John Marston is being blackmailed by government lawmen to hunt down his former partners-in-crime. Driven further into the American Southwest, Marston soon finds that Williams has crossed into Mexico, a country in the throes of a civil war. At every turn, Marston must choose whether to side with outlaws or innocents in the crossfire.
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Arthur Morgan is never mentioned anywhere in the original Red Dead Redemption, and it's not an oversight. Rockstar genuinely hadn't planned a prequel at the time, and it was only after the first game sold over five million copies in three weeks that the idea of telling the gang's earlier story, and inventing Arthur, ever got off the ground.
The first Red Dead Redemption had a genuinely rough road to release, taking more than five years to finish thanks to how massive and detailed the map was. At one point the delays got so bad that Rockstar reportedly worried the whole project might not be worth it, right up until it actually launched and paid off.
The wanted posters scattered across towns in the first game weren't just set dressing, some tied into actual missions. Rockstar apparently made so many of them during development that a huge number never got used at all, and there's a decent chance a few of those leftover designs quietly resurfaced in the sequel.
Scan enough bookshelves around Los Santos and you'll spot a paperback titled 'Red Dead' credited to an author named J. Marston. It's a cheeky little wink to Red Dead Redemption's John Marston, and fans have long assumed it's meant to be a novel written by his son Jack, tying two of Rockstar's biggest worlds together with nothing more than a book spine.
When Rockstar's map for GTA V leaked ahead of launch, fans worked out it clocked in at around 49 square miles, comfortably larger than San Andreas, GTA IV, and Red Dead Redemption's maps added together. For a studio that had been squeezing stories out of the same engine for years, it was a genuinely staggering jump in scale.
