Only 20% of people finished Red Dead 2.

I have taken this personally.

Four out of five of you bought it and put it down, mostly in the same chapter. So here I am, a stranger, about to spend a whole webpage trying to talk you into going back. No spoilers. I've clearly got nothing better to do.

scroll ↓ the game's own theme is up top if you fancy feeling something

Here's the bit that broke me.

Everyone who bought it starts on the left. The line drops every time someone gives up and doesn't come back. Run your cursor along it. See where it falls off a cliff? That's Chapter Two. That's you. Statistically. Sorry.

You quit the good bit. Genuinely the good bit.

That's Chapter Two. The camp, the gold mornings over the valley, the gang before anything has gone wrong. People who finished go misty about this exact place. And it's where most of you stood up, stretched, and went to play something else.

I know why you left.
It got slow.

This is where the shooting stops and suddenly you're feeding a horse and riding twenty minutes to collect a man's debt. It feels like nothing is happening. That's the whole trick. It's the game teaching you to slow down, and it's the single most loved thing about it by the people who didn't quit. Annoying, isn't it.

Here is, roughly, what you have not seen.

You didn't play a shorter Red Dead. You played about a tenth of it and left. The bars are you, against what's actually in there.

And none of these bars are even the story yet. The story is further in than any of you got.

all of it still out there, at dawn, waiting for you to come back for it.

And look what they made. For you. For nobody.

Half a billion pounds. Eight years. Two thousand people. Five hundred thousand lines of dialogue. A fortune of it went on things you will never notice.

the towns

The barman in Valentine remembers if you were rude to him last Tuesday. Help a stranger on the road and days later he'll find you in town and buy you a present.

the horses

A horse's testicles shrink in the cold and grow back in the heat. Leave it filthy and it gets ill. Don't wash yourself and people tell you that you smell. Somebody animated all of that for the one player in a thousand who'd ever check.

the world

The moon does the actual moon. Towns get bigger while you play. New train track is shiny, old track has rusted. Nobody asked for any of this.

the secrets

A crashed flying machine with the pilot still strapped in. A working UFO. A cult in the woods. Thirty-odd of these, and about 85 in 100 players find precisely none.

and

And this is just the furniture. It isn't even the game. It's the stuff sitting around the game.

And I haven't even mentioned the story.

Because I'm not going to. That would be a genuinely evil thing to do to you. All I'll say is this. There is a version of Arthur Morgan you have never met, and the people who met him have been obsessed for seven years. This won more Game of the Year awards than anything ever made, over a hundred and seventy-five, almost entirely for a part you never reached. When someone tells you a game made them cry, it is usually this one. You stopped a bend in the road before it started. Maddening.

So. Homework.

Load your old save. Or start again from the snow, it's genuinely better the second time. Ride back up to that camp and let it be slow this time, on purpose. Give it a few hours past where you stopped. Then come and find me and tell me I was right. First though, be honest with me:

? of the world

Pick your last chapter, and I'll show you how much of the map you actually rode into.

Most people never got past the second one, so no need to be shy about it.

I get nothing out of this. It just does my head in that you got that close to the best thing and turned the horse around.

Finished it already? Tell me what they're missing, no spoilers, and I'll pass it on. That's the whole thing. Go and play Red Dead.

completion figures from steam's public achievement stats, mapped to story chapters; scale figures rockstar / wikipedia. steam counts everyone who owns the game, so the "of people who really played" number runs a bit higher. music is the game's own main theme. not affiliated with rockstar games or take-two. written by a fan, about a horse game.