I never completed the original Red Dead Redemption, but not for the usual reasons of being terrible at the game, or thinking that open worlds are too big and boring these days and I just want to lie down forever and watch anime. I never finished it because my Xbox 360 version was not, in practice, an open world game, but a lonely farm at the bottom of a vortex of butchered spacetime. In the prologue, reformed outlaw John Marston confronts an old bandit acquaintance and gets himself roundly shot to bits. He’s rescued by local rancher Bonnie MacFarlane, who nurses him back to health and gives him a few odd jobs to warm him up for the next plot point.
One of these errands involves getting on a horse and leaving the ranch. I think the objective is to visit a nearby town, but for all I know, that town only exists in Bonnie MacFarlane’s cabin-fevered brain. I was about a minute down the trail when my horse began to stutter and protest like a power drill encountering a buried nail. I hauled on the reins and was suddenly elsewhere, juddering along the rim of a Third Impact-style swamp of cracked and spectral Wild West, sloughing into whitebox like a calving glacier.
I looked around and saw another rider proceeding along the canyon edge, his demeanour calm and his appearance normal save for his hat, which teleported through the air behind him. I drew in my breath to scream for help but there was no air, for air requires a three-dimensional volume, and I had left such petty Euclidean considerations behind. My horse billowed. I died.
OK, I’m exaggerating slightly. This anecdote is over a decade old, and I’ve forgotten a lot of the detail – I’ve pieced things together in hindsight with the help of the Red Dead wiki. But I will always remember the fear, and the fascination. I must have tried to leave Bonnie MacFarlane’s farm about 30 times, each attempt a gradual cascade of bugs and glitches that ended in cosmic paralysis. While I wasn’t thinking as analytically back then as I now (sort of) am, I developed a muscle memory for the kinds of technical problem I could expect at different ranges. If I’d run into such a phenomenon today, I’d have drawn a map equivalent to the maps of quarantine zones you find in games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. or Pacific Drive. Except that nothing I’ve ever encountered in games like those has struck me as nearly as bizarre.
Nowadays, I find the prospect of profoundly buggy geography quite intriguing, rather than inconvenient. It’s partly that I get paid to be annoyed by them now, but also, games are just so wonderful when they break. Nothing they represent can ever be half as strange as the cyclopean guts of the code beneath.
I don’t know what the specific problem was with my copy of Red Dead Redemption, but I wonder if it was a distant cousin of the various terrain generation anomalies that affect certain versions of Minecraft. If you travel a huge distance away from your initial spawn in one of those older Minecraft builds, the numbers powering the world grow impractically vast, and movement becomes a torturous slideshow. Blocks fail to align with your character’s feet, to the point that you risk falling straight through the geometry. Struggle onward for long enough – that is, for several years – and you’ll reach a bug-spotter’s Nirvana of flattened, fissured rock and soil, frozen computer agony gouged out by terrain generators that appear to have been possessed by Junji Ito.
They call certain variations of this phenomenon the Far Lands. I adore the Far Lands, and now that I compare those dysfunctional cliffs with my scanty but vivid memories of Red Dead Redemption, I wonder if there’s any mileage in doing this kind of thing deliberately.
Imagine an open world that got steadily, purposefully glitchier, the further you travel from its centre, an open world constructed according to the logic of the legendary self-sabotaging Minecraft server 2b2t. Technical problems spotted during early prototyping would not be erased, but delicately organised and cultivated, formed into concentric rings of increasing unplayability. Testers and designers wouldn’t squash bugs but scout them, competing to isolate the most interesting physics hiccups, dodgy renders and nightmare chimera.
Such a game would avoid the open world’s usual problem of scale breeding tedium, because every region would require you to creatively relitigate the fundamentals of traversal and interaction. Master the unseen waywardness of the code and you, too, could be a cowboy with a teleporting hat, beating a trail through nested event horizons. Representations of people and places would crumple and mutate, acquiring symbolic and political resonance at random: the Weird West indeed.
There are actually a few precedents for this armchair developer’s daydream. In Yedoma Globula – or at least, the version of it I played in 2021 – the terrain generator’s obsession with fractals takes you to some terrifying places. There’s also Relative Hell from Zeno Rogue, an indie who specialises in subjecting innocent genres like the roguelite to the horrors of hyperbolic geometry.
Still, this is not the Rockstar way. I’m writing about RDR again, of course, because Rockstar have finally ported it to PC and Steam. We may have some longer thoughts about the port down the line, but to be honest, it’s not a high priority for me personally. The game is well-known (and arguably overshadowed by its sequel), and the remaster appears to play the upgrade pretty straight: the only eyebrow-raising thing about it is the hefty price tag.
If I write about it myself, I might try to think through how open world design has changed over the intervening years. But for the moment, I’m writing about it because I no longer have that old Xbox 360 with the spectacularly buggy launch edition save. The Schwarzschildian toilet bowl that was Bonnie MacFarlane’s ranch has long since been claimed by the Red Ring of Death. Ah, what a loss. I will never see its like again. But I can dream. I can’t help but dream.
Before joining RPS, our news editor Edwin Evans-Thirlwell wrote a book about Minecraft’s history in collaboration with Mojang and Microsoft. He’s not receiving any royalties or similar on-going payments.
