Trivia / Red Dead Redemption

• Acting for Two: Benjamin Byron Davis voices both Dutch van der Linde and Nastas.
  • According to Rob Wiethoff, he himself provided motion capture for Jack Marston in the epilogue, especially in the final scene in "Remember My Family", when Jack's actor wasn't available at the time.
• Cast the Expert: Anthony de Longis is an expert martial artist who's especially proficient with a bullwhip and has for decades been a stunt performer and coordinator; he trained Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman for Batman Returns and Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. However— although you might think a Western would be an ideal place for De Longis to display his skills— you would be wrong; his character Marshal Leigh Johnson never so much as touches a bullwhip.
• Cut Song: Animal Collective recorded a track for the game, but it went unused.
• Doing It for the Art: Rockstar expected to have a net loss with this, and reportedly at the end was doing it just so that Rockstar San Diego could prove it could turn out a good game. Of course, it made a very healthy profit.
• Missing Trailer Scene: Pre-release footage shows the interior of a gambling boat, which never appears in the final release.
• No Port For You: Reports concerning the game's source code being inelegant likely accounted for Rockstar ruling out a PC release, though this was ultimately subverted with the sequel thankfully. Even when ports for the PS4 and Switch^note Xbox consoles can use backwards compability were announced, there's still no sign of a PC release.
• One-Take Wonder: According to Benjamin Byron Davis in interviews after II's release, every cutscene in I had to be recorded from the beginning if they needed a new take as the technology back then didn't allow combining different takes. So while the cutscenes utilize different camera angles when required, the audio and motion capture is always from a single take.
• Orphaned Reference: The Blackwater stranger quest "The wronged woman" has a widow mention her late husband frequented a gambling boat. While the line stll makes sense in the final release due to Blackwater having (off-screen) port activity, pre-release footage reveals that the game actually did have an accessible gambing boat at some point in development that was cut before release.^note In the final game the husband is found inside Blackwater's saloon before he's killed.
• The Other Darrin: In the online DLC, whilst most of the actors from Red Dead Revolver reprise their roles, Shadow Wolf is played by Ryan Johnston, not Chaske Spencer, and his character has gone from The Quiet One to one of the taunts and belittles his enemies.
• Reclusive Artist: Uncle's voice actor Spider Madison. Apart from three other credits on his IMDB page, Madison's filmography pretty much ends with this game, and he doesn't reprise the role of Uncle in this game's prequel. Absolutely nothing is known about his personal life, not even his date of birth. A fan later posted a selfie with Madison on Reddit, confirming that the man is indeed still alive as of 2023, though he has since retired from acting.
• Troubled Production: The game was apparently so rough and unplayable just months before release that Rockstar president Sam Houser desperately emailed producer Leslie Benzies for help in getting the game in working order. According to the lawsuit and emails between the two, while Sam and Dan Houser were Rockstar's "idea guys" who handled most of the creative aspects, Benzies oversaw programming and development management, and things turned nasty when the Housers tried to go without Benzies in RDR. While Benzies did save the day, the frantic development crunch and resulting tangled mess of code ensured that RDR will likely never get an Updated Re-release fo PC, as Rockstar did not want to risk a Porting Disaster like Grand Theft Auto IV's PC version (the game did, however, get a Polished Port for the Xbox One, especially the Xbox One X; and it was eventually ported to 8th gen consoles in 2023). Worse, the crunch required from the staff to get the game finished was bad enough that several anonymous spouses of Rockstar San Diego employees wrote a scathing letter that accused Rockstar's management, in no uncertain terms, of destroying the lives of their employees through stress. While RDR won rave reviews and became Rockstar's biggest success outside of Grand Theft Auto, the experience soured the working relationship between Benzies and the Housers.
• Urban Legend of Zelda: In the ghost town of Tumbleweed, shoot out all the lights in the manor and wait for three o'clock in the morning. If you go upstairs, you'll come across a ghost of a woman who will immediately kill you. Thus far, nobody's been able to find any conclusive evidence of this and the linked picture has been deemed fake. Red Dead Redemption II has ghosts as Easter Eggs, however.
• What Could Have Been: The Red Dead Wiki has a page listing most known changes, but some highlights include;
  • According to former Rockstar San Diego designer Dominic Craig, Redemption was originally going to be a direct sequel to Red Dead Revolver with Red Harlow on the run after killing Governor Griffin and you taking control of Red's son, who goes looking for his father after outlaws wrong him. The tone and atmosphere was going to be more similar to Once Upon a Time in the West, but the team was urged by higher ups to make it more like The Wild Bunch in terms of both plot and atmosphere.
  • A lot of the pre-release footage showcased a noticeably younger-looking John, but he was aged up for the final game. A gambling boat in Blackwater is also seen in one trailer, but it never makes an appearance in any form in the game itself.^note A gambling boat would later appear in a single mission in Red Dead Redemption II.
  • The game files include voice-work for two stranger missions that ultimately didn't end up into the final game.
    • One appears to have been a simple Fetch Quest, where John was tasked to find four missing relics for Mother Superior.
    • The other quest included John meeting a lonely Jerkass with dwarfism, who asked John to find him a friend. John would go on to find a "giant" to accompany him, but the "giant" would ultimately (accidentally or not) kill someone, causing the quest-giver to ask John to kill his new friend - with player choice determining if John would do so or not.^note A stranger mission in Red Dead Redemption II would later feature a stranger quest involving a traveling freakshow that includes both a little person and a mentally-handicapped "giant", but the actual content of the mission is completely different.
  • If the player bypasses Dutch's maxim gun with the invincibility cheat, they can reach and lasso him. Once untied, he'll start to clutch his left side and if John points a gun at him, there's a chance that Dutch'll start begging "Don't do this, John". This combined with the wound he suddenly has in his final cutscene implies the fight and Dutch's fate were different in earlier versions.
• Word of Saint Paul: According to his voice actor (before the release of Red Dead Redemption II), Bill's behavior in 1911 ultimately traces back to John; He's jealous of John due to him ultimately winning Abigail's affection, but once John left there was no-one to keep Williamson in check and eventually Bill simply went through Sanity Slippage. The second game ignores this, and instead presents Bill as an Ambiguously Gay (or bi) Shell-Shocked Veteran whose father had dementia, suggesting that his dislike of Marston and Ax-Crazy antics may be caused by a combination of PTSD, self-hatred, and cognitive decline.

---