child that he left behind, even though you didn't know them.
- When did you know how you were going to end Red Dead Redemption One?
- I remember I did a meeting with Christian, the
designer. I can't remember what year. Probably some point
late 2008, early 2009, and we were discussing the last bit and,
and, and said, "I think he's gotta die." And he
leapt on the idea and went, "That's... Yes, yes. No, no, wait, no, it can't work.
Games can't work like that. It can't work if he's dead." You know, began to think through,
well, if we... Just technically it doesn't work because you have to be able to finish all the stuff
up, and then began to think through, "Actually, I think we can make it work if we do it this
way." And so he then really pushed for that idea,
and it seemed to... I was like, "Ah," and I was still torn. I thought it
was clever narratively but I was torn if it was gonna work
technically as a piece of game design, but I think it did.
- Yeah, and spoiler alert, of course, how do we tell the
story of that? Well, so he goes through a lot. He does
all the... John does all the dirty work of hunting down his old gang and he
finally is able to go home and be with his family,
be on the ranch, and then the government betrays him and
sends troops to kill him. And there is dialogue. I mean, that just,
I think the two times I shed a tear in video game history for me is that dialogue.
I think John talking to his wife,
if I vaguely remember. I think he said, "I love you."
But he said very little. He didn't... He made it seem like he's going to see
her and his son shortly. That dialogue was
masterfully done, like a definition of like less is more. It was just so crisp, that
and... And, of course, the other one is again, from memory, Arthur riding
his horse and the music is playing. It's very hard not to shed
a tear during that. Anyway, the dialogue of John talking to his wife
at the end when he's in a barn and is about to walk out.
to face certain death. Do you remember writing that?
- Oh, yeah. Yeah. But it just... Again, I went...
The actor was so good and we've already seen a bunch of his work by then.
He had such a good... He was so good at reading those lines that I knew he
could give us... that you could feel at that point, like-
…I think those lines are best when they're really short and punchy. So I knew—
- Got it.
- I knew he'd be able to make that line sound good.
- So you were imagining his voice. You were just-
- And I think all of those actors on Red Dead
Redemption One were so strong that they really brought that game to life. If
them and Rod, the director, hadn't done such a good job, it would have
sounded cheesy as hell.
- You've said that the ending of RDR1 is one of the best things you've been a part of
creating. Why is that ending so powerful to you? What does it represent?
- I think because for the story to work, just from a technical
challenge, for the story to work, he had to
die. But for a game to work, it felt like a challenge to
make him die. It was probably the
fourth, fifth, or sixth open-world game I'd worked on, and
I'd spent all these years before that working out how these stories worked.
How to make them work technically, how to make them feel right, how they interacted
with the open-form gameplay as best I could.
And suddenly we're going to break one of our golden rules, which was, at the
end of the game, you're freeing the character to go and wrap up all the side stories, to play
forever. You're not going to be able to do that in this game because the guy's going to be dead, and we're going to have
you play as a different character, and the narrative is going to
be compelling enough, if we've done a good job, where you're not going to care about that.
Or you're going to be upset that he's dead, but you can actually have this
emotional moment.
So I think it was a big risk from a technical perspective for us to do that, and then
it worked. So I think that was something that was very…
full of fear, and it worked out okay.
And I think people were really upset and angry at us for doing it because they didn't think it was going to happen, but
I think they also had that kind of experience you're describing, which is that kind of creative
moment where, you know, a transcendent moment with characters in a piece of fiction, which is
what we've always aspired to giving people.
- I mean, it's incredible because I don't think… I don't remember a single video game that has
done that before.
- Well, I would like to have, at the end of GTA IV, killed Niko, but you couldn't do
it. You know, the game doesn't work like that. So it was this thing where we
hadn't done it, thought about doing it, hadn't done it, and then going, "Let's
do it. Let's take the risk and do it. We can't do it. Let's try." And it worked.
- Yeah, what about the decision with the son? You know,
John gives so much effort to make sure that Jack doesn't end up
in a life of violence. I mean, it's very Godfather-like. It's—
…he's dragged back into it through revenge.
- That was also, the game still had to work as a game. Whether that was the right
ending, 100% the best ending from a pure storytelling perspective, I don't know.
But I know that we had to make the game work.
- Oh, interesting.
- So it was... I think it kind of worked in that way where Jack can't
escape, but I always also wanted a version of it where Jack did
escape, but that wasn't... Both were interesting to me.
- Can you just dig in a little deeper? What do you mean about for the game to work?
It's such a direct... It's like Kubrick talking about for this movie to work,
it has to have... From my perspective, I just think about the story. What's the technical
aspect for the game to work?
- It's just the mechanical experience is you have an
avatar you control, and you know, the games don't really end.
You have to be able to wander around the world and do stuff.
So at the end of the game, you have to be able to wander around with your
fairly limited set of
features, which is you can run up to someone and punch them or shoot them or
rob them, or talk to them. And that's
kind of... or jump on a horse or do all this other
stuff. In order for the game still to be fun and people to get this full
360-degree experience with it, they had to, if they
wanted to 100% the game as opposed to just finishing the story, you have to have an
avatar to do that stuff with. So that was the sort of challenge of Jack's
character, wrapping up the story as Jack.
- Oh, there's real power for the avatar to end, the finiteness.
- Yeah. Both the Red Deads, you obviously change avatars.
Which we did, and then did it again. I think there's something interesting about that
moment when you change from one character to another, because they are you and they're not
you, you know, and then suddenly you're someone else.
- Mm-hmm. I mean, I was really shaken by that
experience, but it's a beautiful experience. It's like an unforgettable
experience. What else can video games possibly reach
for? You know, to create that experience,
that's what great films do, that's what great, great books do.
- It's that. I mean, it's that and the world building in games. I think the experience of being in this
fake place and then taking on these narrative
adventures, when that combines, you've got the amazing experience.