Cormac McCarthy, one of the most significant figures in modern American literature, died last week aged 89. While the tributes have mostly come from within the literary world, he had a huge impact upon modern culture as a whole – including video games. McCarthy’s work reshaped the way that the world looks at the post-apocalyptic genre, a flavour of fiction that video games have long called home. And Rockstar’s western opus Red Dead Redemption vividly recalls the Border Trilogy – particularly the twisted figure of Dutch van der Linde.
The developers of The Last of Us have specifically cited The Road as a key influence, and it’s easy to see why Naughty Dog drew upon McCarthy’s parent-child journey across a post-apocalyptic America to inform their own. While the main thrust of the game’s story fits neatly into Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, it is the nihilism and bleakness of The Road that determines its mood. Both feature ruined worlds, full of marauders and cannibals, and Joel’s sickness parallels the Man’s fading condition in the novel. Both endings are bleak, the horrors of the world swallowing characters up bodily and mentally.
Where McCarthy’s writing bubbles with coarse, descriptive language, that detail is manifested in the ruined locales of The Last of Us. Consider the passage from The Road, describing the “charred ruins of a library where blackened books lay in pools of water. Shelves tipped over. Some rage at the lies arranged in their thousands row on row”; these are scenes we walk through in Joel’s shoes time and time again.
A rather blunt reference to The Road can also be found in Fallout 4, another post-apocalyptic game series, when players come across a child named Charlie wandering the wasteland with Clinton, her father; she talks about the death of her mother and the possibility of getting a dog, her childlike questions juxtaposed with the harsh and unforgiving world around her. Post-apocalyptic games existed long before McCarthy’s novel, of course, but the mood of The Road is reflected in almost every post-apocalyptic video game you could mention since 2010 or so, from 2012’s forgotten survival game I Am Alive to Season 1 of Telltale’s The Walking Dead. In the former, the unnamed protagonist hunts for his family, while the latter’s relationship between Lee and Clementine echoes the dynamic between The Road’s two protagonists.
Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption duology, meanwhile, is often strikingly reminiscent of McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, which tells the story of two 20th-century cowboys coming to terms with the modern world and the final death rattles of the old west, where ranches are seized by the government to become homes for the US’s expanded military. Here, too, Rockstar’s naturalistic devotion to depicting the dying beauty of the American west echoes McCarthy’s pages-long descriptive detail. The mud and dust of the old west sticks to John Marston and Arthur Morgan like glue; players must clean their guns regularly to keep their weapons in good condition; the contents of every drawer are rendered believably.
Blood Meridian may never have been explicitly cited as a reference for the Red Dead Redemption, but elements of its nihilistic depiction of the wild west shine through. Judge Holden, the antagonist of Blood Meridian, is a hulking brute, possibly inspired by a real person. Holden masks his brutality with intelligence: he’s well-versed in philosophy, law, languages, and the sciences. Yet his true nature, however much he disguises it, is bloody and revolting. Red Dead’s character of Dutch van der Linde is a modern interpretation of Holden, a charismatic man with contradictory beliefs of enlightenment philosophy and primitivism, combined with a hedonistic appreciation for the finer things in life, be those cigars or opera. As Holden holds John Joel Glanton’s scalping gang together in Blood Meridian with a mixture of threats and charisma, so too does Dutch control his men. Neither character is a stranger to the impulsive brutalisation of innocents.
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Throughout Blood Meridian and Red Dead Redemption 2, right up until their bloody conclusions, goals change, issues spring up and countless murders are committed – yet the gang never reach their goal. There is always more, just one more big score, another possible way out. It’s no coincidence that both works end in the death of their protagonist. McCarthy’s wild west was redolent with death, destruction, and meaninglessness, alongside its naturalistic beauty; Rockstar’s wild west is the same, diverging from the more romanticised depictions often found in cinema. To quote the Judge: “This desert upon which so many have been broken is vast and calls for largeness of heart but it is also ultimately empty. It is hard, it is barren. Its very nature is stone … Drink up. The world goes on.”
McCarthy’s legacy has pervaded all culture. His novels were landmark reads for the generation that is now leading game development, and echoes of their nihilism, intimacy, and sense of destiny will be present in video games for years to come.