Red Dead Redemption is celebrating its 15-year anniversary today, May 18, 2025. Below, we look back at the western in the context of its cinematic inspirations.
Stories about the American West, just like stories about knights or ninjas or other iconic figures, are not a monolith. There are stories fantastical and grounded, silly and serious, traditional and rebellious. Red Dead Redemption is a spaghetti Western in the same lineage as so many of Sergio Leone’s movies, like A Fistful of Dollars and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. Even among other open-world games and the other games in its own series, Red Dead Redemption is a singular experience. It delivers on the fantasy of playing a legendary gunslinger in a grimy American West. And there will never be another game quite like it.
A Look Back at the Red Dead Trilogy
The Red Dead games are a trilogy, though we rarely think of the first entry, Red Dead Revolver. All three games in the series are wildly different takes on the Western; even though the most recent two have consistent characters and a chronology to them, they could hardly be more different in presentation, tone, and style.
Red Dead Revolver, developed by Rockstar San Diego (originally Angel Studios) and funded in part by Capcom, is a linear action game with a simple revenge narrative. Stylistically, it has more in common with a comic book or anime than any Western film or the rest of the games in the Red Dead series. There are limbs flying everywhere, and it sports over-the-top bosses like a huge guy with dynamite strapped to his head and steel plates on his arms as shields.
Red Dead Redemption 2, on the other hand, is a Western epic with more in common with True Grit or Open Range than with something like Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars. It works overtime to represent its characters and setting as accurately as possible (with notable exceptions like the treatment of the people of Appalachia). It’s so interested in authenticity that historian and professor Tore Olsson wrote an entire book on where RDR2 succeeds and comes up short with regard to representing reality and came away with the conclusion that, despite some mistakes and some places where more depth would be warranted, the game got more right than not.
Red Dead Redemption
That brings us to the middle child, 2010’s Red Dead Redemption, a game that takes inspiration from the Spaghetti Western movies. The term Spaghetti Western refers to a genre of film made primarily between 1960 and 1978, and produced in Europe–most commonly Italy and Spain.
Prior Westerns were often about mythologizing the American West. Cowboys were clear heroes or villains, and the lines between good and evil were clear and easily delineated. Spaghetti Westerns blurred those lines, making the villains charming and the heroes surly and difficult to be around.
They also went hard on style. The opening sequence of A Fistful of Dollars is iconic, with silhouettes of gunslingers battling it out, backed by whistling and chanting music unlike anything the cinematic Old West had ever seen.
We see all that at work in Red Dead Redemption. The graphics and music often take direct influence from Sergio Leone’s movies. The music especially stands out here. Composed by musicians Bill Elm and Woody Jackson, Red Dead Redemption uses some traditional instruments like the jaw harp, but it also broadens out from that with the score combining, for example, the sound of a smooth harmonica with grimy, heavily distorted electric guitar.
The story, too, feels entirely of a piece with Spaghetti Western sensibilities, for better and worse. There are some parts that haven’t aged well. The character known as Irish stands out here as a poorly written character built on gross stereotypes of Irish people that sours your replay of an entire section of the game. Even that feels like something straight out of a Spaghetti Western, though, where characters were broad and often built on simple themes or stereotypes.
Other, more elemental parts match up though, too. John Marston is a Good Guy, but he isn’t a good guy. He’s not rising to a challenge, but being blackmailed into an impossible situation. He’s abrasive, too. Even those of us who love the game can agree that Marston’s voice takes a bit of time to warm up to. On the opposite side is the immediately charming Dutch van der Linde: a guy with big ideas and a smooth, deep voice. Side characters like the snake-oil salesman Nigel West Dickens are broad, goofy, and unreliable, while characters like Bonnie MacFarlane tempt John toward an “honest” life that would come with heavy compromises, which he can’t afford to even really dream about. Landon Ricketts, the aging American gunslinger that John meets in Mexico, represents the characters played by actors like Lee van Cleef in movies such as For a Few Dollars More–wise killers who have earned that wisdom with blood and loss.His battles against his former comrades are only triumphant in that you survive them. They’re not victories over evil. John doesn’t want to be there, but the axe over his wife and son’s heads has forced his hand, and he has to do that dirty work. His old friends have gone sour, providing some justification for his actions, but they’re not evil.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid isn’t a Spaghetti Western per se, being an American production, but it lands smack dab in the middle of the Spaghetti Western era, and shares enough of that broad, comedic tone and grimy quality to work here. John Marston’s final moments are a take on the movie’s iconic ending, in which the characters end on a freeze frame over the sound of a hail of gunfire. John opens the barn to see more lawmen than he could ever take down, all aiming at him. He gets his final moment and empties his revolver into the crowd, but he was never going to get to live a peaceful life. As much as he might try, it was not much more than a dalliance for a life-long gunslinger.
Red Dead 2 feels like a slog when I try to imagine re-playing it–all these mean people making mistakes and killing each other, and a beautiful landscape full of terrible people. It’s undoubtedly a beautiful and incredibly written and realized game. But sometimes you want A Fistful of Dollars more than 3:10 to Yuma. Red Dead Redemption is the answer. Despite being full of cruelty, it is an adventure about a reluctant hero with the skills and grit to get himself out of so many bad situations, given all the grandiosity and flamboyance of those movies that inspired it.
For more on Red Dead Redemption’s 15th anniversary, read why its story works best when it shuts up.
