New York Times Review of RDR

"Rockstar, the video game industry and millions of players (not to mention investors in Rockstar’s publicly traded parent company, Take-Two Interactive Software) have been waiting a decade for this moment. Ever since Grand Theft Auto III redefined single-player gaming in 2001, Rockstar has been known as The Company That Makes G.T.A., nothing more. Sure, the company has found moderate success with its noirish Max Payne franchise and its Midnight Club racing series, but Rockstar has been eager to demonstrate that it can create a blockbuster out of more than the profanity-spewing drug dealers and submachine-gun-toting thugs who populate the world of Grand Theft Auto."

"Of all the world’s game developers, only Rockstar would even dream of a passage of such relevant hilarity. No other game developer has been so willing, and quite so able, to riff on the real world rather than sticking to elves or dragons or aliens or fantasized battlefields.

In the more than 1,100 articles I have written for this newspaper since 1996, I have never before called anything a tour de force. Yet there is no more succinct and appropriate way to describe Red Dead Redemption. Rockstar rides again."