Red Dead Redemption 3: THIS Is The Perfect Setting
After World War I, the US experienced a massive economic boom. The roaring twenties had arrived, and with them came Prohibition, a nation-wide ban on alcohol that afforded new opportunities for criminals, with Al Capone amassing a vast criminal empire in the city of Chicago by bootlegging drink across the country. But it wasn't just Capone; as the Great Depression swept across the country in the wake of the Wall Street Crash, gangsters like John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde and Baby Face Nelson captured the imagination of the public, assuming Robin Hood-like status thanks to favourable coverage in the press, just as Jesse James had done half a century prior.
The similarities between the Depression era and the old west have long been broached in other media before. Works like The Untouchables, Lawless, Bonnie and Clyde, Public Enemies or even the recent Netflix feature The Highwaymen all touch on the common ground shared between the western and crime genres (specifically those films set in the 1930s), with the lattermost example even telling the story of Frank Hamer, a former Texas Ranger who led the posse that killed Bonnie and Clyde in 1934. It's a classic western story, only instead of six-shooters and old repeaters, it features Tommy Guns, BARs and Model-Ts.
Red Dead fans may ultimately consider the Public Enemy era of the 1930s too much of a leap from what they're familiar with, but the setting only provides more of what made Rockstar's previous titles so compelling; outlaws reckoning with the inevitability that their way of life is at an end. It's something you could even apply to law enforcement too, with bounty hunters and other aspects of the law being rendered obsolete by the 'G Men' of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. That crushing sense of inevitability might be doubly bleak with the Depression as a background, but there's a reason why it's a setting filmmakers have returned to time and again.
Even aside from the narrative, the gameplay possibilities are also exciting. It would be as if Rockstar mashed their two most popular franchises into one (the other being GTA), mixing the open plains of the Dust Bowl with a metropolis modelled on Chicago, with players engaged in a manner of different criminal enterprises. Heck, maybe Rockstar switch perspectives and have you cast as a Hamer-esque lawmen dealing with that now familiar sense of inevitability, or a moderniser like Elliot Ness arriving to change things around?
As far as long-shots go, they don't get much longer, but it's something Rockstar could definitely do wonders with if they ever felt bold enough - or crazy enough, admittedly - to do so.
Would you play a Red Dead game set during Prohibition? Let us know in the comments below!