Daily Mail Red Dead Redemption Lie Goes Independent

You might expect The Daily Mail to produce a headline such as 'Cowboy Video Game Gives You Cancer' and not support it with facts. In fact the paper produced a line that stated that Red Dead Redemption cost $100m to develop.

Except it had no facts to support this claim.

So, it comes as some surprise that after The Mail admitted that its claim was based on nothing more than conjecture with no facts whatsoever, the broadsheet paper The Independent should repeat the same baseless figure.

Yesterday The Mail told Develop that the figure was "not based on anything we have heard about". Although it's still running that figure.

The surprise is that 'The Indie' - a middle-path broadsheet paper - has today expanded on the Mail's conjecture and printed, "(John) Marston is the protagonist of Red Dead Redemption, a new game for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 from Rockstar, the studio that created Grand Theft Auto."

We'll leave aside the fact that Rockstar is a collection of studios operating in different parts of the world, and that Rockstar San Diego Studio was primarily responsible for RDR, while Rockstar North was primariluy responsible for GTA IV as technical nitpicking. Here's the rub...

"With a budget of about $100m [£70m], it is perhaps the most expensive game ever produced. And with uniformly terrific reviews from the specialist and mainstream press, it looks set to be among the most successful, too."

Our emphasis.

Bless you mainstream media and your video games coverage.