Red Dead Redemption

Red Dead Redemption is an open-world action-adventure game developed by Rockstar San Diego and published by Rockstar Games, released for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in 2010. Set in 1911, in the last days of the American frontier, it follows John Marston, a retired outlaw forced by federal agents to hunt down the surviving members of his old gang across the border states of a fictionalized West and northern Mexico. Where Grand Theft Auto satirized modern America, Red Dead Redemption took the country's founding myth, the Western, and played it straight and elegiac: an open range of deserts, plains, and frontier towns, filled with gunfights, horse work, bounties, and strangers, all shadowed by the arrival of the modern age that has no room for men like Marston. Widely acclaimed for its writing, world, and score, it won numerous Game of the Year awards and is regularly ranked among the finest games ever made. The Undead Nightmare expansion turned its West into a zombie B-movie, and a celebrated prequel, Red Dead Redemption 2, followed in 2018. As the American myth itself in playable form, it missed the Most American list only because Rockstar was already on it with Vice City.