As far as “retro” games go, Red Dead Redemption is kind of pushing it. The 2010 open world game was already released well into the modern AAA game production environment. Matt Margini’s tome from Boss Fight Books implicitly acknowledges how this is a different story from the Boss Fight norm in that it’s hard to isolate individual influences. For the most part, Margini describes “Rockstar” at large as responsible for the game’s design, though he does make it clear that Rockstar was fairly infamous for brutal treatment of its employees in this time period.
Despite this modern aesthetic, Red Dead Redemption has a fairly credible case for being a retro title in our hearts because, as Margini’s father notes, it’s the game where you can ride a horse. Yes, technically speaking, Red Dead Redemption is a riff off of the Grand Theft Auto genre of open world gameplay. But as Margini articulates in this book, Red Dead Redemption is also a reconceptualization of the entire Wild West genre. When reading a novel, or watching a movie, the idea of the Wild West representing freedom is an abstraction. Yet in Red Dead Redemption, you can actually play as the isolated gunslinger in an open world where you can do pretty much whatever you want. And where does that get you?
Well, as it turns out, not very far. The great joke of Red Dead Redemption, in Margini’s telling, is that its hero John Marston, actually has very little real control over the bleak, cynical world he lives in. Sure, he can do anything he wants in the open world and even has a pretty badass bullet time power to boot. But no matter what Marston does, in the long run, he double-crosses his own allies and is doubled-crossed in turn by the feds. He realizes the general hopelessness of his own situation and not only fails to stop his own cycle of violence, but we the player even get to watch that cycle continue after his own death.
These are layers to the open world genre that were not common in 2010 and still aren’t really all that common today. The unsettling implication of this story is that Marston is more being played than he is playing the game. And this is a legacy that goes back to the Western genre in general. Margini’s Red Dead Redemption book, despite being part of a line of general video game explaining books from Boss Fight, actually tends to function better as an introduction the abstract concept of the West for people who might not really know all that much about it. Red Dead Redemption itself assumes (probably correctly) that its players have at least some idea what the West is, if only through pop culture osmosis. But they’re less likely to understand the theoretical underpinnings.
Margini’s analysis on this front is accurate…mostly. Margini buys into a lot of the myths about the myths of the West that can distort some of its interpretation. The depiction of native Americans, for example, assumes a longstanding one-dimensional presentation of their appearance in the Western genre, when in fact the dark, almost comically ambiguous native American quests in Red Dead Redemption aren’t as far off from “classic” Western stories as you’ve probably been led to believe. Margini also completely misses the general cynicism of the Mexican revolutionary quests are some of the game’s most genuinely racist sequences, playing into stereotypes of Latin American cultures as being incapable of non-corrupt leadership.
Mind, Margini’s impressions are so widespread I can’t exactly fault him for presenting them as uncontroversial. He cites his sources, and his analysis in his own right is pretty on-point. His writing understands the difference between John Ford and Sergio Leone, and dives back as far as weirdly homoerotic quotes from the landmark Western novel The Virginian to make his arguments. But at the end of the day, it’s not the citations that give Margini’s book its emotional heart. No, it’s his very sincere effort to understand why, of all the games his father has ever seen him play, it’s the one where the player character can ride a horse that struck a chord with the old man.
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