Lazlow Jones on writing Red Dead Redemption 2: "I spent years of my life writing in the 1899 vernacular"

Red Dead Redemption 2 is one of the most highly-rated games of all time and was the last original title Rockstar released back in 2018.

The game is set in 1899 during the Wild West era and sees players take on the role of Arthur Morgan whose gang is involved in a robbery that goes badly wrong.

He and the gang then have to rob, steal and fight their way across rugged America to survive and there's loads to do along the way.

Lazlow Jones was given the responsibility to write the scripts for the game, spoke to Indy100 and gave a fascinating insight into how he wrote one of the best games of all time.

"I spent years of my life writing in the 1899 vernacular, whether it was dialogue for characters, news articles or researching and writing songs for people to sit around a campfire," he said.

"I would write a script for a character in Red Dead 2, he (Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser) would edit and we would be good to go but then we'd have someone in research say 'you've used a word here that didn't appear until 1905 and this scene is in 1899', so you'd need to change that.

"That was very challenging - I'd written for 20, 30 years in modern times. I always joked I disappeared into 1899 but I really did.

"All my current subscriptions of magazines were stacking up in the corner as I was reading magazines from that time period online; there's a fantastic database of newspapers from America dating back to the 1950s.

"I read those every day to see what the concern of the times was, the way people reacted to events and I had to really learn to change the way I wrote so it felt like that time period.

"Even the brands in that game, and you'd see advertisements in it from the newspaper, and the newspaper itself, I wrote almost entirely by myself as the newspaper dynamically changes as you play the game and stories swapped out based on things you do.

"Writing humour in an 1899 time period was distinctly different than the comedy Dan and I had written for GTA 5 but it had to be amusing with today's sensibilities.

"If you look at comedy from 1899, what they considered funny we might not find funny anymore so it was finding that twist that was a challenge - but I loved it.

"I love these huge ambitious projects and universes where there's a ton of writing because the only way you get better at writing is by writing."

Jones worked at Rockstar from 2001 to 2020 before leaving to focus on his family and then co-founding Absurd Ventures with Houser.

He explained why he thinks Rockstar has managed to enjoy such sustained success for a number of decades and part of that is that attention to detail.

"From day one, Dan has a creative vision and he gets every department and team member on board with that and, of course, throughout the process we're adding characters and fun things to do but he has that vision in his head in the story he wants to tell, the characters and their struggles," Jones said.

"He keeps everything on track and on tone in the universe and with the storytelling - I would write tons of scripts for characters, media and the world, conversations too, and every one of those would go to Dan to look over and make sure it was on tone.

"I think having that direction from day one, and him keeping an eye on every aspect of production, you get to the point working with others you can start to guess with 80-90 per cent accuracy if Dan would feel if it was on tone.

"There was a huge commitment to authenticity; one of the things Rockstar excelled at was making authentic worlds with a level of authenticity other game developers have not pulled off to that scale."

And that attention to detail extends far beyond just scripting.

"Dan wanted to pioneer the concept of interaction with the world and having NPCs in the universe that remember your behaviour," he said about Red Dead Redemption 2.

"It always felt a bit weird to us that you'd be playing the game, you'd see a guy walking down the street, you'd shoot him and then you'd come back an hour later and he's there saying 'hey, how are you doing?'

"We gave the characters persistent memories which then affected the gameplay.

"If you ran around just grieving everybody and shooting up the shops, it made your life harder because then you couldn't go into the shop and buy supplies.

"That required a lot of planning by a lot of super talented people on the coding and game mechanics side and a ton of work on our end writing and recording all of those scripts.

"Every character walking around that world had hundreds and hundreds of lines of dialogue."

Jones spoke to Indy100 ahead of the launch of Absurd Venture's A Better Paradise Volume One: An Aftermath fictional podcast out June 10.

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