Examples of Shout-Out in Red Dead Redemption II:
- The presence of seven figures in promotional material is likely in reference to The Magnificent Seven, while the silhouettes illuminated dimly resembles The Wild Bunch.
- In the mission "Welcome to the New World", Dutch uses the alias Aiden O'Malley.
- Chapter 3’s story arc consists of the gang traveling to a town run by two enemy factions, playing both sides again each other and profiting from the chaos. Sound familiar?
- There's also a pair of star-crossed lovers who are specifically compared, in-story, to "an inbred Romeo and Juliet".
- One of the customization options for pistols is a carving of a snake on the grip.
- Another customization option for the pistol's carving is a scorpion.
- A side mission in Rhodes involves helping a pair of inmates who escaped from a chain gang. One is black, the other is white, they're chained together and both hate each other at first. You can also overhear citizens in the street mention that the man who presided over their case was a corrupt judge named Holden.
- The train robbery in "Pouring Forth Oil IV" is almost a scene-by-scene reenactment of the train robbery scene from The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, up to the point where the gang boards the train.
- In "Favored Sons", the scene where Dutch and Arthur are cornered by the U.S. Army and escape by jumping off a cliff into the river below is a nod to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, where the titular protagonists do the same to escape the authorities (and both scenes are nearly identical frame-for-frame).
- During the legendary duelists side mission, Jim "Boy" Calloway's Schofield revolver has "Canis Canem Edit" carved into it.
- The unfinished "Man-made mutant" is a humanoid made out of boar and bear parts. In short, it's a ManBearPig.
- There’s a hobbit house from The Lord of the Rings located on a pond just north of the second “N” in “New Hanover”. [1]
- The Watson outlaw gang is a group of four incompetent brothers led by their elderly mother.
- The Running Gag of a man calling for Gavin is considered to be both this and an In-Joke, as Rockstar wanted Geoff, Jack and Gavin of Achievement Hunter to make cameos in the game but Gavin never showed up to record his lines.
- Dutch jokingly compares getting dressed up for the social party in "The Gilded Cage" to Cinderella.
- Place names in the heavily Southern Gothic-flavoured State of Lemoyne include Clemens Point (after author Sam Clemens, better known by his pen name of Mark Twain), Radley's Pasture (for Boo Radley, the Misunderstood Loner with a Heart of Gold in To Kill a Mockingbird), and Compson's Stead (after the Compson family from The Sound and the Fury). The state's name itself is French for "The Monk", which is likely a reference to the Gothic Horror novel of the same name by Matthew Lewis, as well as to Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, the founder of New Orleans. A major NPC in Lemoyne's capital, St. Denis, has the surname of Bronte (presumably for Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Bronte.)
- During the mission after Jack is kidnapped, Arthur will tell a grieving John not to "go down the rabbit hole".
- The gang's kidnapping of Angelo Bronte in "Revenge is a Dish Best Eaten" heavily resembles Trevor's kidnapping of Devin Weston in Ending C of Grand Theft Auto V.
- Lagras is a Creole village in the middle of a gator-infested swamp next door to an abandoned voodoo lair (Lakay) and surrounded by the ambiguously human Night Folk. Fitting for a place named after Inspector Lagrasse from the The Call of Cthulhu.
- Though it's wildly unlikely to have been the devs' intention, this game features a couple named Jake and Sadie, of whom one dies tragically.
- The first epilogue's plot is broadly similiar to that of the classic western movie Shane - a capable ranchhand with a troubled past saves his employers from their violent, unfriendly neighbours, but then has to leave.
