{"id":15378,"date":"2026-10-13T16:15:00","date_gmt":"2026-10-13T13:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/?p=15378"},"modified":"2026-10-14T00:05:47","modified_gmt":"2026-10-13T20:35:47","slug":"dan-houser-was-surprised-how-angry-some-people-were-at-red-dead-redemptions-iconic-ending","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/2026\/10\/13\/dan-houser-was-surprised-how-angry-some-people-were-at-red-dead-redemptions-iconic-ending\/","title":{"rendered":"Dan Houser Was Surprised \u2018How Angry Some People Were\u2019 At Red Dead Redemption\u2019s Iconic Ending"},"content":{"rendered":"

Spoilers for Red Dead Redemption and Red Dead Redemption 2 follow.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The ending of 2010\u2019s Red Dead Redemption is an all-timer. For dozens of hours, we\u2019re placed in control of protagonist, John Marston, as he wanders across the American West in search of revenge against his former gang leader, Dutch Van der Linde. He, of course, gets it in a snowy showdown in one of its final missions. But John doesn\u2019t get to live out his life in peace. That would be far too tidy an ending. Instead, the outlaw is gunned down by members of the army at his family farm\u2019s barn.<\/p>\n

It was a novel twist at the time. Open-world games, and games in general, didn\u2019t do this. It initially split opinion, but has since gone down as a masterstroke in narrative design. Dan Houser, former VP of Rockstar and writer of Red Dead Redemption, recently spoke with IGN as part of our IGN30 Icons Series, and told us that it was just as difficult a decision to make as it sounds.<\/p>\n

\u201cI remember discussing it with the lead designer, Christian Cantamessa, and he was into it, and I was into it, but just knowing the production realities of\u2026 how does an open-world game work if you’ve killed the protagonist? So I said, \u2018I think maybe we have to kill him.\u2019 And he goes, \u2018That’s a great idea. Got to do it.\u2019 I said, \u2018I don’t know if… let me just think about this,\u2019 because we’re just dealing with audio and dialogue. The nature of an open-world game is you finish a story, then you go back into the world and wrap up all the side content if you want to. We’d have to play as someone else for that. We could play as Jack, but what does that mean? So I had to think through for a while what it would mean production-wise.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jack is John\u2019s son, and is only 16 years old for the majority of Red Dead Redemption\u2019s runtime. For that transition of control to work, and for the game\u2019s world to make sense, he\u2019d need to become an adult, hence the three-year time jump to 1914 that sees us play as a 19-year-old Jack after his father\u2019s death. But that was just one of the hurdles that faced Houser, Cantamessa, and the team at Rockstar.<\/p>\n

\u201cDid we have the skills and the bandwidth to play as Jack?\u201d Houser recalled questioning. \u201cWould it work? Technically, not story-wise. We’ll figure out the story aspect. If you go and see a side character and they’ve got a three-mission arc and you’ve already done one mission, what would that actually mean if you came back? How would that work? We had to think through all of that stuff and concluded we could probably make it work, but we were still scared.\u201d<\/p>\n

The final story mission of the 2010 masterpiece sees Jack carry out his own act of cathartic revenge when he kills the person responsible for John\u2019s murder in a duel. It\u2019s the moment that makes it all work and ties the knot on the game\u2019s story.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think people really loved that moment when you killed them and found it so powerful internally,\u201d Houser said. \u201cI think there was broad consensus that it was the right decision, but obviously it was an unusual and out-there decision, but I think the company had survived on making those decisions. I think we were surprised when the game came out by how angry some people were about that decision. There were people who were livid with you. And part of you goes, \u2018That’s fantastic,\u2019 because it means you’ve really engaged in the story and the characters.<\/p>\n

Another part was like, you forget, or I can forget sometimes, we’re not making movies, we’re not writing books, we’re making games. The game can’t live without a player. So they do feel ownership over what you and they are co-creating in the moment in a way someone looking at a painting, say, doesn’t. And I think they felt really let down by this decision.<\/p>\n

\u201cNow, I think it was the right decision because you want those big, strong reactions, but I think people were really confused by it. As a writer, it was like he had to die for the story to have any weight, and I had wanted that in several GTAs. We\u2019d never done it really for the technical reasons we just discussed.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Every IGN Rockstar Game Review Ever<\/h3>\n