A man and his horse with nothing but open terrain in front of him. Their only mission is to survive yet another day. The Wild West was an era of lawlessness and innovation, a setting perfect for video games. My father always loved westerns when I was growing up, The Magnificent Seven being his favorite. I, too, acquired the taste for Western-themed stories, as they say, the apple does not fall too far from the tree. Modern humans always lament how simpler times were in the past, but most do not understand what it took to survive just another day then. The Red Dead Redemption franchise holds a special spot on my list of favorites from my past. My introduction to the first Red Dead Redemption may seem typical to today’s standards, but when it came out, the iPhone had not yet become mainstream, and access to the internet was still restrictive for a teenager at best. Today, you may be bombarded by ads on social media for a game that may interest you is soon to be released. In 2009, when I saw it as the centerpiece of the GameInformer magazine, I knew I needed to play it. I had to have read that preview piece maybe a hundred times before I actually got the game. To say I was obsessed with the game before it even came out may be an understatement.
For those of you who have not heard of this game before, the game has extremely mature content. Something most teenagers should not engage with or tread carefully if they do. The developers of Grand Theft Auto also made Red Dead Redemption, and they are notorious for not holding back in their games. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I had strict parents, and playing M-rated games was a “new” endeavor for me. The first one was when my parents let me play Call of Duty: World at War when I got my Xbox 360 for Christmas at the end of 2008. Gears of War 2 was the second M-rated game I was allowed to rent, as a birthday present. Red Dead Redemption would be the next one, and the one that broke the camel’s back on my parents’ strictness.
I explored every nook and cranny I could find in the original, to the point that, when I found out all the sayings I found on the walls were the cheat inputs to unlock them, I already memorized where half of them were. I did not want the game to end; that is why I did everything imaginable before the final mission as John Marston, the main character. I trotted up to the final mission marker with dismay and anxiety; the game was about to end. Nothing in the countless hours of playing was going to prepare me for the emotions I was about to endure for my final moments with John. When thirty-some federal agents call John out of his barn and the dead-eye mechanic activates, you think it will be just like every other shootout you have had up to this point and win. John swings the doors open, and you start painting the agents with the xs like normal, but this is a fight you cannot win (trust me, I tried numerous times and ways later). My realization of the character I had watched redeem himself over the past hundred hours is dying in front of me, and the fact that there was nothing I could do devastated me. I sank to my knees and started to cry, I was conflicted. I felt a bond toward John Marston by now, but I knew he had a dark past. I stayed there, kneeled down for a good few minutes trying to process things, things I have forgotten in time. I do remember rising back up and walking into the other room to tell my father. He said I had a thousand-yard stare and looked like I had just lost my best friend. I replied flatly, “They killed John.”
I also wanted to reflect on my playthrough of the second Red Dead Redemption game when it came out years later, but I see now both can be their own piece instead of one. The next post will be the continuation and evolution of how I processed thoughts and emotions differently than I did back when I was just a teenager.
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