Sometimes the cost of a big, open world is lower fidelity in each environment—not so in Red Dead Redemption 2, which manages to be both meticulously constructed and impossibly huge. More than that, Red Dead is a period piece of sorts taking place from 1899 to 1907; but who’s keeping score with all those fussy details, right? Would anyone notice if the specifics were flubbed here and there?
Yeah, it’s the internet we’re talking about, of course someone would. YouTuber Any Austin decided to conduct an ad hoc in-game census of Red Dead 2’s fictional town Valentine, including “employment status, employment industry, income level, age, and overall health.” He compared his findings with real census data from 1907 United States and found that, by some metrics at least, the game’s batting average was “pretty amazing.”
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Any Austin’s video gets into the nitty gritty of his methodology, but suffice it to say he split the town into an even grid and pulled random pools of NPCs at various times of day and then recorded a suite of details about them into a spreadsheet. Since he obviously couldn’t interview the NPCs, he used visual cues to identify their lot in life: their clothes, their surroundings, the amount of teeth attached to their skulls, and so on. While not perfect, it works given that Red Dead populates its towns with different grab bags of NPCs on a given day; since there’s no actual in-game population to assess, the next best thing to assess how accurate the illusion is on average.
And in that regard, Valentine did pretty well, as Any Austin explained in his video. Certain things were slightly off; the unemployment rate seemed slightly higher than was reported in real life, the town had a higher population of entertainment workers (and a lower population of construction workers) than would have likely been the case, but nothing so far off that the illusion ever breaks, even when scrutinized at this level.
The only exception Any Austin found is health; Red Dead’s vision of the wild west apparently includes much better dentistry, and consequently fuller sets of teeth, than a bunch of cowboys and farmers would have had access to a century ago. Still, considering you have to clip your camera into someone’s face to really notice it, it hardly seems like a big deal.
There are plenty more axes on which one could judge the historical accuracy of a game like Red Dead—stories of gunslinging cowboys like Arthur Morgan are, themselves, a romantic embellishment of American history. But given the use of real historical data in Any Austin’s experiment, it’s impressive to see how well Rockstar’s take on the American frontier holds up. And hey, if you think this is all a waste of time, you’re welcome to turn Arthur into a Super Monkey Ball instead.