Bizarre Things Gamers Did In Red Dead Redemption 2

Red Dead Redemption 2 isn't as inherently silly as Rockstar Games' other big franchise, Grand Theft Auto. In one, the main character gets high and shoots at aliens. In the other, the lead spends half of the campaign dying of tuberculosis. Both operate on the same general hook, however: here's a giant, detailed, and dynamic open world, here are some ways to get in trouble, now go out there and make your own fun.

And boy, people have. There's nothing fundamentally strange about Red Dead Redemption 2's Old West setting (well, aside from all of the UFOs, the time travelers, the vampires, and the ghosts), but that hasn't stopped players from finding some truly bizarre ways to play the game anyway. As time passes, more and more people who enjoy Red Dead Redemption 2 and its multiplayer component, Red Dead Online, are pushing the boundaries of what's capable in the game. As you'd expect, things get pretty weird. Here's proof.

Red Dead Redemption 2's map is gigantic, but it's also finite. Play long enough, and you'll eventually see the whole thing. At that point, you're going to have two questions: how else can you amuse yourself in Rockstar's digital Western, and what lies beyond Red Dead Redemption 2's borders?

A few intrepid explorers found the answers. Unlike the first Red Dead Redemption, RDR2 doesn't include Mexico as a playable location, but that didn't stop players from getting there anyway. After completing the main campaign, you can use a glitch to escape the game's invisible barriers and make your way into the country. There, a healthy supply of stamina and health tonics, plus a horse delivered via cheat codes, will let you explore Mexico at your leisure. There's not much to it, of course — it's mostly wide-open plains and Red Dead Redemption's El Presidio prison — but it's there if you want to see it.

For some people, however, Mexico wasn't enough. They wanted to go even further. So, they did. They rode beyond Mexico, and found the surreal dreamscape beyond: a flat, grassy land filled with storm clouds. The actual, literal end of the world. The vast sea that lies beyond, and ultimately ends at the Caribbean island of Guarma, which features in Red Dead Redemption 2's fifth chapter. It's an odd, unsettling journey that doesn't really offer anything new, but that doesn't matter. If it's there, Red Dead Redemption 2 players will explore it. That's good enough.

In Red Dead Redemption 2's single-player campaign, Arthur Morgan keeps a detailed journal that keeps track of his various adventures, discoveries, and other details about his time in the Wild, Wild West. Red Dead Online doesn't have a comparable feature. If you run across something interesting in your travels — or if you just need some help remembering what you were up to the last time you played — you're going to have to write about it yourself.

Reddit user and Red Dead Redemption fan ps4noob92 doesn't just take notes when he plays Red Dead Online, however. He's created an entire, real-life journal that expertly captures all of the intricacies of Arthur's in-game diary. Some of his journal entries recount ps4noob92's daily adventures. Others poetically muse on the nature of life on the frontier. There are illustrations, odes to his horse, and more.

Of course, there's one big difference between ps4noob92's journal and Arthur's. Arthur's story is a tragedy about the taming of the American West. Ps4noob92 is playing a video game filled with griefers and trolls. "I love fishing," one of ps4noob92's entries begins. "Now imagine my surprise when I found out I was the one being fished," it continues, along with a drawing of ps4noob92's character getting lassoed by a fellow player. "I spent two hours hunting down xXpussyslayer14Xx," another reads. "I lost my hat again," one page says, along with a picture of ps4noob92 getting his head blown off.

Cass Marshall, a gaming journalist at Polygon, loves her Red Dead Online horse. Her friends do not. "He is a sin," one member of Marshall's posse says. "Hayseed is a mistake and a burden," another observes. "It's not unreasonable to have both it and its owner exiled to the far reaches of the snowy north," a third comments.

See, Hayseed is one of Red Dead Redemption 2's Belgian Draft horses, which means that he is strong, slow, and big. Very, very big. No, Hayseed doesn't have all that much stamina. No, Hayseed can't take corners very gracefully, and he'll never beat smaller, faster animals in a straight-up race. That doesn't mean that Hayseed isn't useful. Marshall can use Hayseed as a barrier when things get tight, keeping anyone else from progressing through choke points. Instead of whipping out pistols to take out enemies, Marshall simply points Hayseed at them and charges ahead, trampling foes underneath the beast's massive feet.

Of course, like other Belgians, Hayseed doesn't handle well, and often tramples Marshall's traveling companions by accident. Sometimes, he kills them. Marshall insists on taking Hayseed with her everywhere, too, even places where horses aren't supposed to go, ruining Red Dead Online's immersive qualities. When Marshall's friends try to get revenge by murdering Hayseed, they die. Hayseed, on the other hand, doesn't seem any the worse for wear. And so, Marshall keeps using him. So what if Hayseed pisses her friends off? That just makes Marshall love him even more.

Red Dead Redemption 2 is rated Mature for a reason — actually, for a bunch of reasons. Battles are filled with "large blood-splatter effects," and often pause for "close-up, slow-motion view[s] of enemies getting shot and killed." The game rewards you for breaking the law, and encourages players to steal, cheat, and murder. There's graphic nudity and plenty of profanities and racial slurs. One crucial power-up is straight-up made out of cocaine. It is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a game for children.

And yet, for some reason, people have decided to try and make it one anyway. On Lifehacker, there's an entire guide for playing Red Dead Redemption 2 in "dad mode," turning Rockstar's Old West criminal simulator into something as "wholesome as a Roy Rogers Western." Don't do any story missions, which tend to devolve into chaos and debauchery. Use blackjack to teach your kid math. Hunting is gruesome but fishing and horse-rearing are pretty tame, and RDR2's magic lantern shows are a lot better than those creepy made-for-kids YouTube videos.

So what if that goes against Red Dead's outlaw spirit? Who cares if you'll have to play with the sound off in case a passing NPC drops an f-bomb or tells an unsavory story? Does it really matter that you'll probably be graphically disemboweled by a bear at least once while the kids are watching, or that there are plenty of other games out there that are both fun and actually age-appropriate? They're your children. Expose them to whatever media you want. Just don't forget to tuck a little extra away for their therapy bills. Trust us. They'll need it.

Animals play a big part in Red Dead Redemption 2 — murdering them does, that is. If you want the best upgrades that the game provides, you'll need to spend hours executing wild beasts, brutally skinning them with your knife, and hauling their bloody, desecrated corpses around in order to offload their body parts at the local trapper or your camp.

On the other hand, if animal cruelty makes you squeamish, you can always ignore the upgrades and play RDR2 like Audobon's Nicholas Lund does. Lund, an avid birder, doesn't kill Red Dead's feathered friends (or, at least, he doesn't always kill them). He simply observes them, turning Rockstar's open-world opus into a quiet bird-watching simulator. It's pretty easy to do. Red Dead even gives Arthur a pair of binoculars, which you can use to find some of the game's rarest breeds.

As Lund notes, bird watching was only just becoming a thing in 1899, when Red Dead Redemption 2 takes place, but the game's virtual fauna is so detailed that you can easily turn Arthur Morgan into an actual tally hunter. A few mistakes aside, RDR2's birds often have the same markings as their real-life counterparts, are found in similar habitats, and have fairly accurate bird calls. Lund even provides a checklist for aspiring birders to follow. Unusual? Maybe, but on the other hand, it sure beats going outside.

Making money in Red Dead Online can be a grind, so when people find a shortcut, you'd better believe that that they'll take advantage of it. That's why, at one point, many players rode into town only to find pile after pile of cougar corpses waiting for them.

See, in Red Dead Online, a top-tier cougar body will get you a cool $13.50 from the local butcher. That's not a lot by today's standards, but in 1899, it was a small fortune. That's only half of the story, however. These cougars weren't hunted and killed. They were cloned, science fiction-style. In March 2019, players discovered a glitch that created infinite animal corpses. If you had a body on your horse and entered a shop for a few minutes, the horse would disappear. The corpse wouldn't. Even better, when you called your horse again, it'd still have an animal strapped to its back, giving players twice as many.

You can probably see where this is going. Enterprising players used this glitch to create piles of cougar corpses, which ended up dominating towns like Blackwater and Valentine. Eventually, it seems that Rockstar caught on, and some players reported that they could no longer sell cougars for money — but until then, the streets ran red with cougar blood, making entrepreneurs rich and terrifying players who weren't in the know.

Reddit user and Red Dead Online player Oakoak021 wanted to spread some holiday cheer to his fellow outlaws for Christmas, but Red Dead Redemption 2 doesn't have sleighs, or reindeer, or jolly old men who slide down chimneys. So, Oakoak021 had to improvise. The would-be Saint Nick secured a cart in Strawberry, and then stopped by the Dakota River to catch some fish. Then, it was back to town to hand out the results as gifts to anyone who passed by.

By Red Dead Online standards, a pike isn't a bad gift — you can get $8 for one at the butcher — and, like they say, it's really the thought that counts. Oakoak021's fellow players seemed to appreciate the gesture, too. On Reddit, Oakoak21 said that they'd passed out nine fish "and only got killed once." If you've spent any time in Red Dead Redemption Online, you know that that's quite a feat.

Not that everything went smoothly, of course. Sometimes, the pikes glitched or despawned, leaving Oakoak21's wagon empty. At one point, the back of the wagon opened up, sending Oakoak21's bounty back to the river. Still, all-in-all, it was a fairly successful operation, and Oakoak021's seems to have inspired others to share the joy. In the same thread, Redditor angelpuncher writes, "I was hunting way up North and had more stuff than I could carry. Found a dude fishing and stuck a perfect grizzly pelt on his horse," before adding, "Not everyone in this game is an ass."

Red Dead Redemption 2 has plenty of weapons, but sometimes you want to go old school. Sometimes, nothing less than pummeling your foes into submission with your bare fists will do. If that feeling sounds familiar, then we've got some good news: many players out there are organizing their very own Red Dead Online fight clubs. Would-be Tyler Durdens can log in, punch someone out (or get punched out), disavow the feelings of emasculation that go hand-in-hand with consumer culture, and head home feeling like a real man. It's that simple.

In fact, if you're really good at Red Dead Online's melee combat, you can even earn real money for your trouble. The Wapinschaw Gang, one of the most active Red Dead Online posses on social media, holds weekly events that often include bare-knuckle fighting tournaments. Sometimes, the prizes are simple in-game items, like pelts. At others, Wapinschaw hands out a purse with $10 worth of PlayStation Network credits to the winners.

Wapinshchaw isn't the only game in town, either. In fact, there's an entire subreddit devoted to Red Dead Online fight clubs, so whether you play on the PS4 or Xbox One, you should be able to find a group to join. Oh, and now that fight clubs have been established, what's the next combat sport popping up in Red Dead Online? Why, jousting, of course.

Red Dead Online's persistent posses are basically fraternities. They're social groups that you join so that you always have people around who you can team up with when you feel like causing trouble. As such, it's no surprise that, like frats, some Red Dead Online posses have fairly elaborate initiation ceremonies that players must suffer through before they're fully-minted members of online gangs.

Naturally, most of these initiations involve violence or some sort of danger. The so-called \/\/atson's Gang, for example, forces pledges to jump through all kinds of hoops before they can join. Prospective members need to show off their prowess by performing a "noteworthy deed/action," proving their worth in a gang war, and completing an involved ritual that includes beating both of the gang's founders in a fistfight. The Wapinschaw Gang forces new recruits to jump off the edge of a cliff while the rest of the posse stands around, lassoing them as they fall. That's the idea, anyway — as one video shows, things don't always go according to plan.

No word yet on whether or not Red Dead Online posse members have found a way to force horses upstairs and shoot them with blanks as part of a hazing ritual, but you know what? Red Dead Redemption 2 players are a creative punch. It's only a matter of time.

Kidnapping is a crime, but so are bank robberies, train heists, and murder, so you can forgive these Red Dead Online players for doing what the game tells them to do and breaking the law — especially when the results are this hilarious.

Redditor rainyradio and a buddy were on a routine hunting trip when they ran across a player who was idle. Half an hour later, that player was still there. So, the two outlaws did the only logical thing: they hogtied him and dragged him all over Red Dead Redemption 2's map for a series of adventures. They took the hogtied player to the mountains, where they rode through the snow. They took him camping. They took him on a fishing trip, and they proudly displayed him on the bar during a night of drinking.

Thankfully, they also documented the entire thing via photographs, letting the rest of the Red Dead Online community in on the fun. In fact, rainyradio says that they even sent their unwitting partner in crime photos of all of their shenanigans, although the player never responded. Watch out when you leave your Red Dead Online character unattended. Even if you're not at the controller, you never know what he or she is going to get up to.