Spoilers for Red Dead Redemption and Red Dead Redemption 2 follow.
The ending of 2010’s Red Dead Redemption is an all-timer. For dozens of hours, we’re placed in control of protagonist, John Marston, as he wanders across the American West in search of revenge against his former gang leader, Dutch Van der Linde. He, of course, gets it in a snowy showdown in one of its final missions. But John doesn’t get to live out his life in peace. That would be far too tidy an ending. Instead, the outlaw is gunned down by members of the army at his family farm’s barn.
It was a novel twist at the time. Open-world games, and games in general, didn’t do this. It initially split opinion, but has since gone down as a masterstroke in narrative design. Dan Houser, former VP of Rockstar and writer of Red Dead Redemption, recently spoke with IGN as part of our IGN30 Icons Series, and told us that it was just as difficult a decision to make as it sounds.
“I remember discussing it with the lead designer, Christian Cantamessa, and he was into it, and I was into it, but just knowing the production realities of… how does an open-world game work if you've killed the protagonist? So I said, ‘I think maybe we have to kill him.’ And he goes, ‘That's a great idea. Got to do it.’ I said, ‘I don't know if... let me just think about this,’ because we're just dealing with audio and dialogue. The nature of an open-world game is you finish a story, then you go back into the world and wrap up all the side content if you want to. We'd have to play as someone else for that. We could play as Jack, but what does that mean? So I had to think through for a while what it would mean production-wise.”
Jack is John’s son, and is only 16 years old for the majority of Red Dead Redemption’s runtime. For that transition of control to work, and for the game’s world to make sense, he’d need to become an adult, hence the three-year time jump to 1914 that sees us play as a 19-year-old Jack after his father’s death. But that was just one of the hurdles that faced Houser, Cantamessa, and the team at Rockstar.
“Did we have the skills and the bandwidth to play as Jack?” Houser recalled questioning. “Would it work? Technically, not story-wise. We'll figure out the story aspect. If you go and see a side character and they've got a three-mission arc and you've already done one mission, what would that actually mean if you came back? How would that work? We had to think through all of that stuff and concluded we could probably make it work, but we were still scared.”
The final story mission of the 2010 masterpiece sees Jack carry out his own act of cathartic revenge when he kills the person responsible for John’s murder in a duel. It’s the moment that makes it all work and ties the knot on the game’s story.
“I think people really loved that moment when you killed them and found it so powerful internally,” Houser said. “I think there was broad consensus that it was the right decision, but obviously it was an unusual and out-there decision, but I think the company had survived on making those decisions. I think we were surprised when the game came out by how angry some people were about that decision. There were people who were livid with you. And part of you goes, ‘That's fantastic,’ because it means you've really engaged in the story and the characters.
Another part was like, you forget, or I can forget sometimes, we're not making movies, we're not writing books, we're making games. The game can't live without a player. So they do feel ownership over what you and they are co-creating in the moment in a way someone looking at a painting, say, doesn't. And I think they felt really let down by this decision.
“Now, I think it was the right decision because you want those big, strong reactions, but I think people were really confused by it. As a writer, it was like he had to die for the story to have any weight, and I had wanted that in several GTAs. We’d never done it really for the technical reasons we just discussed.”
Houser seemingly enjoyed it so much that a similar trick was pulled in its sequel, Red Dead Redemption 2, this time arguably to even greater effect as the prequel bound us to Arthur Morgan before Marston once again took over the reins.
In a post-RDR2 world, Rockstar will once again be looking to push its storytelling capabilities forward in GTA 6 by letting us play as a couple on the run, Jason and Lucia. Will we still be able to play as both of them by the time the credits roll?
For more on GTA 6, you can read our full interview with Rockstar co-studio head Rob Nelson, how the game will tackle the current political climate, and why Dan Houser says he won’t be playing it.