John Marston pointing sawed-off shotgun on red desert background from Red Dead Redemption cover art

Red Dead Redemption

2010video game fandomclassic

Published September 24, 2026

Red Dead Redemption is Rockstar Games' 2010 open world Western starring outlaw John Marston, and it became a running fandom joke online thanks to physics glitches, sunset-teaser Photoshops, and the drawn-out wait for a PC port. The October 2016 sequel announcement supercharged the fan meme output, spawning teaser edits, subreddit petitions, and years of Old West shitposting.

gaming photoshop memes fandom hype memes early 2010s memes 2016 memes

Overview

Red Dead Redemption is a third-person open world action-adventure game set in the dying days of the American Old West, following former outlaw John Marston as he hunts down his old gang to save his family3. Rockstar built the fandom's meme fuel straight into the design: a morality system, tameable horses, ridable trains, and a physics engine loose enough that players quickly started uploading clips of NPCs being tied to railroad tracks or glitching into rideable mounts3.

The meme output around the game splits into two eras. The first wave was gameplay ephemera, glitch reels, blooper montages, and stunts staged for YouTube uploads circa 2010 to 20133. The second wave arrived with the October 2016 sequel tease, when Rockstar's cryptic red logo and sunset silhouette prompted a run of Photoshop edits riffing on Daft Punk, Rick and Morty, and Pulp Fiction2.

The fandom also carries a long-running grievance meme about platform exclusivity, since the original never got a PC port and players spent years agitating for one through petitions and subreddit threads1. That gripe kept resurfacing every time Rockstar teased new footage.

Origin & Background

Platform
Rockstar Games (source) / Reddit (viral spread)
Creator
Rockstar Games; meme edits by various fans
Date
2010

Rockstar Games released Red Dead Redemption on May 18, 2010 for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, followed by DLC packs including Undead Nightmare and a Game of the Year Edition in October 20113. The game hit an average score of 95/100 on Metacritic and had shipped over 14 million units by August 2015, giving it a large enough player base to sustain years of clip culture on YouTube and Reddit3.

The meme resurgence catalyst was Rockstar's mid-October 2016 tease, when the studio posted a red logo followed by a cowboy-silhouette sunset image, then confirmed Red Dead Redemption 2 for Fall 20173. Fans immediately began Photoshopping the sunset teaser, and VG247 covered the edits on October 18, 2016, spotlighting the Daft Punk 'Get Lucky' cover riff by Redditor EpicAbcdude alongside Rick and Morty and Pulp Fiction crossovers2. The same day, a fan on Change.org launched a petition demanding a PC release for the sequel4.

How It Spread

Fandom infrastructure had been in place for years before the sequel tease. The Red Dead Wiki launched on January 24, 2010 and grew past 1,800 pages, while the /r/reddeadredemption subreddit and a Facebook page rounded out the community footprint3. Early viral clips leaned into the game's ragdoll physics, with YouTubers like Robbaz uploading a woman-on-the-tracks stunt on May 21, 2010 and WhereDaBootz posting a glitch that let players ride a woman like a horse the next day3.

The 2016 sequel tease is what pushed the fandom back into meme territory. Rockstar's announcement tweet cleared 134,000 likes and 108,000 retweets in 24 hours, and a GamesRadar op-ed arguing that Red Dead Redemption 2 should ditch the Old West triggered a Reddit dogpile the following day under the headline joke 'When you sigh so hard you spit out your tonsils'3. The Change.org PC port petition gathered thousands of signatures within hours of going live4.

The meme cycle got a second wind in 2018 around the sequel's launch. On October 14, 2018, Vulture published a Rockstar feature quoting cofounder Dan Houser about '100-hour weeks,' which Kotaku followed up on the next day with Houser clarifying the workload referred to a four-person writing team's final three-week crunch5. That quote spread widely and became a talking point for renewed discussion of industry crunch.

Timeline

2011-10

Red Dead Redemption Game of the Year Edition bundles all DLC including Undead Nightmare.

Frequently Asked Questions