Rockstar Games Cut an Even Darker Red Dead Redemption 2 Opening Because Arthur Morgan Was 'Very, Very Nasty'
Amid scrutiny over razor-thin calls and high-stakes finishes, the message from the locker room is blunt: the games ended exactly as they were supposed to be.
Red Dead Redemption 2 already opens like a boot camp for blizzards — hours of trudging through knee-high snow while everyone slowly freezes and hates each other. Turns out Rockstar almost started it even darker.
Arthur Morgan, but meaner
Rockstar Games co-founder and frequent Grand Theft Auto lead writer Dan Houser says the original intro for the Western sequel would have pushed Arthur past gruff and straight into brutal. On the Lex Fridman podcast, Houser explained that the early draft had Arthur dealing with the immediate aftermath of his newborn child dying — and he was cold, even to the on-and-off girlfriend who had the baby. The idea was to make him, in Houser's words, very, very nasty right out of the gate, which would have made any later redemption hit harder.
"There was a bit at the start of RDR where [Arthur] had a baby who just died, and we ended up cutting it, which was the right decision because it was too tough in some ways."
Why they cut it
Houser says they pulled that storyline because it risked turning players against the protagonist before the game really got going. As he puts it, the shipped version keeps Arthur tough and a bit nasty, but he reads as slightly more likable early on — and that was the right call commercially. In other words: still a hard man in a harder world, just not immediately irredeemable.
The version that almost was
What Houser liked about the scrapped approach was Arthur's inability to access his emotions. That bottling-up would have set up a starker contrast with the collapse he suffers near the end of the game. Even so, Houser sounds at peace with the pivot, saying the games ended up the way they were supposed to be.
Meanwhile, the sales keep climbing
Also worth noting: Red Dead Redemption 2 just passed Mario Kart 8 to become the 4th best-selling video game of all time, with 79 million copies sold. Not bad for a bleak frontier tragedy that opens in a snowstorm.