A Red Dead Redemption 2 enthusiast set out to test how faithfully Rockstar recreated daily life on the Wild West. The creator behind the YouTube channel Any Austin carried out a census of Valentine’s inhabitants and compared the results with real US statistics from 1907.
We’ll conduct a census of the NPCs in the town of Valentine. It will record employment, occupation, income level, age, and health status. The purpose is to gather enough data to compare Valentine (a fictional 1907 town) with actual demographic records of the Wild West.
He monitored NPC behavior, their routes, and reactions. Sheriffs and merchants were easy to identify — their dialogue immediately signals their trade. Observing ordinary passersby was more complex: because characters spawn randomly, he broke the map into sectors and observed them over timed intervals.
The collected data showed that RDR2 portrays the era fairly faithfully. The measured unemployment rate was 4.5% versus the historical 1.8%. The breakdown of occupations and residents’ wealth also aligned closely with early 20th-century statistics. The most notable discrepancy was dental health — characters had “too many teeth,” whereas missing teeth were common at the time.
The researcher summed up:
Even when examined with the granular detail that only a census can provide, Red Dead Redemption 2 remains a striking reflection of American history.
Source: iXBT.games