The depiction of the Old West in Red Dead Redemption 2 is nothing short of remarkable. Rockstar's attention to detail is among the finest in the whole industry. One fan decided to test just how deep the developer went for the new frontier by surveying a town in RDR 2, and his findings are fascinating.
"We'll be conducting a census of the NPCs in the town of Valentine," YouTuber Any Austin states in the video. "The census will include employment status, employment industry, income level, age, and overall health, and the goal of the video will be to gather enough data about the people living here to do a demographic comparison between Valentine (fictional town from 1907) to real census and demographic data from 1907 frontier America."
This involves following and examining Valentine's NPCs thoroughly, examining their routines, responses to your presence, and their in-game models. In some cases, this is quite simple: the sheriffs, shopkeepers and service providers are all pretty easy to find at any given time, and come with flavor dialogue to answer the bulk of the questions needed.
But many of the other passers-by are harder, since Rockstar employs RNG to populate the map. In order to circumvent the randomization, Austin broke down the map into blocks and time slots, to ensure he got a strong sample of the NPCs that could appear there. It looks as tiring as it sounds, but it worked in providing a healthy amount of data.
The data he gathers demonstrates that Red Dead Redemption 2 is fairly close to legit. The unemployment rate is 4.5%, for instance, higher than the available stat of 1.8% nationally for the US in 1907, but much closer than you'd think. The same can be said for wealth and the spread of jobs within the town, though specific data points are hard to glean for this far back.
One inaccuracy that sticks outs is in oral hygiene. Rockstar's given people too many teeth, when folk missing a few - or more - would've been exceedingly normal. But that’s a rare gap in the general accuracy of the recreation.
"Even down to the hyper-specific details that you would dig up in something like a census, Red Dead Redemption 2 is really a pretty amazing representation of a slice of American history," Any Austin states at the end of the video. I can't wait to see what he discovers when going through GTA 6 with such a fine toothcomb.
