Game developer Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption (2010) and Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018) introduced millions of people to an immersive digital world populated by Western gunfighters and outlaws. But these extraordinarily popular games are part of a longer history of video game Westerns that emerged in the 1970s, and drew on the mythic West portrayed in stories, films, television shows, and playthings. The evolution of the video game genre follows closely the development of the game industry itself from the text-only computer games and coin-operated arcade games of the 1970s to the modern open-world games of the 2010s and 2020s. Because the Western, a genre focused on morality dramas and violent conflict in a frontier setting, was familiar to many Americans (and even to those outside the U.S.), it proved to be an enduring genre for video game developers to draw from when creating games over the last 50 years.
The origins of the video game Western lie deeper in America’s cultural history. We can trace its roots to the film Western, which in turn, drew on earlier cultural forms and stories, including 18th-century American captivity narratives, tales of wilderness hunters and fighters like Daniel Boone, the 19th-century novels of James Fenimore Cooper, frontier histories such as Frances Parkman’s The Oregon Trail (1849), popular dime novels about lawmen and outlaws, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West traveling show, and modern novels like Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902) and Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage (1912). Building on these sources, in the 20th century the Western film genre became the principal vehicle for what historian Richard Slotkin has identified and explored in his books Regeneration Through Violence (1973), The Fatal Environment (1985), Gunfighter Nation (1992), and A Great Disorder (2024) as the “myth of the frontier,” or the story of how Americans forged a national identity, grew, and prospered over two centuries of westward expansion. At the heart of this myth are stories that transformed the white frontiersmen’s wars against and displacement of Indigenous peoples into heroic tales through what Slotkin calls “regeneration through violence” or the ability to regenerate fortunes, spirits, and national power through violence. This violence was justified by the logic of “civilizing” the “wilderness” of the New World while these stories also often ignored or marginalized the histories and perspectives of Indigenous peoples, women, and Black people.
When game developers went to the imaginary West to craft new experiences, they often drew consciously or unconsciously from these stories and films. The 1971 text-based, mainframe computer game Oregon Trail illustrates this approach. The first game to use the West as a setting tasked players to lead a party of settlers moving westward in a covered wagon from Independence, Missouri to Oregon City, Oregon. Played using a teletype printer, players (middle school students at the time) gathered and managed resources like food, clothing, wagon wheels, and bullets while they tried to fend off disease and ultimately death on a treacherous trek west. Cocreator Bill Heinemann explained in a 2017 interview that the earliest version of the game included negative depictions of Native Americans as aggressors that he believed were true because he had seen this in so many television Westerns growing up. The developers later revised the game based in part on cocreator Don Rawitsch’s findings from settler diaries that suggested that Indigenous peoples were much more likely to provide aid or information to travelers than to attack them. Nevertheless, Rawitsch later acknowledged that the game lacked an Indigenous perspective. That perspective arrived decades later in a different game developed by designer Elizabeth LaPensée and a group of indigenous artists, musicians, and writers. Their 2019 point-and-click adventure game When Rivers Were Trails, focused on the story of an Anishinaabeg—displaced by U.S. land allotment laws—on a journey west from their traditional territory in Minnesota to a new home in California.
Although Oregon Trail would become a popular educational game during the 1980s and 1990s, the first video game Westerns to engage the mass public arrived in arcades in the mid-1970s and centered on the role of the gunfighter. Western films and television shows such as The Gunfighter (1950), High Noon (1952), Shane (1953), and Gunsmoke (1955-1975), as well as decades of Western-themed electromechanical pistol shooting games like Exhibit Supply’s Dale Six Shooter (1950), Bally’s Gun Smoke (1959), and Sega’s Gun Fight (1970) all set the stage for video games that focused on a player’s skill with a physical or digital pistol. The first of these games, Midway’s Gun Fight (1975 and adapted from Taito’s Western Gun in Japan) pitted two players against each other in a duel set on a sparse desert landscape with a few cacti and an occasional moving covered wagon to hide behind. Each player controlled an on-screen cowboy and shot with a trigger attached to a directional joystick shaped like the handle of a pistol. Atari’s 1976 game Outlaw challenged a player’s reflexes more directly by asking them to quickly remove a light gun from a holster and shoot an onscreen outlaw when he turned to draw his gun. Unlike Gun Fight, which referred more generically to the Western, Outlaw explicitly frames the shootout between the “good guy” player and “outlaw” computer by noting “Score Good Guy” and “Score Outlaw” at the top of the screen. Players could also choose to draw against a slower opponent called “Half Fast Pete” or a faster outlaw named “Billy the Kid” to increase the difficulty. In this scenario, Outlaw directly refers to the Western duels in gunfighter films (think of Shane or Will Kane from High Noon) and the stories of notoriously fast-drawing outlaws like Billy the Kid. Following Western conventions, the game then, challenges players to not only exact justice against outlaws, but also to enhance their own reputations through skillful shooting against a fast, and legendary, gunfighter.
Due to the technological and graphical limitations of the time, these references weren’t always obvious in the games themselves. The arcade games relied heavily on cabinet and bezel (or the shroud surrounding the monitor) artwork and pistol-shaped controllers/joysticks to enhance the simple silhouette-like figures wearing cowboy hats and holding pistols. For example, Midway’s 1977 sequel to Gun Fight, Boot Hill (an explicit reference to gunfighter burial grounds; and not to be confused with 1975 TSR role-playing game by the same name) used a mirror and light to overlay a visual of a Western town and cemetery over the digital gunfighters. Similarly, the early home console video game Western Outlaw (1978) for the Atari 2600 displayed an artwork montage of gunfighters, desert, horses, and a covered wagon on the game’s package and cartridge. Outlaw and Gun Fight (1978) for the Bally Astrocade were both clones of Midway’s arcade game Gun Fight. Since Bally programmed the Astrocade version of Gun Fight onto the console itself without any added package artwork, the company relied entirely on the player’s recognition of the earlier arcade game.
Although anyone with a quarter or with access to a home console could play many of these games, the games themselves portrayed relatively small worlds—Western streets and deserts devoid of Indigenous and female characters—where the player alone brought law to a lawless digital land through their shooting prowess. The focus on gunfighters emerged from a mixture of following popular trends and necessity. On the one hand pistol and rifle shooting games were some of the most popular mechanical and electromechanical arcade games of the 20th century, and many children growing up in the 1950s and 1960s played with Western-themed pistols and playsets. On the other hand, early video games’ limited graphical capabilities forced developers to boil down the Western to the most easily recognizable and popular trope of the gunfighter shootout. Players would continue to take up the role of the gunfighter in the future, but as new kinds of action, adventure, and shoot ‘em up games arrived in the 1980s, developers went back to the mythic West with a new variety of games to offer players.
My next blog post explores these new variations of video game Westerns.