Been thinking back over the RDR2 single-player campaign.
Something that jumped out at me \u2013 Rockstar games always had a strong sense of time and place but they used to filter that through preexisting movies about the setting and now they take on that first-order role and treat history directly, and that\u2019s a big change
GTA3 was New York crime as filtered through Coppola and Scorcese and other gangster movies; Vice City was Scarface and Miami Vice. San Andreas lifted its aesthetics from gangsta rap and Hughes brothers movies. Even RDR1 leaned heavy on Peckinpah and spaghetti westerns
(Bully, I suppose, comes off as an entry in the British \u201cschool days\u201d novel genre from someone who grew up in Trainspotting-era Manchester, transposed to the United States)
But starting with GTA4 it feels like they decided to try to grab the zeitgeist barehanded and honestly? I\u2019m not sure it works. 4\u2019s \u201cmodern New York, with immigrants shaped by post-Soviet chaos\u201d is a real thing, but not really a resonant thing. In 5 Franklin\u2019s lament that people still have an image of south LA as mid-90s ghetto while it\u2019s solidly lower-middle-class and climbing is accurate but doesn\u2019t really build into something; Trevor and Michael could be a metacommentary on the two traditional threads in Rockstar vidya - anarchic violence and domesticated interior plot - if you squint, but you have to squint.
I noticed this thinking of how RDR2 checked off so many boxes on \u201cwhat was happening in late-19th cen America as the frontier closed\u201d - you\u2019ve got your Chinese workers building a railroad over here, your reintegration of the unchastened South over here, your resource magnates consolidating here, your German immigration important to the Great Plains here, your native tribes (who integrated freemen after emancipation) being moved on again from first-wave reservations here…
It\u2019s probably newer (or more easily missed) to people w/o my interest in American history, and more subtle and better done than a lot of contemporary AAA stuff \u2013 in a lot of cases there\u2019s a parallelism to Arthur and his band that\u2019s used to play with things, one mission sequence is retrieving things for a dispossessed old man and it really leans into his self-pity and what he\u2019s lost but the final twist is he was a slavecatcher and Arthur\u2019s righteously angry, y\u2019know his band idealizes freedom; and anyway a bit later you\u2019re mourning the good old days of freedom… to be a bandit… in between breaking lives for economic reasons and capturing fugitives… it\u2019s like \u201coh, hm\u201d
But still for all that it\u2019s box checking - yeah, we fit that in, and it just builds up into a pile, and I think it could\u2019ve made a good revisionist Western out of any one of those things instead
(Well it does have heist movie pacing, like GTAV did, that\u2019s something)
(alt.: it\u2019s plenty Scorcese, just later indulgent Gangs of New York/The Aviator Scorcese)
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