Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser has recalled the controversial ending to 2010's Red Dead Redemption in which the main character, John Marston, is killed.
He said in an interview that the game's lead designer, Christian Cantamessa was on board with the idea to kill off Marston, but Houser wondered about 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," Houser told IGN "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.”
How Rockstar handled it was by setting RDR's epilogue years later, in the year 1914, with players taking control of Marston's son, Jack. He said this setup presented challenges, too, in terms of the technical realities of playing as Jack as opposed to John. There were story and mission concerns, too, including how multi-stage missions might play out if players, as John, completed one part and then came back to finish later as Jack.
"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," he said.
The RDR epilogue has Jack hunting down and killing the men who killed his father, and Houser said players "really loved" that feeling of vengeance. Ultimately, Houser observed that there was "broad consensus" that it was the right call in the end to kill off John, even if it was an "unusual and out-there decision." Houser was, however, surprised 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," he said. "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."
Also in the interview, Houser said he wanted to achieve something like this in the GTA franchise, but it never happened due to technical reasons.
He and the Rockstar team did, however, pull it off again with Red Dead Redemption II, which is a prequel to the earlier game. RDR2 famously killed off its own main playable character, Arthur Morgan, though he died from tuberculosis or at the hand of Micah. RDR 2 had an epilogue as well, featuring John and Jack Marston.
Houser left Rockstar in 2020 and now works at Absurd Ventures, which is crafting an open-world comedy game. His brother, Sam Houser, remains at Rockstar and helped lead the team bringing GTA 6 to market on November 19.