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Video games have the power to bring families together. Or break them apart, in the case of my older brother who had an existential crisis after I beat him in Mario Kart Wii. But let's focus on the happy stuff here. 

The medium has come a long way from the days of Pong and Galaga, with games like Red Dead Redemption and Resident Evil 7: Biohazard rooting themselves in the traditions of the Western and Southern Gothic genres, respectively. And if there's one thing that older generations know a lot about, it's Westerns. 

At C2E2 2025, Roger Clark, the actor behind Red Dead Redemption 2's protagonist, Arthur Morgan, told host and Popverse video producer Ashley Victoria Robinson about the unexpected benefit that the game has had on families. "So many kids are learning about Westerns now, because of Red Dead. So many grandfathers and granddaughters and grandfathers and grandsons come to our table saying, 'Oh, we hated each other until Red Dead came out, and now we've bonded over this game," Clark said. 

There's some real truth behind Clark's words, because the Western genre was most popular from the mid-1940s until the mid-1960s. I don't know about you, but I certainly wasn't alive during the genre's heyday in Hollywood. Since then, it's made a bit of a comeback with revisionist Westerns like Wind River, The Revenant, Logan, and Killers of the Flower Moon. The Yellowstone shows from Taylor Sheridan, while not revisionist Westerns, are still some of the most popular TV series right now. I don't know about you, but as someone born after the Western film's original proliferation, I'd rather play Red Dead Redemption 2 than watch Yellowstone. 

The popularity of the Red Dead Redemption franchise shows how malleable the Western genre is between different mediums. So in that sense, long live Red Dead. 

You don't need to beat the game to prepare for the next one—here are all the major new and upcoming games coming our way.