A book about the history of the hit game Red Dead Redemption.
Almost six years after it was released, Red Dead Redemption 2 is still one of the best video games that I have ever played and I’m not alone in thinking this way.
The game sucks you in with its vast open world and rich story as it lets you live the life of an outlaw in a fictional version of America at the turn of the century. A lot of time, love, and research went into making this game as good as it is.
But how historical is RDR2?
It certainly looks like the American West—or at least the version that we see in photographs and movies. But many people, myself included, have wondered just how real is the game?
Enter Tore Olsson.
Dr. Olsson is a scholar of American history, who has previously published books on subjects such as environmental and transnational history of the United States after the Civil War. He is also the author of the upcoming book Red Dead’s History: A Video Game, an Obsession, and America’s Violent Past, which tries to look at just how accurate the video game is to the real history of our country.
Red Dead’s History is released and now available!
I had the opportunity to sit down and talk with Tore Olsson, who is also a tenured professor at the University of Tennessee, and discuss his upcoming book and how he got the idea to write about one of the most popular video games in recent history.
We talked about how he returned to his love of video games during the pandemic, and how that led to him teaching a college course, and then later writing a book, about the real history behind Red Dead Redemption.
An Interview with Tore Olsson
Q: As an American historian, what first drew you to these video games?
I started playing the game [during the pandemic] and I had never really played anything quite like it. Especially as the plotline moved into the South.
By the time we’re in hour fifteen, hour twenty when we move into Lemoyne, the fictional Deep South, that was when things started to get really interesting for me … I was really intrigued at how often the game would gesture toward some of the big dilemmas of American history in this time period. Both in the West, and the South, and in Appalachia, in the Caribbean.
Usually, those big historical dilemmas were not at center stage in the game, they’re on the sidelines, but they were there, and they usually didn’t have the context or the sort of clarity that a historian would want.
But I knew how ridiculously popular this game was. I knew how many tens and tens of millions of copies it had sold. And in the “Southern” portions I wondered if it could be a tool for teaching.
Could this be a tool for getting younger folks excited about the serious and real dilemmas or race, power, capitalism, and empire in the United States in the late 19th century?
And my first instinct was to figure out what have scholars done with this game before? Now, the game was two years old at this point, so I did a search in the traditional databases that I would normally access, key journals in my field…
And in 2020, when I searched, it was blank. Nothing. Historians hadn’t done anything with it. That was when this epiphany hit me… why don’t I try to be the first one?
I mean, I’m a gamer at heart—at least, a rekindled gamer—why not try teaching a class that uses the fictional content of the games as a jumping off point to really dive into the serious actual history that the games were inspired by, but that they don’t often place front and center.
So, that was the idea. I pitched to Ernie Freeberg, who was the head [of the department], and Charles Sanft, the associate head, and I said, “Here’s my crazy idea for this experimental class.”
And it’s not that crazy, in a sense, because historians use pop culture all the time in teaching.
It’s just that video games are often given short shrift when we consider pop culture. Historians wouldn’t skip a beat when it comes to using a film or a novel or tv series as a hook to get students excited. But videogames have been dismissed from those conversations—for reasons both legitimate and perhaps unfair.
I thought “Let’s give this a try” and both of them [doctors Freeberg and Sanft] said: “I have no idea what Red Dead Redemption 2 is” and “Sure! If you think students will sign up, we’ll give it a try.” They were supportive of it and gave me permission to try this out in the Fall of ’21 for the first time.
Q: Can you tell me a bit about the class and how that went?
The first trick was getting word out.
The whole pitch to my senior colleagues was “Students will be really excited to take this class,” ie, it will have high enrollment. So, I had to prove that in some way. And the complicating factor was that this was in the midst of the pandemic and campus was pretty much deserted.
So, I decided to take to social media to get the word out.
I posted on Twitter about the class and was kinda surprised that it went viral. It got picked up by all sorts of other outlets. GameSpot did a story on it. Reshared and liked by thousands and thousands of people. And it was certainly successful with getting the word out with UT’s students. I think it got shared in the UT Reddit, and a bunch of students saw it that way.
It was very successful in drumming up interest in undergrads here. I had timed my Twitter campaign with registration. The class had a much higher enrollment than it would have otherwise.
[Tore explained that new classes like this usually get very low enrollment. They’d be lucky to get twelve students total]
So, that was fun and exciting. But it was also fun when this tweet went viral and word of the class got out to the internet ecosphere, it meant I got a lot of messages saying, “How can I participate in the class?” “How can I audit the class?”
And I, disappointingly, had to tell these people that sorry, but you have to be a UT student to participate in this thing. And they said, “Ok, sorry. Can you share the syllabus?” And it was a lot of messages, Ian. I mean, it was dozens. That made me enthusiastic about the possibility that, you know, there was an audience for this beyond just the University of Tennessee.
But yeah, that first semester, that first class was really, really fun. It was a ton of work, because any time you prepare a new class it’s a boatload of new research and strategizing about how to teach topics, find readings, and mainly writing lectures.
And writing those lectures was a ton of work. And it was fun, you know, but it was a ton of work in two ways because, one, I had to play the game more to feel like I really understood it—cause I’d only done one playthrough at that point so I needed some more hours of experience in the game to explore the nooks and crannies of it.
And, as you know, it’s a big game.
Then I had to consult monographs and textbooks and the usual secondary sources that we use when we write lectures. It was a busy semester to say the least, but it was really fun and really rewarding because the students were super excited to be there.
And they were excited not just to talk about Red Dead Redemption, which we actually did fairly little of, but to talk about the actual history and the dilemmas in the period. So, it was an amazing first semester.
Q: Was that how you got the idea to write your book, Red Dead History?
Remember that I had gotten all of these messages from people outside in the world who wanted to participate in the journey but couldn’t because they weren’t actual college students here.
That was certainly encouraging. And the other encouraging thing is that by the end of the semester, I’m looking at a stack of papers this tall full of the lectures that I had written. I’d thought through how to use the plotline and the characters and events of the game and use it to teach about American history.
I’d done a lot of the leg work and kinda had the first draft of a book on my plate. This is also in the midst of the pandemic when many archives were still closed.
So, I was looking for something to do in the meantime and I love to write—writing is my job in so many ways—so I thought this seemed like the perfect opportunity to write a public-facing book aimed at lovers of the games, gamers in general, and the history buffs who were interested in the period.
To, basically, transform the work of the class into an accessible, engaging, and lively book that does the same thing as the class. I was trying to take that fictional content of the game and spin it into a broader conversation about the violence in late 19th and early 20th century America.
I knew I didn’t want to write it for academics… I’d always had an urge and interest in writing a trade book with a commercial publisher and a broader audience.
This seemed like my opportunity and I pitched the idea to my literary agent and she said, “I’ve never played any video games but this sounds like a great idea.”
And then she shopped it around to publishers and ultimately we got a really interested publisher in St. Martins, which is a part of Macmillan’s big publishing group, they loved the idea and wanted to do it. We signed a contract with them and I got to work.
But I’ll share this as a closing remark on it: in my very first conversation with my editor at St. Martins, before we even signed a contract, she was really insistent that this had to be an audiobook.
This has to come out as an audiobook in addition to print because a lot of our demographic that we’re aiming at likes to listen to books rather than read them. And she was the one who had the idea that, to narrate the book, we need one of the actors from the game.
I hadn’t even thought of it at that point, and when she said it I said, “Absolutely, that’s great.” And in my head at the time, I’m thinking “Oh, we can probably get some minor character.” We could get, I don’t know, Bill Williamson—some great actor who plays a key role.
But the idea that we would get Arthur Morgan was absolutely unfathomable.
It was an impossibility that we would be able to line up the main actor from the game. But, as you know, that’s precisely who’s going to be narrating it. Roger Clark. And it was really my publisher who accomplished that, not me.
They just reached out to Roger’s agent and they pitched the idea and it turns out that Roger Clark has done many audiobooks before. He’s a seasoned narrator. He liked it and was like “Sure, I’m on board.”
I’ll tell you, the day that I got that email saying, “Roger Clark is going to do the audiobook.” I mean, I was just out of my mind I was so excited.
Q: So, is Roger Clark going to narrate your book in the voice of Arthur Morgan?
Rockstar Games owns the character of Arthur Morgan, and my book has no affiliation with Rockstar Games, whatsoever. An entirely third-party affair. I’m not going to claim that Arthur Morgan’s reading the book, Roger Clark is reading the book but yes, he’s going to sound a hell of a lot like he did in the game. There’s absolutely no denying that.
So, yes, there will be no confusion as to who’s reading the book.
Q: So, the big question: how did Red Dead do in portraying American history?
Yeah, this is one of the key things that my book tries to answer. It’s not the only thing, but it is one of the key questions that we do return to.
It’s a mixed answer. To be sure. Good on some counts, less than good, if not quite bad, on other counts.
As a general rule, they do the best at capturing the visual look and feel of this time and place.
New Orleans at the turn of the century. They do a really good job in capturing the architecture, the street grid, the division between the rich and poor, the fact that the city is poised on both a swamp and a major river. The docks being laden with cotton bales to be shipped out.
There’s many, many parts of the game that it’s clear to me—and I should say that I know virtually nothing about the creative process at Rockstar Games—but I can only guess that they spent a lot of time looking at photographs from the period. They’re trying to recreate the look and feel of the historical photographs from the turn of the century period.
Whether it’s a western boom town like Dead Wood, South Dakota, which you can see mirrored in Valentine, Strawberry, the western parts of the game, or those sleepy plantation towns like Rhodes, or of course New Orleans. I think they really cared about recreating the look and feel.
As you know, looks are important but it’s not just looks. A photograph cannot capture the complexity of society. So, the bigger question we need to ask is: how do they do in capturing the human fabric of America? Rural, western, southern, Appalachian America at the turn of the century? How well do they capture the things that people care about? The topics that enthused them? The limitations and possibilities of the world that people live in?
Here my assessment is a lot lower.
(I love that there’s a great deal of diversity in the game. That’s important. The US was an incredibly diverse place. Certainly, the South and the West. And even though the protagonist of the game is a white man, many of the collaborators and people in his gang are people of color, women, native peoples, immigrants, and so forth. And so, I like that, that’s cool, but there’s major problems with the rest of the portrayal.)
There’s virtually no politics in the game. Which would have been completely bizarre to any American of 1899. It was a highly divided, partisan landscape that they lived in. And there’s no mention of other topics that were dominant at the time.
Like the Labor Movements. There’s a tiny reference in the games to the Labor Movements but very, very little. And there’s also no mention of the project of Jim Crow, the segregation and disenfranchisement, which was very much taking place right in the 1890s.
So, there would have been much more of that in reality and indeed parts of New Orleans [St. Denis] and Rhodes would have been racially segregated. Not all of it, but some of it.
One of the biggest mistakes of the game, too, is that Red Dead 2 is often a great game about the 1870’s. However, it’s not set in the early 1870s, it’s set in 1899, so almost 30 years afterward.
Certain topics would have made plenty of sense in 1871 but are basically non-sensical in 1899.
For example: massive wars between Native peoples and the government. That’s just not happening by 1899. It was very much happening in the early 1870s and before, but the dust had largely settled on those large-scale military altercations by the 1880s.
Or the Pinkertons being the scourge of the western outlaw and that they were primarily concerned with hunting bandits in the west. In the early 1870’s, totally true. That’s when Allan Pinkerton and his gang are pursuing Jesse James and other renowned train robbers. By 1899, though, they are mainly cracking heads with labor disputes.
They are mainly breaking up strikes and mainly the tool of big companies against organized workers. It makes sense in 1871, not so much in 1899.
The list is long here, Ian, I’ll just name one last example. It has to do with the Klu Klux Klan. So, in the game, Arthur encounters these hooded, robed men in the woods in the south, in Lemoyne, who are staging this bizarre, secretive ritual.
The game gives you carte blanche to kill them without damaging your honor rating. So, the game portrays the Klan as this significant institution in the South. That would have made tons of sense in 1871, basically no sense in 1899 because the Klan is largely stamped out by the US government in 1872/1873.
The Klan was in hiatus, dormant in the South in 1899. It would resurface later on in the 1910s. But in 1899, there would not have been Klan members anywhere to be found. There were other vigilante groups like the White Caps and others who often practiced some of the same racial terrorism, but they weren’t Klansmen. They didn’t burn crosses, to be sure. In fact, the Klan never burned crosses in the 1860s and 70s even, it’s only in the 1910’s.
There’s a kind of consistent asynchronicity of the game. They should have set it in 1872. It would have made a whole lot more sense.
Q: Was there anything about Red Dead’s engagement with history that really surprised you?
I was surprised at how central they made questions of race and racial inequality.
Especially because I had learned a little bit about Red Dead Redemption, the first game, which is really very different. The only characters who have much complexity and depth in the first game are white men. Most of the people of color are complete stereotypes and cliches and that’s not true in Red Dead 2.
Like I said, there’s lots of nuanced characters in the game who tell their own stories and encounter racial hierarchy in America. But then Arthur Morgan is pretty steadfastly anti-racist. He really doesn’t like the nasty ideologies that he runs into.
Probably my favorite encounter with this is one that he has with a eugenicist on the streets of St. Denis. He’s trying to sell literature about race science, pseudo-scientific stuff, eugenics being quite popular among many white people in the US around then. And Arthur basically tells him “You’re an asshole, you’re totally wrong.” He debunks the entire philosophy.
That, to me, was surprising. Most games are afraid of controversy and don’t go there.
The game also includes major questions about women’s history and suffrage at that key moment. The fact that there’s a central story mission about suffragists in the south in 1899. I would never have guessed that picking up in this game.
This is Rockstar, too. They don’t exactly have a great reputation when it comes to portrayals of women. I think that’s an understatement. Grand Theft Auto has left such a stain on their reputation.
It seemed to me playing this game, that, regarding representations of women, that they were kind of trying to atone for their sins of previous years and give a much more sympathetic and thoughtful view to questions of women’s rights in that really crucial moment.
Q: What are your thoughts about the Guarma chapter and the game’s engagement with the larger world?
Yeah, exactly. Knowing who I am and who I was professionally before I wrote this book, you would have thought, “Ah, there’s going to be long sections of this book about the Mexican Revolution,” which are highlighted in the first game, “and then long chunks about Guarma and American Imperialism in that shadow of 1898 moment.”
You would be very disappointed to learn that in my book there’s not that.
There’s three sections of my book, which are “The West,” “The Deep South,” and “Appalachia,” and it really doesn’t engage the world beyond the US. And that came with great regret to me because I do know a great deal about those kinds of questions and have written a great deal about them before. But it simply stretched the book too big, it drew it away from the US backbone, and it would have been too long.
Part of it too, and kind of an alternate answer to this, the section in Guarma is just weird. Right?
I just don’t know quite what to make of it. In one sense, it seems to be talking about Cuba because it’s this sugar island that’s dominated by an American businessman but they talk about Cuba in the games. It’s not supposed to be Cuba. Cuba’s there, somewhere. It’s just kinda weird.
I think a lot of gamers have also found the Guarma chapter to be sticking out like a sore thumb within the game. It’s like a strange diversion. I don’t know. I mean, there’s opportunity but I did not foreground it as much as I did the US parts in the book.
But yeah, it’s kind of strange given that I do US and the world. Or at least, you know, I did for ten years before writing this book.
Q: How representative was the game of real outlaw gangs?
I’ll give you two examples, Ian.
I think there’s a single outlaw gang that the Van der Linde gang is trying to imitate quite closely. And that is Butch Cassidy’s Hole in the Wall gang because they were quite active in the late 1890s, they robbed major railroads, and they get into a big dispute with the Pinkertons, and escape into Latin America to try to shake the Pinkertons off their tail.
In that sense, the game clearly maps onto that story, it also mimics the 1969 movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid quite neatly. And Rockstar is all about gamifying movies, right? And they’re very much doing that with the 1969 Paul Newman, Robert Redford film.
Though there are some divergences between the real-life Hole in the Wall gang and the Van der Linde gang. And that is that the Hole in the Wall gang were all white men. There was no diversity within the gang whatsoever. So, the idea that there’s going to be women, African Americans, Native peoples—the Van der Linde gang is much more diverse than the actual inspiration.
Let me give you another point of comparison. The game spends a lot of time in New Orleans [St. Denis], of course, and what’s interesting is that in New Orleans there is no rival gang to be in fire with, you’re mainly shooting out with the police. There’s lots of battles between outlaws and the police in New Orleans and I imagine many gamers would be curious if that was realistic or not.
Yes, in a sense.
In fact, in 1900, the year after the game is set, there was a tremendous shootout between one outlaw and the police that led to seven police officers dead and got this guy in a shootout with a crowd of several thousand people. So, this is an example of an outlaw fighting the police.
However, there’s one very important difference. This 1900 outlaw shootout had everything to do with race and Jim Crow. This was a so-called race riot that took place in New Orleans in 1900 of a black man by the name of Robert Charles, who was being unfairly arrested for nothing at all and decides to resist and he fires back at police officers and then ignites this manhunt for him where he returns fire and shoots several police.
Here is an actual example of an outlaw at war with the police but it’s not because of a bank robbery, it’s not because of grudges and rivalries, the kind of things we see in the video games, it’s about social problems.
And that’s what the main gist of my book shows, that America of this period was violent but that violence wasn’t random. It wasn’t just triggered by whisky or poker games, it was triggered by big social problems. Particularly problems regarding race and inequalities of capitalism.
That’s really the heart of what the book is about.
Q: What are some things you would like to see in the next Red Dead game?
My pitch is that, given that they really wanted to make a game about the early 1870’s, that they actually make a game about the early 1870’s. And you set it in, I don’t know, 1872.
In part because the US is actually way more violent and chaotic than it is in 1899.
And I’d love to see Arthur Morgan return, for sure. We’d have to catch him at 17 or 18 years old, he’s going to be a young man. Or maybe Dutch or someone, a young member of the Van der Linde gang. Hosea?
And I’d love to see it be set in the West and the South, in part because the numbers of violent, profoundly important encounters that are happening in that period are almost too many to list.
I think the violence between the US and native peoples has to be at the forefront, the way that it is in the second game—but in 1872, there was no certainty who would win this.
If in 1899, the smoke is clearing from the battlefield, in 1872, native peoples are still calling the shots in much, if not most, of the west. The tide of the battle often tips in their favor. This is the era of Little Big Horn, when the Lakota and a number of native nations defeat the US military—many victories by native warriors against US troops.
So, this is a very unsettled West, but in many ways, the South was more wild than the West was at this point. We’re in the midst of Reconstruction, US troops occupy the south, and there are incredibly violent encounters between freed people, the formerly enslaved, and the Klu Klux Klan and the US army.
It’s a battle for the future—the very soul of the United States taking place in the South at this moment as there’s this on-the-ground struggle for what Reconstruction is going to mean.
Will the nation actually live up to its promises of racial equality? Will bi-racial democracy be a reality in the South or not?
There’s so much historical material that a third Red Dead Redemption game that moves back 25 years or so, if not more, could capture. It’s my great hope that they would do that.
And create a game that’s even more nuanced and thoughtful. I’m thinking particularly about questions of race.
Red Dead 2 was a game that was made before Black Lives Matter. I mean, the US in 2016/2017 is not having that many conversations about race. There’s some, to be sure, but they’re not on the same scale and awareness that they’re having after 2020. And I’d love to see a game that is more in tune with those conversations. I think it could be a really powerful game, and really fun for gamers to engage with the difficult moments in American history.
Whether they take my advice, who knows?
Red Dead’s History
Tore Olsson’s book, Red Dead’s History, is available for purchase at most booksellers and was released to purchase on August 6th.