10 Things You Didn't Know About Red Dead Redemption

9. The Score Was Made In Fifteen Months

There is a reason the older GTA games had such amazing licensed soundtracks: Rockstar had no experience creating original scores. Instead of doing it themselves in-house, the company instead opted to use existing music to texture their titles, and it more than worked in their favour.

With Red Dead Redemption, though, that wouldn't be an option. For one, licensed music would clash with the authenticity of the setting, while using pre-existing pieces of score written for Western movies would only make Red Dead feel like a pastiche or a rip-off, and Rockstar very much wanted this project to be an addition to Western canon, not simply an imitation of it.

Consequently, it was one of the first titles the publisher created to draft people in to build the soundtrack from scratch. Bill Elm and Woody Jackson were brought on board, but the process of making a game score was markedly different from crafting that of a movie.

For one, they were used to knocking something out in 12 weeks, whereas work on RDR was completed over 15 months. Incorporating influences with their own ideas, the duo described the process as incredibly freeform, but the initially daunting freedom resulted in one of the most distinct gaming soundtracks of the past decade.