Rumor: Red Dead Redemption Code Implies It Could Have Been A Real Remaster

There’s some new evidence that suggests we could have gotten a full remaster of Red Dead Redemption.

As reported by Game Rant, a dataminer who uses the handle National Pepper, real name Vadim, went through the code for the Nintendo Switch version of Red Dead Redemption. What they had discovered is that the name of the executable itself is rderremaster.exe.

National Pepper then pointed out that there were early rumors corroborated by this data. Those rumors were that Rockstar would have made a full remaster of Red Dead Redemption, but changed their mind after the backlash of the Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy Definitive Edition. National Pepper also opines that we may get a similar port for Grand Theft Auto IV in the future.

Just so we are on the same page, Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy Definitive Edition deserved its bad reviews, and is still a very poorly put together anthology. While many fans pointed fingers at the unknown developer Grove Street Games for the poor conversion, that accusation isn’t entirely fair, as they were hampered by budget and other concerns, and were not given enough to make it a worthy remake of these games.

They also were dealt a bad hand in general, because many of the original assets had gone missing, meaning they couldn’t use that original code to upresolution and make a proper port. Grove Street Games were also given the unreasonable task to work on three full Grand Theft Auto games. That workload forced them to make decisions such as using AI to upresolution all the games’ signs, and then manually correct them afterwards.

All of this is to say that, if this rumor is true, Take Two Interactive made a lot of consecutive mistakes here, leaving fans unhappy, and obviously, also leading to them making less money than they had hoped for.

Now, this rerelease of Red Dead Redemption may be disappointing, but at least Take Two did the bare minimum to make an acceptable product. Double Eleven at least seemed to get enough time and resources to make sure that these ports would pass scrutiny to be above the quality of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions, even if only barely.

But we can’t help but wonder, if Take Two’s decision making led to making a proper current generation port of Red Dead Redemption, that included PCs, and the multiplayer mode, if Take Two would have made even more money by spending that much money.

Maybe that’s something the company could work on in the future. For what it’s worth, if you are a Nintendo fan, the cards aligned so that the Switch version of this game seems to be the most worthwhile purchase that is available, with performance very close to the PlayStation 4 version.