As it turns out, the horse testicles were never the strange part. The strange part is that seven years after Red Dead Redemption 2 came out, we are still finding new things in it. A new Jason Schreier video explains why and it comes down to one thing Rockstar does that almost no other studio does.
In the video, posted on October 19 and titled “Some New Things I Learned About Grand Theft Auto VI And Rockstar,” Schreier describes how Rockstar works. “Individuals are given a little bit of autonomy to put in details and put in features and put in things that they think are cool,” he said. Art director Aaron Garbut went further. “There’s no one person that has this whole thing in their head.” The horses are perhaps the famous and meme’d proof. As Schreier tells it, nobody ordered the weather-reactive anatomy in RDR2. “That was something that people or a person kind of on their own autonomously decided, I’m going to do this because I think it’s a really cool detail and I have enough time to work on it.”
Red Dead fans aren’t exactly new to these sort of revelations. Late last year, players stumbled onto a spider-web mystery hidden in the game’s telegraph poles, untouched since 2018. The webs only appear for an hour at a time in the small hours of the morning, which is how they stayed invisible for so long. Follow them and you get a trail of clues, an N pointing north, a W and five poles west, a guitar symbol, a path toward Fort Wallace. Hundreds of players have chased it and it remains unsolved to this day.
Then, a former Rockstar tester named Adam Butterworth, who worked on both Grand Theft Auto V and RDR2, saw the discovery and admitted it was never supposed to be found. “Absolutely wild people have found this,” he wrote. “I remember hearing about this and thinking it would never be discovered.” He described it as an open secret among developers, the kind of thing they assumed would stay buried forever. A detail built into the game by someone who figured no human would ever see it just because they had the time to do it.
This is exactly the machine Schreier was describing. When hundreds of developers each get to slip in the details they care about, you end up with a game no single person fully knows, full of things that were added on a whim and some that were never meant to surface. Garbut is right that nobody has the whole thing in their head.
Imagine what kind of details we’ll discover in GTA 6 years from now when we’re still finding out about hidden stuff in Red Dead Redemption 2 to this day.
Schreier expects Grand Theft Auto VI, out on November 19, to harbor the same kind of secrets, with his own prediction of “no shortage of YouTube videos titled the 99 coolest details you missed.”
So the horse balls were only the beginning. They were the detail famous enough to become a meme, but the spider mystery, like many other things, is the one that shows what Rockstar’s hands-off culture really produces, a game that outlives its own secrets.
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