Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser has recalled the controversial ending to 2010's Red Dead Redemption in which the main character, John Marston, is killed.

He said in an interview that the game's lead designer, Christian Cantamessa was on board with the idea to kill off Marston, but Houser wondered about the production realities of, "How does an open-world game work if you've killed the protagonist?"

"So I said, ‘I think maybe we have to kill him.’ And he goes, ‘That's a great idea. Got to do it.’ I said, ‘I don't know if… let me just think about this,’ because we're just dealing with audio and dialogue," Houser told IGN "The nature of an open-world game is you finish a story, then you go back into the world and wrap up all the side content if you want to. We'd have to play as someone else for that. We could play as Jack, but what does that mean? So I had to think through for a while what it would mean production-wise.”

How Rockstar handled it was by setting RDR's epilogue years later, in the year 1914, with players taking control of Marston's son, Jack. He said this setup presented challenges, too, in terms of the technical realities of playing as Jack as opposed to John. There were story and mission concerns, too, including how multi-stage missions might play out if players, as John, completed one part and then came back to finish later as Jack.

"How would that work? We had to think through all of that stuff and concluded we could probably make it work, but we were still scared," he said.

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