Watch its unimaginably long credit roll and you’ll spot a number of researchers whose roles were dedicated to making sure Red Dead Redemption 2 reflected a historical reality. Outside of the simulation genre, video game tends to play very fast and loose with history, but Rockstar Games has gone above and beyond to make the world seem deeply believable while functioning within the parameters of an open world entertainment experience. This dedication to realism exercised by Rockstar is commendable, but the team also clearly understood that pure, unadulterated retellings of real-world events and frontier life also wouldn’t perfectly serve their creative purposes.What emerges from the tension between creativity and history is a sort of delightfully-corrupted time machine that transports us to another era while simultaneously servicing our limited attention spans, creating a world of synthetic amusements that feel startlingly real. And while there’s a natural tendency for us to bore down to the microscopic details present in this game, the sense of realism is often more powerfully expressed in the broad themes. Let’s begin by examining a few of those.

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The World Was Cruel

Red Dead Redemption 2’s ’s later acts are largely concentrated around a conflict between the inhabitants of the Wapiti Reservation and parts of the United States government influenced by unbridled industrialism and business interests.

At issue is oil found on native land. Simply put, US industrialists want it, the nations dwelling on the Wapiti Reservation are too small to defend it, and under a veil of trumped-up war, the government seizes it. The situation is remarkably evocative of at least two particular historical situations: the famous seizure of the Black Hills from the plains nations after discovery of gold in the 1870s, and the patronizing and reprehensible treatment of the Osage by the state and federal governments through the 1920s. In both cases, violence, intimidation, and lies were used to seize mineral wealth from legally guaranteed land, and in the case of the Black Hills, the situation contributed to a state of open war.

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Rains Fall’s son Eagle Flies comes to believe that the situation is simply too impossible for peace to accomplish anything and declares war on the invading army forces, against the wishes of his father. He’s coaxed into this move by Dutch Van der Linde, who exploits and fans the tensions between the tribes and the government to draw attention away from his gang. The result is predictably disastrous for the outgunned Wapiti, who succeed in an initial ambush but then find themselves fighting forces far larger and better equipped than their own.

Young warriors following their passionate, angry peer against the wishes of an authority figure is another common theme in American tribal culture. Many first nations were far less autocratic in structure than the United States presumed: chiefs often led by reputation, charisma, and tradition more than hard legal power, and thus members of the tribe could and did sometimes act on their own.

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Rockstar’s decision in general to not ignore the racial and cross-cultural antagonism so prevalent in this period of American history is commendable. The attitudes of racial exploitation in this period are portrayed in many ways: with the presence of the Lost Cause-enamored Lemoyne Raiders, the occasional encounters with the Klu Klux Klan in the southeastern forests, and within the gang itself. But the reality was much more terrifying. Many Americans existed in a state of second-class citizenship or worse. African-Americans were permitted to serve in the military, but were built into segregated units and supervised by white officers. Native nations were leveraged into a tragic economic dependency that was used to enrich corrupt agents and mainstream leaders alike as laws were changed or ignored at the demands of expediency to United States interests.

You Were Either Very Very Rich or Very Very Poor

“ The Civil War had fundamentally changed the nation, federalizing the American sense of identity.

The Civil War had fundamentally changed the nation, federalizing the American sense of identity. It also left in its wake a legacy of disabled veterans, another theme engaged both overtly and subtly in Red Dead Redemption 2. The high caliber soft-lead rifle bullets used during the Civil War tended to shatter bone on impact, creating a fertile ground of septic infection in an era when disease was poorly understood. The standard treatment for severe limb wounds was amputation, cutting of the mangled area in favor of a cleaner, easier to treat wound.

Civil War casualty estimates range around 617,000 dead and perhaps a million wounded. Of those injured who survived, a significant proportion were amputees, and consequently, a generation of American veterans lived out their days shy an arm or a leg. A soldier who enlisted early in the Civil War at the age of twenty would be less than sixty years old at the time of Red Dead Redemption 2. In an age when manual or unskilled labor made up an enormous section of the workforce and where federalized social security was largely non-extant, the fate of these veterans was often left to the unevenly-available hands of private charity, another common backdrop through the arc of Red Dead Redemption 2.

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It was also a time when a vast percentage of adult population of the United States was denied the vote by state and federal governments elected and dominated by white men who didn’t want to share power. Women fought back. Arthur finds himself smack in the middle of a suffrage rally fairly early in the story of Red Dead Redemption 2. The protest takes place in the State of Lemoyne, a sort of amalgam of the real-world trans-Mississippi region of Louisiana, Arkansas, and east Texas... states which didn’t permit women to vote until the passage of the 19th Amendment less than 100 years ago.

Rising union sentiment against worker exploitation in this period was met with overt violence at the hands of the wealthy, sometimes assisted by the real-world Pinkertons, a private agency of for-hire guns and detectives who assisted in disrupting unionization. The Pinkertons were also frequently employed in hunting down real old-West gangs, acting in the vacuum of effective interstate law enforcement in 19th century America. Business interests in the era made liberal use of private agents and gun thugs in enforcing their will, just as Leviticus Cornwall does in the pursuit of Dutch’s gang.

It was also the first age of the American robber baron. Leviticus Cornwall is a parodic caricature of the captains of industry that effectively ruled much of the United States during this period, men like J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and George Vanderbilt whose unfettered monopolies and wealth granted them tremendous power over law, life, and death in industries from oil and coal to the vested interest in Caribbean sugar and influence over the soon-to-be-constructed Panama Canal. These realities are shadowed throughout Red Dead Redemption 2 in depictions of Annesburg and Guarma, two far-away regions with populations living under the heel of industrialist might.

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The World Was Full of Technological Marvels

Technologically, it was an age of wonders. The industrial revolution was in full swing, and the Civil War had kickstarted an age of mechanized military innovation that washed over the world. During the Red Dead Redemption 2 period (1899-1911), John Holland was perfecting the design of the modern combat submarine. It was an era of growing fleets of steel battleships mounting cannon that could fire shells for miles. The Wright Brothers flew their fantastic machine at Kitty Hawk, a device that would alter warfare forever. Machine guns were largely perfected. The recently-popularized smokeless gunpowder altered infantry tactics and made firearms deadlier.

Communications was revolutionized by the telephone, which enabled rapid communication (and therefore greater centralized control) over the immense geographic area of the United States. Catalogs allowed the transport of factory-manufactured, mass produced goods across the rail lines from far-away cities to frontier homesteads, a reality that takes a prominent place in the process of Red Dead Redemption 2 shopping for items from guns to full-sized homes. Telephones were sometimes employed in startlingly innovative ways, like using the networks of barbed wire strung around ranches to carry phone signals. Phone lines operated using the same new electrical principles that illuminated the previously-absolute darkness of a moonless night... and began to blot out the stars.

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It was a dark world at night, an open range of thousands of miles broken only by the feeble manmade open fires, kerosene lanterns, and electric lights illuminating tiny towns, villages, and farmsteads. In the wild a rider high on an open hilltop might look far off in every direction and see no light at all but the moon and stars. Even the few true cities of the west were dark in comparison to modern standards, with no illuminated roadways for automobiles, no streams of automobile headlights moving down paved roadways, no blinking towers and very few lit skyscrapers (the San Francisco Chronicle building being a notable exception).

“ In the wild a rider high on an open hilltop might look far off in every direction and see no light at all but the moon and stars.

An electrically powered and machined world required oil and coal to fuel it. As echoed in the aforementioned Rain Falls storyline, exploration for the increasing demand for power fueled exploitation and violence. Coal workers trapped in production towns were muscled into lives amounting to indentured servitude, and wells dotted the Texas landscape by the early 1900s. With the oil came an economic wave leading to rapid urbanization of previously rural and underpopulated areas.

To entertain themselves, people with the means to pay turned to the evolving world of theater and its new magic-lantern shows and gaudy vaudeville variety acts, just as Arthur does. Recorded music was still a new innovation, but we find it in the Van der Linde gang’s camp and other places, and when recordings weren’t available, people sang and danced. Watch the credits to RDR2 and you’ll see an enormous list of sources for period-accurate music.

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Crime was Rampant

In the face of rapid change there was naturally a series of counter-cultural responses. Among the plains peoples in 1890, the religious movement Ghost Dance promised a reversion to the old ways, the restoration of the life-sustaining buffalo, and the retreat of the US invaders. Labor concerns and the tyrannical power of unfettered capitalism gave rise to greater themes of widespread populism and socialism, while the new awareness of international military power in Cuba sewed the seeds of US colonialism imperialism. A relatively new, uniquely American religion flourished in the American West in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. The rapid pace of scientific advances and discovery led to new ideas, including some damaging and pervasive pseudo-scientific nonsense (like social Darwinism and eugenics).

In the midst of this ideological crossroads and complexity, a counter-cultural personality like Dutch Van der Linde could flourish. In the literature and history of late-19th century change is a boundlessly apparent great discomfiture, an understanding that things as they have been a breaking, and for good an ill can never go back to the way they were. Dutch’s promise of building a better world, his assertion of moral superiority in the face of forces of great evil moving around the gang are in many ways the spirit of his age... he is in many ways the archetype of a modern anti hero, a morally flawed man at odds with his age.

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Gangs of fugitive criminals were indeed a notable part of the American frontier during the late 19th century, when the vast open spaces, lack of adequate law enforcement systems, and poor communications infrastructure made life by theft and robbery a viable and somewhat sustainable way to survive. A number of prominent gangs briefly flourished in the Old West and gained lasting notoriety, including the James Gang, the Hole in the Wall gang, and the Arizona Cowboy syndicate of OK Corral fame. While most gangs were small, a few (like the Cowboys) grew to enormous size, but no gangs who rose to prominence long endured the westward march of the expanding United States government.

Lawlessness was hardly limited to the frontier. By becoming a part of the system, many eastern gangs endured where their western counterparts were devoured. Dutch’s encounter with the Costa Nostra (the Italian Mafia) in late 19th century Saint Denis likewise has its roots in historical reality. By the 1890s, the Sicilian mob had been active in New Orleans crime for decades, and a local family crime war over control of shipping interests late in the century resulted in widespread violence and assassination. A wild card like Dutch Van Der Linde would no doubt have set the delicate balance of organized crime and civic structure edge and invited reprisal.

“ Lawlessness was hardly limited to the frontier.

But by the late 1890s, the legendary lawlessness of the American West was practically at an end. Dutch’s gang bears striking parallels to the Wild Bunch or Hole-in-the-Wall gang now best remembered for the affiliation with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The gang’s heyday and disintegration took place in almost exactly the same historical angle as the story of Red Dead Redemption 2.

Weapons, Violence, and Death Was the Norm

Though the Colt revolver and Winchester rifle enjoy the greatest notoriety in the romanticized history of American expansionism in the West, the shotgun more than any other weapon was the staple firearm of the United States frontier. Simple and therefore extremely reliable, tolerant of rough care and endure abuse, forgiving to the unskilled user, and equally adept at hunting, farm pest control, and personal defense, the shotgun was in many ways the perfect homesteader weapon. The legendary Doc Holliday used a shotgun at the OK Corral, as did Wyatt Earp in his famous killing of Curly Bill Brocius. Video games often distort a shotgun’s characteristics, underestimating the weapon’s effective range and overestimating its spread. But Red Dead’s shotgun feels surprisingly right, effective at most ranges without feeling like the hand cannon it sometimes becomes in other games.

The repeating rifle has been invented just before the Civil War and largely perfected during it with the Spencer and Henry, but it was the compact post-war Winchester model that made the weapon a frontier mainstay. The Lancaster is a fair representation of the Winchester and a desirable weapon in Red Dead Redemption 2 for the same reasons its real-world cousin was so popular: affordability, reliability, decent accuracy, rapid fire capability, good range, and a generous magazine of relatively-powerful rounds. Single shot rifles were mostly relegated to specialized purposes: hunting (especially with high-caliber weapons), use by first nations who couldn’t get their hands on enough repeaters, and curiously, as the primary weapon of the US military until as late as 1892. While the pistol (and particularly the revolver) is perhaps the most symbolic firearm of the frontier, pistols were more often than not weapons of last resort. The Colt revolver was relatively reliable, but it was far less powerful and accurate than a rifle or even a shotgun when accounting for spread, and at most ranges in the wide-open west it wasn’t especially effective. Its main virtues were portability and concealability, and as a weapon of convenience or last resort it served respectably. It was truly deadly in the hands of a skilled expert, capable of rapid fire when fanning the hammer or intrinsically in double-action models and automatic pistols like the Mauser. Becoming good with a pistol took a LOT of practice, and the Deadeye system is a reasonable abstraction of that skill that helps limit skill with a pistol to realistic levels for a talented gunfighter.

When it comes to reloading, however, Red Dead Redemption 2 does sacrifice realism for playability. Very simply, no cowboy or gun hand worth their salt loaded their pistol with six bullets, for the very simple reason that early revolvers were prone to accidentally discharging the chambered round is jostled. To avoid shooting themselves in the leg with a holstered revolver, it was common practice to leave the chamber the hammer rested on empty. Thus, most gunslingers only got off five shots before reloading, or more commonly before reaching for a second gun.

“ When it comes to reloading, however, Red Dead Redemption 2 does sacrifice realism for playability.

The body counts in real Western shootouts were typically far smaller than a Red Dead Redemption 2 gun battle. Most gangs operated in relatively small bands, and gunfights were typically over in a matter of seconds... outside of organized warfare, it’s very uncommon that people shoot at each other for any length of time without someone either getting hit or running away. The famous shootout at the OK Corral only involved ten participants and ended with three fatalities, three wounded, and three participants fleeing unharmed, all of which likely took place in less than a minute of shooting.

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Death was everywhere, but even for the violent gunfire and capital punishment, folk would likely die from other causes. In an age where heroin was an OTC product and Coca Cola contained cocaine, progress in treating infection lagged far behind the treatment of pain symptoms that led to widespread drug addiction. Mr. Morgan’s death by tuberculosis was and is a far-too-common occurrence in a world where medical testing and treatment are out of reach for many. Even in contemporary society tuberculosis remains a grave threat to the infected with often-lethal repercussions. An astoundingly-large percentage of the modern world’s population is infected with TB, and while many will never develop lung symptoms, those who reach that stage in the disease without antibiotic treatment are even now usually doomed to slow, wasting death.

“ Death was everywhere.

All of these historical nods really just scratch the surface of the degree of fidelity achieved in Red Dead Redemption 2’s astoundingly engaging world. Very few video games have so lovingly succeeded in recreating a different day and time to such a flavorful and granular degree. The details grant texture to an imagined world, bringing it just close enough to the myths, legends, and recollections we recognize that we feel like heirs to the story’s legacy, visitors in a world that seems so very far away and foreign, but relative to the course of events didn’t happen all that long ago. Here’s hoping that Red Dead Redemption 2’s success in deriving such a measure of historical reality paves the way for more period pieces in gaming that vault us into an illusion of life long past and reward our curiosity with learning and discovery.

Jared Petty produces Red Dead Radio: The Read Dead Redemption Podcast , the quiz show Contestants Are You Ready , the video essay series Hop, Blip, and a Jump , and the storytelling podcast Pockets Full of Soup . He's a host at Kinda Funny Games and a frequent contributor to IGN. He likes cowpokes. Follow him on Twitter @ pettycommajared and on Instagram @pettycommajared