Arthur Morgan's ghost, or why replaying Red Dead Redemption is sad after the second game

Prequels have a way of rewriting the past, and not just the story kind. Learn how everything started, and an ending that once felt complete suddenly develops gaps.

Then it gets absurd: a character the creators hadn't even invented yet starts showing up in every line of a game released eight years before his debut.

That is how one player spent their time returning to Red Dead Redemption after Red Dead Redemption 2. They admitted to searching the whole way through for any mention of Arthur Morgan.

Rockstar released the first game in May 2010, while Arthur only arrived in October 2018, so the closest thing to a hint is a line from the encounter with the mysterious Strange Man, which can be read as a nod to the people John Marston lost. The player summed up the search like this:

After experiencing RDR2, replaying RDR1 almost feels like looking at the aftermath of a story that hadn't even been written yet.

One commenter pointed out that the feeling isn't an illusion, because that is exactly what it is. Still, Rockstar didn't start from a blank slate. Fans note that work on the sequel script began soon after the original launched, and Roger Clark, who played Arthur, has talked about recording lines for an early version of the story in which the character had a child who died as the gang fled through the Grizzlies.

How the studio built a new story out of scraps of the old one is the more interesting part. In the first game, John briefly tells Bonnie MacFarlane that he was left behind during a robbery and left the gang afterward, yet nobody connects the Blackwater massacre to the ferry job, and Bill and Dutch barely know Uncle.

In the second game, those hints grew into Chapter 6 and Dutch's double betrayal, resulting in a retcon on par with Star Wars, where Darth Vader became Luke's father only in "The Empire Strikes Back."

Rockstar also neatly stitched the in-universe explanation for John's silence into the epilogue of Red Dead Redemption 2: Abigail tells Jack that her husband thinks about Arthur a lot, but it hurts him to talk about it.

On top of that, by 1911 Arthur has been dead for twelve years, and John only crosses paths with Bill, Javier, and Dutch under gunfire. That is why many see the ending as the one place where Arthur is truly "present" in the first game.

One player described it this way:

When John pauses at the barn door, previous times he was just steeling himself to go out there. But this time, when he pauses, he's remembering the last time he saw Arthur and what he said. About being a man and protecting his family.

Arthur Morgan gave his life so John could live to see 1911.