Read Ded Redemption 2 devs worked multiple 100 hour weeks in 2018 in order to meet deadline

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In early 2011, Dan began chatting with Rockstar San Diego about how Red Dead Redemption 2 would look and who the characters would be. Late that summer, he says, he had a “broad outline and rough flow of the game defined.” By fall 2012, his team had completed rough scripts for many of the game’s missions and started doing read-throughs on video conference calls with directors of game play, art design, and animation from Rockstar offices around the world. On those calls, Dan, who took some acting classes in school, sometimes performed every role. Says motion-capture director Rod Edge, “If the character is high intellect and has Dan’s energy, his acting is perfect.”

The final script for Red Dead Redemption 2’s main story was about 2,000 pages. But if he were to include all the side missions and additional dialogue, and stack the pages, Dan estimates the pile “would be eight feet high.” Bringing the script to life meant 2,200 days of motion-capture work — compared with just five for Grand Theft Auto III — requiring 1,200 actors, all SAG-AFTRA, 700 of them with dialogue. “We’re the biggest employers of actors in terms of numbers of anyone in New York, by miles,” says Dan. Before a motion-capture shoot that would last two or three weeks, there were meetings “four hours each day for four days. We want it as tight as possible for motion-capture because we’re burning a lot of money very quickly [at those sessions].”

“We always did try to dream big,” says Edge, who directed the majority of those sessions, beginning in 2013, at Rockstar’s motion capture studio in Bethpage, New York. As a kid, he says, he had always wanted to direct a Western, with Hitchcockian camera angles shot from characters’ perspectives, and John Ford’s “strong sense of framing.” But Red Dead Redemption 2 was “much harder to direct than a movie, when [the actors] are wearing skin-tight futuristic-looking [mo-cap] suits.”

The polishing, rewrites, and reedits Rockstar does are immense. “We were working 100-hour weeks” several times in 2018, Dan says. The finished game includes 300,000 animations, 500,000 lines of dialogue, and many more lines of code. Even for each RDR2 trailer and TV commercial, “we probably made 70 versions, but the editors may make several hundred. Sam and I will both make both make lots of suggestions, as will other members of the team.”

The result of all their labor, Dan says, is “this seamless, natural-feeling experience in a world that appears real, an interactive homage to the American rural experience. [It’s] a vast four-dimensional mosaic in which the fourth dimension is time, in which the world unfolds around you, dependent on what you do.”
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