Kyle Barr
In a not-quite-filled stage at New York Comic Con, the voices who won’t leave my head talked about the game I can’t stop thinking about. A whole swath of the main cast from Red Dead Redemption II came to New York Comic Con this year to talk about a game that first hit store shelves in 2018. For fans who played it then, and may still play it now, those characters are so real, the people who spoke that dialogue and—in some cases—threw each other around a stage for mo-cap, somehow seem like figments.
Why is the cast of a near-six-year-old game even at Comic Con 2024? Likely because Rockstar hopes to promote that the original Red Dead Redemption along with the DLC Undead Nightmare are finally coming to PC. It’s only taken Rockstar 14 years to bring the original open world cowboy sim to a platform PC gamers can officially play, but I estimate there’s many people still relishing these games years or decades after release.
Because I sure as hell am. I can’t stop thinking of Red Dead Redemption II. In my head, I’m still reliving the scene of Arthur Morgan, portrayed by Roger Clark, and Sister Calderón (Irene DeBari) sitting on a bench in front of a train, talking about the essence of a good person and what we can do with our lives when we know our time will soon come.
“It was the first time I had ever seen a cowboy admit that he was scared of dying,” Clark told the crowd.
Every other member of the cast who rode the stage coach to Comic Con sounds so much like their character it’s uncanny. Most did not have to do more than inflect their voice to bring out the manic idealism of Dutch van der Linde (Benjamin Byron Davis) and the punk and deadbeat father—eventually redeemed—of John Marston (Rob Wiethoff). Clark doesn’t sound like his character. The accent was born out of a friend who used to mimic the languid, western tones of his father.
Rockstar is notorious for casting relative unknowns in its games. The developer also hires hundreds of them, but the host of VO for the main characters up on stage couldn’t delve much into their characters, or even remember most of the lines from the game many of them first starting working on close to 11 years ago. They’re actors, but that doesn’t necessarily make them as sharp and eloquent as the characters they portray.
When one fan asked the actors about their favorite lines, few could point to anything specific. Davis mentioned the line “this is America, you can always cut a deal,” a line that stands out because it comes at such a pivotal scene, just before Dutch starts to truly spiral into the worst version of himself. Peter Blomquist, who played the “snake” Micah Bell, said his favorite line was “Dutch, get over here and dance with me,” dialogue that—of course—is nowhere in the game. Blomquist swore with a devil’s grin that the dialogue is somewhere on the game’s cutting room floor.
One notable fan asked the question any Red Dead fan asked themselves when playing the game. “What was ‘the plan?’” Of course, the answer is, there wasn’t one. There couldn’t have been a plan when the world was telling Dutch and the whole Van der Linde gang there wasn’t a place for them anymore, not with their ideals—slim as they were.
“Make a lot of noise, make a lot of money, and get the hell out of here,” Davis quotes from the game.
What’s the plan for the future of Red Dead? “Red Dead 3’s already out,” Clark said. “It came out yesterday, after lunchtime.”
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