It’s my birthday today, and Rockstar has been kind enough to rerelease its 2010 western opus Red Dead Redemption on PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch (out tomorrow), as a slightly late birthday gift. It is indisputably a landmark game, less ambitious but also less self-indulgent than its 2018 sequel. The first game is tauter, its crafted set-pieces more memorable. Everyone who’s played it remembers that moment when you cross the border into Mexico, and José González starts to play as the sun rises. Few games boast a single moment that compares to it.
I played Red Dead Redemption the summer after I graduated university, mainlining the whole thing in three days. I remember getting inordinately attached to my horse, the vast desert expanses, the encroaching inevitability of its shock ending at John Marston’s farmhouse, which I saw coming but still gasped at. I remember hating the feds with every fibre of my being, and unexpectedly hating some of Marston’s former outlaw friends just as much. It was a game with no real winners – still unusual at the time – and took the same bleak view of humanity’s essential moral depravity as the Grand Theft Auto series, but with fewer off-colour jokes and more moments of fleeting beauty. I have been looking forward to playing it again.
