Rockstar, the video game industry and millions of players (not to mention investors in Rockstar’s publicly traded parent company, Take-Two Interactive Software) have been waiting a decade for this moment. Ever since Grand Theft Auto III redefined single-player gaming in 2001, Rockstar has been known as The Company That Makes G.T.A., nothing more. Sure, the company has found moderate success with its noirish Max Payne franchise and its Midnight Club racing series, but Rockstar has been eager to demonstrate that it can create a blockbuster out of more than the profanity-spewing drug dealers and submachine-gun-toting thugs who populate the world of Grand Theft Auto.

And now it has, though this project involved no small leap of faith (and no small expense: between $80 million and $100 million, according to industry executives). For a genre that has been so essential to the film business, it may seem surprising that the western has traditionally never lent itself to video games. Then again, western games, like Activision’s Gun from 2005, have never sold well because there has never before been a western game that was truly made well.

And that may be because the western, perhaps more than any other genre, exposes how much more work is required to make a convincing game than to make a “realistic” film.

John Huston set Hollywood on its ear in 1948 with “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” by shooting on location. But all of those mountains and plains and ridges and gorges were already sitting there waiting to be photographed. But if you want mesas and forests and gulches and rivers in a video game, you have to build them by hand, from digital scratch if you will. Moreover, in a game you have to build all of it. In noninteractive entertainment  be it a play, film or television program  the director controls exactly what the audience sees at every single moment. That is why it makes sense to build sets that are nothing more than plywood facades: if the audience can’t see it, it has no reason to exist.

By contrast, a great western game allows players to roam the frontier as they please. See that outcropping over there in the distance? You can climb it if you like, or just keep riding. When you come into one of the many towns and villages there may be dozens of buildings to explore, and they are all populated with folks going about their daily lives, even if you never visit.