By The hype for Red Dead Redemption 2 is getting extremely intense ahead of the release on 26 October. If you need something to fill the empty hours until it arrives, you could go right back to the start of the Red Dead series and revisit its largely-forgotten forebear, Red Dead Revolver.
Red Dead Redemption isn't a sequel to Revolver as such - they both take place in the Old West and feature a lot of shooting and spittoons, and that's about it - but it's a clear and deeply weird spiritual predecessor.
The story starts out following gold prospectors Nate and Griff, who celebrate a find by buying commemoratory revolvers. However, when Griff is captured by the Mexican army he double-crosses Nate, who's killed along with his wife. His son Red survives, though, and goes on to become bounty hunter. There follows a lot of gunplay, vengeance, gold-chasing and slave labour down the mines.
Despite how grim that sounds, the game was relentlessly goofy, partly because of the knockabout arcade vibe of the gameplay. That's down to Rockstar buying the game off Capcom (who'd been putting it together as a reboot of the arcade shooter Gun Smoke) halfway through its development and polishing it off rather than building it from the spurs up. That might explain the interlude in which Red has to liberate a bowler-hatted, monocle-wearing Englishman from the clutches of a colony of mad clowns who live in an abandoned windmill, and the multiplayer deathmatch character who could fly.
The artwork suggests Red himself was modelled quite closely on Clint Eastwood, but with PS2 graphics being what they were he looked more like a grimacing Desperate Dan. Meanwhile the chunky, cliché-crammed world of the Old West he roamed around looked like it had been put together out of large chunks of polystyrene.
Then again, some clichés were extremely welcome, not least the Spaghetti Western-referencing soundtrack which featured tunes from classic films. You might have recognised Revolver's main theme when it turned up in Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained as the theme for Christoph Waltz's Dr King Schultz, having originally been written for the 1971 Italian Western His Name Was King.
Red Dead Revolver was a fairly decent-sized hit when it landed in 2004 but is nearly forgotten now. That's partly because it was dwarfed by Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas when it landed three months after Revolver's release, and suddenly its arcade-style shoot-'em-up missions looked a little bit dated compared to GTA's open-world thrills. Red Dead Redemption 2 is a long old pony trek away from its grandpappy Revolver on pretty much every level aside from being based on the same land mass. It might be nice, though, if it nodded back to its roots by including a mad clown or two.
