Out With the Old West, in With the New
Red Dead Redemption is slow and melancholic, a lamentation on the old ways refusing to die. It is perhaps more prescient than it ever knew.
On August 7th, 2023, Rockstar Games announced Red Dead Redemption’s rerelease for “Nintendo Switch and modern PlayStation systems”. The conversion to the Switch is a very welcome addition, but the second part of that statement was weird.
By “modern PlayStation systems”, they meant it was being ported to PlayStation 4, a ten-year-old console. While no mention was made of PlayStation 5, we were left to presume that this was a clever piece of PR-speak, where the game would be playable on PlayStation 5 via backwards compatibility, while not being developed to take any specific advantage of the newer hardware. This was true when the game was eventually released, though a 60fps patch was released a few months later, likely a cobbled-together belated apology for not doing quite a lot more.
Rumours have swirled abound for a long while about Rockstar doing something to Red Dead Redemption. All of it was taken with a pinch of salt, considering that sources were no more solid than anonymous Reddit threads and supposedly “trusted” leakers. The first, more prevalent rumour was as follows: Red Dead Redemption will be getting a remaster for modern consoles, meaning that the original game will be preserved, and enhanced with quality-of-life changes to streamline the experience both visually and mechanically.
The second was far more ambitious and, frankly, fantastical: Red Dead Redemption will receive a full-scale remake in the style of its far more recent sequel, 2018’s Red Dead Redemption 2. As such, it will feel far more like the next big Rockstar release, a studio infamous for extremely long development cycles, instead of a simple refresh of a modern classic.
Unfortunately, neither was true.
Red Dead Redemption was re-released for PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch on August 17th. That’s less than a fortnight between the official announcement and release.
No changes were made to the original 2010 release. It includes the massively popular “Undead Nightmare” expansion pack, which was released in the same year. It does not include the multiplayer mode.
It cost more in 2023 than it did in 2010. No new content, a 13-year-old product, and a higher price tag. If this sounds like the most unappealing deal of all time, rest assured that it topped the PlayStation store charts in the UK, and came in fourth on the US PlayStation store in August.
Why?
Red Dead Redemption was an odd decision for Rockstar Games. Released two years after Grand Theft Auto IV redefined the scope and scale of the open-world genre, Rockstar decided to follow this up with something of a Wild West anti-fantasy game. Set in 1911 at the tail end of the era of outlaws and robbers in American history, as civilisation consumes every corner of the land, the game is a spiritual sequel to Rockstar’s 2004 title Red Dead Revolver. Narratively, it doesn’t elaborate on the original story (in fact, Red Dead Revolver is folklore in Redemption’s universe) but instead follows a brand new direction.
Where Grand Theft Auto has always been a colourful, crass critique of American consumerism and ignorance, Red Dead Redemption took a different tonal direction. Following former outlaw John Marston, it tells the story of a man whose days as a gun-toting cowboy are over. Or at least, he wants them to be. Once belonging to the Van der Linde gang, Marston and his family are held to ransom by government agents to assist in their efforts to hunt down the remaining former gang members.
The game is sparse and haunting, with most locations being working ranches, ghost towns and small settlements. While the player meets a cast of vibrant and engaging characters, perhaps the most impressive thing about Red Dead Redemption is how it manages to make the world feel like it’s on the cusp of transformative change, with the undesirables pushed out across the quickly receding frontier. It feels empty, but not in a negative way. It’s a game that thrives on open, organic spaces, broken up by abandoned shantytowns, touches of “civilised society” and run-down town-steads left behind as the Old West withers and expires in the baking sun. Everything feels displaced and unsettled, save for the wide expanses of wild nature.
I think it’s accurate to say that this game was a gamble. This is not the fast, loud and violent action of Grand Theft Auto. Shootouts and setpieces are in abundance, but the world-building is decidedly more melancholic and honest. It’s a really sad game, but undeniably beautiful. Not content to be a scathing assault on capitalism and authoritarianism, it is far more of a meditation on the themes that every good Western has: Revenge, fate, the past and the future. Despite all of its praise, I don’t know if it’s ever truly gotten the flowers it’s due.
In MacFarlane’s Ranch, there’s a backroom behind Marston’s tiny lodgings, a small room where a poker game is continuously held. At night, when the dusty farmland is silent and unmoving, the bleeding orb of light emanating from the gas lantern hung up outside the room is a tempting invite. It’s easy to be John Marston, to head into the little backroom and play poker with strangers into the wee hours, collecting your winnings (or, more likely, lamenting your empty pockets) and heading back onto the ranch, as the shy rays of morning light illuminate the land.
A short horse ride over the rolling hills and arid flats of West Elizabeth later, and we’re in Armadillo.
Armadillo is not MacFarlane’s ranch. A lively boomtown that represents one of the last bastions of the Old World, it is hard to find a space in Armadillo where you cannot hear the saloon’s piano or the chattering of drunk patrons as they stumble out of its doors and down its stairs. Even without Red Dead Redemption 2’s retconning of Armadillo as a town that has recently emerged from a cataclysmic cholera outbreak, the town breathes history. It is economically depressed, teetering on the edge of lawlessness, and stuck in the past. If not for the unassuming train station connecting this relic with the rest of America, it would seem Armadillo is frozen in both time and space, spinning its wheels in the mud of quiet rebellion.
Like most of Red Dead Redemption, this town is sparse, violent and on the verge of something else. Ask any of the characters in the game, and they’ll tell you what that something is: society. It’s a common theme across the two games, the unbridled animal nature of the land and its people being dragged, kicking and screaming, into the 20th Century.
Far away, up North, lies Blackwater. Even as a child, Blackwater always made me feel weird. It is easily the most identifiable space in the game, a modern town in virtually every way. Opulent government buildings sit at the end of a well-maintained street, with grand shop fronts standing in parallel with a modern, calm and quiet saloon. There is no small, wooden home for Marston to call his own, the only avaliable property being a furnished room at a hotel. There are signs of construction, expansion, and progress.
Police here are not scruffy would-be cowboys with bronze stars. They are uniformed, and adorned with modern weaponry. On a mechanical level, their AI is smarter, aggressive and ruthless to a fault. Even passively, their increased numbers are felt even in law-abiding strolls down the sidewalks and along the boardwalk.
Blackwater’s presentation is stark. The warm, natural, untamed tones of the rest of West Elizabeth are not present here. Blackwater is oppressively grey. It is clean, modern, safe and soulless. In a game marked by wild, chaotic violence, it feels very much like nothing can go wrong here. And it’s not nice.
In Blackwater, there is a hotel at the very end of the main strip. Up a flight of carpeted stairs and behind a unique glossy door, there is a poker game. The chairs around this perfectly maintained table are cushioned and plush, the height of opulence. This game is barred from public entry, where only the “Gentlemen’s Attire” will grant admission to the high-stakes game, amongst law enforcement and aristocracy. It is always eerily quiet, and without a single word spoken, you never once feel like you belong in this room, in this town.
The central message of Red Dead Redemption can be told across its immaculately composed twenty-hour narrative, and it can be told in tiny, unassuming moments like this. The free-for-all poker games that litter the ranch outhouses and saloon backrooms, and the high-stake affairs that bar entry to those who will not conform to polite society.
The old ways are done, and the war is won. The railroads have connected virtually every corner of the continent. The frontier is gone. The natives are gone. Almost every American state has joined the Union. The stagecoaches rattle along the dirt roads as normal, the fear of masked outlaws tempered and forgotten. The automobile has arrived, the cities have expanded and the guns are holstered.
But what does that mean for us? Not us, the grizzled middle-aged has-been outlaw with a pistol on our hip and a faithful nag at our beck and call, outrunning the end of the world, but us, the audience?
Red Dead Redemption was released in the middle of 2010. By this time, the brakes on the “open-world everything” train had begun to detach (in no small part due to Rockstar’s own impact). We were four years into the seventh console generation, with the then-mythological “eighth-gen” fast approaching.
In 2007, a year after the PS3’s launch, the best-selling games of the year included Super Mario Galaxy, Halo 3, BioShock and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. These games are all undoubtedly important in their own right, but they were all also something else: linear.
In video games, a linear title takes place in traditional levels, with success unlocking the next. You complete Level 1, you get to complete Level 2, and then Level 3, and so on until a (usually) fixed conclusion ends the experience.
Red Dead Redemption, an open-world title, invites exploration within a sandbox. Virtually every area is free to be examined, prodded, and discovered through the player’s unguided interactions. There are still traditional missions to spur on a pre-determined narrative, but you will miss most of what makes these games work if you bounce from mission marker to mission marker in a straight, uninterrupted line.
These sales trends would continue, but there came a point in 2012/13, when we started to see titles like Far Cry 3, Grand Theft Auto V, The Witcher 3, The Elder Scrolls V and Assassin’s Creed 3 creep onto year-end bestsellers lists. It represents a transformative change, one which the gaming industry still happily perpetuates for an audience that appears to be increasingly disenfranchised.
Open-world everything: The idea that every game has become open-world by necessity rather than design. How does a linear, tightly structured crime game like Mafia 2 compete in a world where I can load up Grand Theft Auto IV or V and do virtually everything I can do in that game, but wherever I like, whenever I like?
There’s a growing feeling that the mainstream gaming space is too safe. Long gone are the days when a major outfit like Ubisoft would take a punt on a psuedo-historical action-adventure game set in the Middle East in the midst of the Third Crusade, or where Rockstar Games would morph the easy, loud, action of Grand Theft Auto into a slow and sad reflection on the never-ending industrialisation of the western world.
Perhaps, from this lens, Red Dead Redemption was more prescient than we realised, maybe even more than it was meant to be. Rockstar is not innocent in the proliferation of this medium: Grand Theft Auto has been the open world by which all others are measured since 2004. But that’s rather the point. When Blackwater is so safe, why would you ever take the dirt road headed West?
Browse any gaming forum or online conversation concerned with grumblings over the most recent open-world release and you’ll see the same general idea being posited: No one does them like Rockstar.
The company has built a deserved reputation for creating the most vibrant, believable, organic open worlds on the market. Their video games are the most expensive and the most profitable products on the market.
Red Dead Redemption, with its hopeless and haunting depiction of an archaic and forgotten world being slowly squashed under the boot of progression is, for my money, the best example of an open world done right.
This space does not exist simply to look pretty or to provide a sense of scale.
The abandoned remains of Tumbleweed. The sterile, orderly streets of Blackwater. The simple, honest, oasis of MacFarlane’s ranch. The lawless backwater hellhole of Thieves Landing. The wild, untamed beauty of the Great Plains. The warm comfort of Beecher’s Hope.
Red Dead Redemption tells a story not just through its characters and narrative, but through the land itself. It serves as a warning, not just a warning of adapting to change, but of change itself.
It comes for everything, but from the bureaucratic evil of a heartless and uncaring government to the self-serving grandiosity of the Dutch Van der Linde’s of the world, that change is always human of some flavour or another. A compromise may exist, or it may not, but change is coming. How we engage with it, is entirely up to us.
We are built and raised for the world we find ourselves in. Many among us strive to look back at the end of our lives at a world that is better than the one we were given.
But what does that “better” world look like for those who thrived in what we had? Are they wrong? Is their lack of adaptation a failure? Change is often accepted as a good thing but when, if ever, does that stop being true?
If you can, make some time to exist in the world of Red Dead Redemption. I do mean “exist”, too. Walk along its roads, and observe its people. Ask yourself these questions. See the world through not just the eyes of John Marston, but through those characters who are pieces of his puzzle, and through your own.
And, if nothing else, spend time on the plains of West Elizabeth and drink in these small pockets of nature. Remember a time when change came to your front door.