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

Red Dead Redemption 2 is one of the highest rated games of all time and was the last original title released by Rockstar in 2018.

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

He and the gang must then rob, steal and fight their way through the harsh America to survive, and there is plenty to do.

Lazlow Jones was tasked with writing the game’s scripts and spoke to Indy100 and gave some fascinating insight into the process of writing one of the greatest games of all time.

“I spent years of my life writing in the vernacular of 1899, whether it was dialogue for characters, newspaper articles, or researching and writing songs for people sitting around a campfire,” he said.

“I would write a script for a character in Red Dead 2he (Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser) edited it and we were good to go, but then someone in research said, “You used a word here that didn’t appear until 1905, and this scene takes place in 1899,” so you’d have to change that.

“It was a big challenge – I had been writing in modern times for 20, 30 years. I always joked that I disappeared in 1899, but I really did.

“All my current magazine subscriptions were piled up in the corner as I read magazines from that era online. There’s a fantastic database of newspapers from America going back to the 1950s.

“I read them every day to see what was going on at the time, how people were reacting to events, and I really had to learn to change my writing style to make it feel like that time period.

“Even the stamps in this game and the newspaper ads contained within them, as well as the newspaper itself, are almost entirely my own work, as the newspaper changes dynamically throughout the game and stories are swapped out based on the actions you perform.

“Writing humor in 1899 was markedly different from the comedy that Dan and I had been writing. GTA5 but it had to be amusing for today’s sensibilities.

“If you look at the comedy of 1899, what was funny then may not be funny today. So it was a challenge to find the right twist – but I loved it.”

“I love these huge, ambitious projects and universes where there is a lot of writing to do, because only by writing can you get better at writing.”

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

He explained why he believes Rockstar has had such sustained success over the decades and that this is partly due to their attention to detail.

“From day one, Dan has a creative vision and he brings every department and every team member on board. Of course, we add characters and fun things as we go along, but he has this vision in his head of the story he wants to tell, the characters and their struggles,” Jones said.

“He keeps everything on track and in the right tone in the universe and the storytelling. I wrote loads of scripts for the characters, the media and the world, including conversations, and each one went to Dan, who would look at it and make sure it was in the right tone.

“I think when you have those instructions from day one and he’s keeping an eye on every aspect of the production, you get to the point where you’re working with others and you can guess with 80 to 90 percent accuracy whether Dan feels something is in the right tone.

“Authenticity was given great importance. One of the things that Rockstar excelled at was creating authentic worlds with a level of authenticity that other game developers have not achieved to this extent.”

And this attention to detail goes far beyond mere scripting.

“Dan wanted to pioneer the way we interact with the world and create NPCs in the universe that remember your behavior,” he said of Red Dead Redemption 2.

“It was always a little weird for us that you’d play the game, see a guy walking down the street, shoot him, and then come back an hour later and he’d be there and say, ‘Hey, how are you?'”

“We gave the characters lasting memories that then impacted the gameplay.

“Going around mourning everyone and raiding the stores made life harder because you couldn’t go to the stores and buy supplies.

“It took a lot of planning by a lot of super talented people on the coding and game mechanics side, and a lot of work on our part writing and recording all of those scripts.

“Every character that walks around in this world has hundreds and hundreds of lines of dialogue.”

Jones spoke to Indy100 ahead of the launch of Absurd Ventures A Better Paradise, Volume 1: An Aftermath fictional podcast, released on June 10th.