onto high definition consoles, our thought process has been to try and be more subtle in our references and try to create something unique and original using our own design, writing and research teams. We believe games are now sufficiently detailed to support this kind of approach. For Red Dead Redemption, the focus was to create a Western that took place in a fairly unusual time period: the turn of the twentieth century, when the Old West started to disappear and the modern world began to take root.”
Naming Eastwood highlights such as Unforgiven and High Plains Drifter as an influence, Cantamessa continued: “This is much later than many of the ‘classic’ Westerns that are usually set in between around 1840 and 1880, when the West itself was still being conquered. Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch shares similar themes—as well as some of the best action sequences ever put to film—but we also took inspiration from the novels of Cormac McCarthy and from films like Unforgiven, High Plains Drifter and The Proposition. Our overarching theme is the ‘Death of the West’ rather than the more conventional ‘Myth of the West’ that is often seen in the classic John Wayne films or even in our own Red Dead Revolver—although we watched a lot of classic westerns, too.”
The designer concluded: “That said, one thing we worked very hard to get right was to deliver gameplay that covered all the classic Western moments, scenes you remember from years of films and television, but that you’d never experienced as gameplay: things like Mexican standoffs, using a lasso to capture horses or bandits, driving stagecoaches, taming wild horses, riding with the cavalry, blowing up bridges, hunting buffalo or running away from a wild bear. We wanted this game to go beyond great shootouts to deliver a complete Western experience in gameplay and action as well as atmosphere.”
Whilst there are many parallels between the Red Dead Redemption games and the influences listed above, there are a couple of notable nods to 1992’s Unforgiven included. Regarding the first game, it primarily concentrates on the death of the Old West, with the theme also prominent in its prequel/sequel. This is also the broader topic of Clint Eastwood’s 1992 epic, with the American actor directing the movie and starring as William Munny, the repentant former outlaw and murderer who has long since retired from the life of crime. However, when he learns there’s a significant bounty on offer that could save his failing hog farm and provide for his family’s future, he heads back into his former world, with its brutal reality becoming readily apparent.
Elsewhere, in Red Dead Redemption 2, numerous story elements of Unforgiven can be found in the side-quest ‘The Noblest of Men, and a Woman’. Here, the influence of Eastwood’s movie on the series is more explicit than the similarities in the arcs of Marston and Munny. The narrative of this side-quest includes a former gunfighter having his biography written by a naive journalist, just like Richard Harris’ English Bob in the movie. In other similar aspects, the player visits an ageing outlaw running a pig farm, which could not be more identical to Munny’s situation at the start of Unforgiven. Later, the English Bob-like gunfighter proves himself to be a fraud, like in the movie, and the journalist decides to pen a fictional account of the gunfighter’s death, ignoring the truth of reality.
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