An enthusiast placed all the regions of the Red Dead Redemption duology on a real map of America – from Montana to Cuba

Rockstar never builds exact copies of real places – the studio assembles America as a collage of recognizable details. Snow-capped peaks sit next to swamps, and you can gallop from windswept plains to a cactus-dotted desert in fifteen minutes without your brain putting up a fight.

That's the exact blend someone tried to take apart on Reddit, where a player overlaid the maps of Red Dead Redemption 2 and the original game onto the actual geography of the US and Mexico.

The map is color-coded by ownership: purple marks land available only in RDR1, yellow shows territory added in the sequel, and turquoise covers ground shared by both games. What comes out of it is a rough sketch of which pieces of the real country Rockstar used to build its version of the West.

Here's how it breaks down:

• Ambarino lands on the Rocky Mountains and the northern states – Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho

• Big Valley covers the west, stretching from California and Nevada to Utah

• New Hanover, home to Valentine and Annesburg, moves to the Midwest – Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, and Ohio

• Lemoyne gets the South, with Saint Denis sitting right where New Orleans is

• West Elizabeth, with Strawberry and Blackwater, spans from Utah and Colorado down to Texas

• New Austin, with Armadillo and Tumbleweed, falls onto Texas and New Mexico

• Nuevo Paraíso covers northern Mexican states along the border, while Guarma turns out to be an island in the Caribbean Sea east of Cuba

The most interesting part of this whole exercise isn't matching up cities – it's the scale. The in-game map covers roughly 75 square kilometers, while the territory it represents stretches across millions. Saint Denis, with its streetcars and grimy docks, reads as New Orleans, but in-game Louisiana is the size of a big park.

There's a special irony to the purple zones. Nuevo Paraíso physically exists in the Red Dead Redemption 2 files as scenery across the river, but you can't legally set foot there, and Guarma from the sequel is scripted as nothing more than a few-hour story detour.