This Week In Retro: Red Dead Revolver (Patreon)

May 3, 2004: Pass the controller, pilgrim

by Diamond Feit

America's fascination with the Old West has never sat right with me. Westerns occupied a huge portion of radio, movies, and television for decades, to the point that directors in other countries began to absorb those myths and produce their own tales of lawmen and outlaws on the frontier. Yet even though I grew up hearing about Billy the Kid and The Lone Ranger, I viewed cowboy stories as antiquated long before I reached my teens.

While I'm certain my appetite for technology and video games helped draw my attention away from Little House on the Prairie and Young Guns, it's not like my media diet was entirely bereft of covered wagons. Tons of early games used familiar iconography from Westerns; I retain vivid memories of spending hours playing Atari's Outlaw, Capcom's Gun.Smoke, and Konami's Sunset Riders. Even at school, I rushed through typing lessons so I could spend the rest of class braving the journey across The Oregon Trail. 

As the 1990s wore on and video games grew more sophisticated, I saw fewer depictions of gunfights at high noon and stagecoach robberies. While I never took economics in school, I suspect this reflected the lack of interest in Westerns among the public at large, as cowboys also grew scarce on the silver screen and in living rooms. Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven might have won Best Picture in '92, but it felt like a swan song for the entire genre.

You might call it a case of absence making the heart grow fonder, but 20 years ago this week, I spotted a cowboy amongst the new releases in the video game aisle and couldn't help but investigate. Even stranger, I noticed the Rockstar Games logo on the box, the same brand I had come to admire thanks to their red-hot string of engrossing Grand Theft Auto releases. My curiosity piqued, I took home a copy of Red Dead Revolver and drove home into the sunset, since I lived to the west of all my local shopping malls.

Red Dead Revolver introduces us to young Red Harlow, the teenage son of a white prospector and a Native American woman. The game's first level—which doubles as a tutorial—offers players a chance to practice aiming and shooting as Red receives his father's old pistol as a hand-me-down. After taking a few shots at pots and pans in the backyard, bandits attack the Harlow homestead and Red has to help his father fight off the raid. No matter how well Red performs in this crucible, he loses both his parents and his house in the attack. Red also badly burns his right hand when trying to grab a fallen handgun from a fire, leaving his palm the same color as his name.

The action jumps ahead at least a decade, giving Red a chance to grow into an adult. Now a wandering gunman making a living as a bounty hunter, Red has a knack for walking into trouble and shooting his way out. Lucky for him, the people he kills have a price on their heads, so he hauls them away in a cart to find the nearest sheriff for a reward. Unfortunately, Red can't collect until the elderly sheriff rids his town of its gang problem; naturally, this duty falls to Red.

These early levels establish the rhythm of Red Dead Revolver, sending Red on mission after mission to take down wanted men (and women), netting him money and building up his reputation after each success. Even though this resembles the flow of Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto series, where players explore entire cities at their leisure, that's not the case here. Red Dead Revolver is largely linear, offering little more than a few dusty streets to mosey through in-between jobs. Red can talk to the passersby and hit up the local general store for items and collectibles, but cannot saddle up and ride across the plains or into the hills.

Each mission takes place in a specific area, one Red instantly travels to once he accepts a bounty before immediately returning to town to collect his fee. Other characters enter the story over time, some of whom players even control, but they only take the spotlight for specific missions before handing the reins back to Red.

While Red Dead Revolver may not break new ground as a video game, it does present itself and its world with confidence, making a good first impression with a stylized cinematic intro like that of a spaghetti western. An artificial film grain and fake visual imperfections only add to the impression that the events of the game take place in the distant past; the menus also carry a sepia toned hue one would expect from centuries-old documents. A cast of working voice actors brings every character to life, regardless of their significance to the story.

Players have no shortage of firearms to choose from in Red Dead Revolver, although the historical setting does limit the selection to era-appropriate weapons. Pistols fire fast but lack pinpoint accuracy, shotguns deal heavy damage but only when up-close, and rifles offer precision and range but require more time to reload. Throwable items such as knives, dynamite, and flaming bottles also have their uses, plus the occasional turret appears during Red's adventures, but players should expect to spend the bulk of their time in game slinging lead rather than stabbing or detonating their foes.

With no advanced or exotic guns available like rocket launchers or freeze rays, Red Dead Revolver does its best to make gunplay consistently fun. A lot of this comes from the game's sound design, as every shot fired sounds ripped straight from the movies. Red also earns money per hit, not just per kill, with bonuses and a visual flourish applied to headshots. Taking down varmints one after another also adds a combo multiplier to Red's income. This encourages players to really flex their trigger fingers and aim carefully. A special Bounty Hunter mode, unlocked after clearing the game once, also challenges players to replay missions with extra objectives.

Despite my relative disinterest in cowboys or horses, I had a great time with Red Dead Revolver when I first played it. It couldn't match the sheer breadth or heights of a Grand Theft Auto game, but it never promised such a thing. Red Dead maintains good pacing, throwing a variety of threats at players to ensure they never get too comfortable. Different environments might offer more or less cover, forcing Red to adjust his tactics. The game's many boss encounters also mix things up, as their amusingly bizarre personalities and fighting styles demand players adapt to their particular strain of madness. When a guy charges at you holding a stick of dynamite or hides on a rooftop while his boys chase you down, you'll have to consider the best response for each situation.

Red Dead Revolver didn't bend the tide of video games towards the past, but it must have sold well enough for Rockstar to consider the western a viable genre for future releases. Seven years later, the company would develop a quasi-sequel called Red Dead Redemption, this time promising an open-world frontier that players actually could explore to their heart's content. The gamble paid off; Red Dead became a proper series that successfully sold a 19th-century fantasy to 21st-century audiences. At this very moment, thousands of players around the world are playing make-believe cowboy, rustling cattle and tossing lassos. If a Hollywood studio produced a western revival as a live-action Red Dead adaptation, it wouldn't surprise me in the least.

Writer/podcaster/performer Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but xer work and opinions exist across the internet.