Red Dead Redemption should always give us cowboys

The cowboy is an enduring pop cultural phenomenon. There he is, taming a new, wild, frontier, whether or not there are indigenous peoples already living there. It’s still new to him, dammit. He’s almost a mythological figure, now. Some cowboys are so damn cowboy they just can’t quit, even when inappropriately cast as Mongolian warlords: consider John Wayne playing Genghis Khan in The Conqueror and modifying his performance approximately zero percentiles, “I share yer taste in wimmin, Targutai, but not in blud.” It’s the lure of total freedom, doing whatever you want and not caring because out here is past the reach of the long arm of the law. You make your own laws. Frontier laws. Frontier justice.

This lends itself to video games, especially more immersive ones, because you get a chance to experience that freedom, to be that louche badass with a horse, and a pistol fired from the hip (just like he fires his dick at the ladies at the saloon, am I right except oh no that doesn’t work for Marston forget I said anything). There are several games that have used the trad-cowboy setting, like Gun, Call of Juarez, and, of course, Red Dead, to name but a three. I’m delighted that, assuming the seven lads in the announcement art for Red Dead Redemption 2 aren’t in cowboy fancy dress just to f*** with us, the franchise will be staying with that setting.

It didn’t have to. Cowboys still exist today, and as a concept they long ago broke through the confines of the western states during the late 18th century. Han Solo was a total cowboy, as was Spike Spiegel, episodes of whose anime show sign off with ‘See you, space cowboy!’ because space, after all, is the final frontier (see also: Malcolm Reynolds and the crew of Serenity). Any time Steve McQueen was ever on screen he exuded a kind of low-key cowboy-y aura. Save a horse, ride a cowboy. You know what I mean.

There’s an actual category called ‘neo-western’, which refers to Old West-style cowboy stories that have been updated or retold in a modern way. This includes grindhouse-esque stuff like From Dusk Till Dawn and Machete as well as No Country For Old Men. IMDb also claims that The Last Stand, a film I have seen which features Arnold Schwarzenegger playing a sheriff defending a small town from a Mexican drug cartel using only Johnny Knoxville and high powered weapons, also counts as a neo-western, so this may delegitimise the genre for you. Call of Juarez went neo-western with The Cartel. The new Red Dead game should not do that.

Marston, the protagonist of Red Dead Redemption, was a great cowboy. He was a former outlaw who tried to go legit, and the game is set in the early 1900s when the frontier was in decline. Marston is trying to make a life with his wife and son when the Old West comes for him again, like the final thrashes of a wounded animal, and he must hunt down his former gang mates to save his family. The end of John Marston’s story is one of the most memorable a game has ever produced, and because it’s set in the last days of a dying era it’s impossible to have a direct sequel that doesn’t zoom forwards in time. Thing is, though, if you take a morally grey, kind of cool, kind of devil-may-care protagonist, give him guns, put him in conflict with both the law and other outlaws, and dump him in a modern city on the edge of a cultural epoch with the freedom to do almost anything he wants, you’ve made a f***ing Grand Theft Auto game, haven’t you? Rockstar already do those.

We don’t need another pavement pounding, car-stealing, robbery-committing troupe of miscreants. They’re great, but Rockstar already has that down pat. Michael, Franklin, and Trevor of GTAV are the perfect neo-western outlaw gang. They’re varying degrees of unsavory, a bit violent, a bit nasty, suspicious of one another, but charismatic enough that you’re still rooting for them. They’re fantastic, but they’re not Red Dead.

Red Dead is synonymous with the Old West, the dusty trail, the quickdraw, the jingle of spurs. If Rockstar wrestled for a while with where to pitch the new Red Dead Redemption tent, before finally going ‘F*** it, let’s take ’em back to the glory days!’ then I’ll applaud them for it. Popular opinion is that this is indeed the case, with the image the seven figures against the setting sun representing Marston’s old gang. And it’s a neat nod to The Magnificent Seven, too. It says: this is old school. It says: this is a western. It says: this is cowboys. Everybody loves cowboys.

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