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Somebody at Rockstar genuinely had this as part of their job. Ride a male horse out into the snowy mountains and, if you look closely enough, you'll notice things shrink up in the cold and settle back down once you're somewhere warmer. It got so much attention before launch that the studio ended up confirming it themselves rather than letting fans keep guessing.
Launch weekend for RDR2 wasn't just good, it was one of the biggest openings any piece of entertainment has ever had. Rockstar reported around $725 million in sales in just the first three days, putting it up there with blockbuster movie openings rather than typical game launches.
Rather than splitting work across separate teams, Rockstar pulled all of its studios worldwide together into one combined production for RDR2. That's over 2,000 people, from the motion capture performers right through to the environment artists, all pointed at the same game for years.
A typical film script runs somewhere around 120 pages. RDR2's story missions and side content reportedly ran past 2,000 pages of script, and that figure doesn't even include the roughly eighty extra pages written just so background pedestrians would have something to mutter as you walk by.
Go back and play the first game and you won't hear Arthur's name mentioned anywhere. Rockstar never had a sequel planned when RDR1 released, so one of the most loved characters in gaming simply hadn't been written yet at that point.
There's a bittersweet story behind all the 'Uncle has lumbago' jokes. John O'Creagh, who performed and voiced Uncle, passed away from a blood clot complication partway through the game's production. Rockstar removed most of his recorded lines out of respect, though the unused files still sit in the game's data. The one performance of his that made it into the finished game is his singing during the celebration scene at Beecher's Hope.
Roger Clark, who did the motion capture and voice for Arthur, has said the toughest physical challenge of the entire production wasn't a big emotional scene, it was crouch-running. He spent something like three days repeating crouch-walks and crouch-runs with different weapons in hand, and joked afterwards that his thighs were wrecked for days.
Arthur's slow decline from tuberculosis wasn't just chosen for dramatic effect. Co-founder Dan Houser has since said it was personal to him, his own grandfather contracted tuberculosis before antibiotics existed, not long after Dan's father was born, and that piece of family history shaped how Arthur's story was written to end.
Ride near the train tracks in northern Lemoyne around 3am and your horse might start acting spooked for no obvious reason. Stick around and a ghostly train comes barrelling down the line before fading away. It's never explained in-game, but a fair few players reckon it's a wink towards the phantom train boss fight from Final Fantasy VI.
This one takes a bit of legwork to trigger. Find the small shack north of Emerald Station in New Hanover and read the note left inside, then climb Mount Shann and track down an odd rock circle near the summit. Head back to that same shack once night falls and you'll see a green glow drifting through the sky above it.
