Yesterday, a new rumor making the rounds on the internet said that there would be Red Dead Redemption II Story DLC and a Red Dead Redemption Remake coming in the next couple of years. The Reddit user, throwaway11113454, who wrote about the rumors has since come forward and admitted that they were fake and that “this was an experiment I have always wanted to do regarding the spreading of rumors in video game culture”.

throwaway11113454 went on to say: “I’ve been thinking about this for a while and wondering how I was going to do it, then I saw red dead online was basically  being ignored (most likely not, but the fans are in the dust about it, including me) so this was basically a good starting point for me. So first I thought about here there were a lot of alien references in RDR 2’s story mode, so I started my “leak” on that. I made up a somewhat believable story that my “friend from rockstar” told me. (Real original right?) then I put in small details I thought in my head would make sense such as “Still playing as Arthur”. But I stayed real vague just to build up some speculation. Then I thought of what I wanted out of a story dlc. I wanted a remake of the first game with all of the bells and whistles of the recent game. And the rest is pretty much history…”

After looking into how the story blew up, with multiple websites and videos on Youtube reporting the rumors throwaway11113454 wanted to come clean. “Then I realized I was getting to many peoples hopes up, so I decided to write this post. And through this experiment I learned that some people will believe anything that someone says if it sounds believable. And also that mass media is a powerful tool, over 70k people atleast have seen this fake leak that I wrote, and I’m glad that a majority of people saw through it! From now on the original leak will stay up unless the mods say otherwise but I will link this to clarify it was all fake! Thanks for listening!”