By now, it’s possible you’ve seen that viral footage of a Red Dead Redemption 2 mod made by a Twitch streamer where the game forces the player to watch an NPC’s backstory if and when they die. That, by itself, is brilliant enough. But what really grabbed people’s attention was the fact the NPC stories were written by the Twitch streamer’s own viewers — and the results were ridiculous. But the antics go well beyond a short social media clip. Polygon spoke to the mod creator to get the lowdown on where the mod came from, and what’s happened since the initial clip blew up.
If you missed the initial video, which blew up on social media sites like Reddit and X, here’s what kicked everything off. In it, Twitch streamer Blurbs headshots an NPC, only for the game to suddenly shift into a cutscene. The victim is revealed to be a man with dreams of adventure, a father of a newborn, a dog owner, and a war veteran. These details do not so much pull at the heartstrings as much as they form as a backdrop for absurdity. The NPC tries to speak dog and brainwash his newborn into liking a specific baseball team. But the idea proved irresistible to commenters online. “This is actually incredible, it’s like you’ve invented a new mechanic,” a Redditor wrote.
In real life, Blurbs is a former engineer who has been streaming for five years. He’s spent the last year exploring the creation of mods, like a recent Red Dead Redemption 2 creation where players can only use their Deadeye ability to shoot NPCs in the groin. Blurbs has been running a long-standing series where viewers suggest horrible mods to make, and he does his best to make those ideas happen. In the Skyrim iteration, for example, he built mods that would enlarge the player’s butt every time they crouched, and another one where every NPC tracks down the player to try and speak with them. Typically, these suggestions get crammed into round-up videos with various horrible ideas. The idea of giving NPCs backstories written specifically to make the player feel bad was good enough to focus an entire bit on it, however. What went viral was a mere minute out of a video that’s 13 minutes long:
To make the NPC backstory mod, he created a chatbot that allowed viewers to type scripts right into Twitch. You’d think handing over the reins to viewers would be playing with fire, but Twitch’s ample modding filters help keep things tame. The actual scenes were tougher to put together. Blurbs says that he worked with viewers to brainstorm what they would be, but he had to put them together by hand. This construction also placed some limits on how gameplay can unfold while using this mod. Blurbs says he had to find a good area to spawn the required pre-written NPCs, had to frame the camera in the right place, and dig through RDR2‘s ample animation libraries to find the exact movements needed to bring some scenes to life.
“It was extremely tedious and I actually wanted to have more scenes but couldn’t bring myself to make more than what we ended up with (around 6),” Blurbs said via email. The lengthier video shows some of this process. Blurbs can be seen going into the code to tweak values, like how the game handles zoom, just to make sure the flashbacks are framed cinematically. Think something like Fallout’s VATs system, except it only activates after you kill an NPC. It also turns the gameplay black and white for some added drama.
The making-of is just as entertaining as the end product. At one point during development, for example, a test flashback unfolds with a headless version of the NPC who just got killed, because Blurbs had just blown his dome off. In another segment, when Blurbs was experimenting with including babies, merely getting the toddler into the right place is a challenge. The digital bundle of joy had a knack for floating and spawning in strange places. Blurbs also spent some time experimenting with modding animals into these scenes, who unfortunately end up ruining the proceedings more often than not. Turns out, bears won’t chill out just because you’re reminiscing about a wonderful wedding. The whole thing is worth a watch to get a sense of how much work was put into a single minute of content that blew up on the internet, and to see what scenes didn’t make the cut.
You’d think that the reception to the memories mod would have Blurbs doubling down on the idea, but no. “Once the YouTube video is out, we immediately start work on whatever the next horrible mod will be,” Blurbs said. “The reception to the clip has been incredible.”
If you enjoyed any of these hijinks, I’d give Blurbs a follow on Twitch or YouTube. The man is out here creating content gold, yet he averages less than 100 viewers per stream despite the millions of people who have watched his Red Dead Redemption clip.
