Player Conducts In-Game Census in Red Dead Redemption 2, Praises Its Historical Accuracy as “Impressive”

The portrayal of the Old West in Red Dead Redemption 2 is truly exceptional. Rockstar’s meticulous attention to detail sets a high standard in the gaming industry. One dedicated fan took it upon himself to explore just how deep this commitment goes by conducting a survey of the town of Valentine, and the results are intriguing.

In a video, YouTuber Any Austin explains, “We’ll be conducting a census of the NPCs in the town of Valentine. The census will include employment status, employment industry, income level, age, and overall health, aiming to gather enough data to compare Valentine (a fictional town from 1907) with real census and demographic data from 1907 frontier America.”

This process involves closely following and analyzing the NPCs in Valentine, observing their daily routines, interactions, and in-game appearances. Some characters, like sheriffs and shopkeepers, are easy to locate and provide the necessary dialogue to answer most questions.

However, many other townsfolk are more elusive due to Rockstar’s use of random number generation to populate the area. To tackle this randomness, Austin divided the map into sections and time slots, ensuring a robust sample of NPCs. It sounds exhausting, but it yielded a wealth of data.

The findings reveal that Red Dead Redemption 2 is surprisingly accurate. For example, the unemployment rate in the game is 4.5%, which is higher than the national average of 1.8% in the US for 1907, but still closer than one might expect. The distribution of wealth and job types in Valentine also aligns reasonably well with historical data, although specific figures from that era are challenging to pinpoint.

One notable discrepancy is in the portrayal of oral hygiene; Rockstar has given many characters an abundance of teeth, while it would have been common for people of that time to be missing a few. Nonetheless, this is a minor flaw in an otherwise impressive historical representation.

“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 concludes in the video. It will be exciting to see what he uncovers when he applies the same meticulous approach to GTA 6.