Clastr Cloud Gaming on Unsplash
Even if you’ve never played Red Dead Redemption 2 before, you know the open-world game is unlike anything before it. Seasoned gamers have spent nearly ten years unlocking every easter egg and sniffing out hidden content, and some finds are still coming! The thing is, a 70-hour game is bound to draw from real-life experience, and the influence isn’t always pretty. Here’s how one macabre massacre inspired one of the most gut-wrenching scenes of the game.
Los Maniceros Massacre
In 2009, a Colombian amateur association football team was kidnapped off a field they were playing on. Of the twelve men (aged 17 to 38) thrown into vans, only one of them survived. The rest were unfortunately found scattered around Venezuela.
The only survivor was a 19-year-old named Manuel Cortez. He sustained a shot through the neck, and his brother later told Associated Press that, “They had them tied up for 14 days in the sun. They tied them up to some trees, with chains on their necks and with their hands locked up." As for the culprit, Cortez said that the leader only referred to himself as "El Payaso (or “the clown”).
No one knows the motive, but it was suspected that the National Liberation Army was responsible for the attack.
Blackwater Athletics Team
So, how does all this come into play in RDR2? Well, if you ever find yourself moseying through Tall Trees—though we wouldn’t recommend it—you’ll stumble across an eerily similar scene just south of the Lower Montana River. There, buried in a mass grave, is a group of massacred athletes in matching uniforms. Some of them even have bags over their heads with crudely drawn clown faces on them.
If you read the newspaper, you’ll learn all about the grisly scene before you even hunt for it. In the Blackwater Ledger, issue 69 carries the headline “Blackwater Athletics Team Missing,” stating that “they were last seen leaving the north edge of town for a group athletics run and, although the most thorough search has been made for them, they cannot be found.“
Of course, Rockstar didn’t loop an actual guerrilla insurgency group into the mix, so players have since theorized that the Skinner Brothers were responsible for it. Either that or Edmund Lowry Jr., that giant freak.
But you can’t do anything about it or alert the authorities. It’s just one more terrible sight to subject Arthur to.
Classic Rockstar
It’s no surprise that Rockstar managed to include real-life tragedies in its game, and it’s not the first time they’ve left an easter egg like that. But the haunting scene freaked out plenty of gamers who stumbled upon it, and a bunch of them didn’t even know it was based on a real event.
Though if you think that’s bad (and it is), the Skinner Brothers were also likely based on a real bloodthirsty gang of outlaws…but we’ll leave it up to you to research their laundry list of crimes.
