Highlights
- A Red Dead Redemption 2 glitch causes a supposedly dead bear to suddenly come back to life and attack.
- Glitches and programming quirks make Red Dead Redemption 2's open-world sandbox an unpredictable and harrowing experience.
- The player's encounter with the undead bear could become a legendary tale of the Old West in Rockstar's critically acclaimed game.
A seemingly normal bear hunt took a shocking turn for one unlucky Red Dead Redemption 2 player, who learned the hard way to make sure an animal is indeed dead before trying to harvest it. Rockstar’s open-world Western is considered by many to be one of the greatest and most financially successful video games ever made, owning up to its gripping narrative and detailed game world that takes players to a fictionized version of the American frontier lands in the late 1890s.
As is the case with the Grand Theft Auto games, Red Dead Redemption 2 contains plenty of interesting side activities to go along with the single-player journey of former Van der Linde gang member Arthur Morgan - such as hunting for meat and upgrading materials across the untamed wilderness of the Old West. Arthur can also partake in Legendary Hunts, which task the player with tracking down a certain animal in exchange for pelts of the highest caliber. However, the list of animals available for players to hunt in Red Dead Redemption 2 includes carnivores like bears and cougars, and the hunter can soon become the hunted if Arthur isn’t careful.
While most of the animals in Red Dead Redemption 2 are painstakingly programmed to behave like their real-world counterparts, glitches can and do occur that can make an otherwise realistic experience turn into something out of a supernatural horror movie. Such was the case for Reddit user Temporary-Shirt-8783, who fought and seemingly killed a bear during a session of Red Dead Redemption 2. Unfortunately for them, the bear isn’t quite as dead as initially believed when they begin to skin it, and the animal suddenly rises up and mauls the startled player to death after completely shrugging off Temporary-Shirt-8783’s efforts to defend themselves.
Red Dead Redemption 2 players have shared many unusual hunting stories in the five years since the game launched to near-universal acclaim. Some of these virtual tales end with a wolf dying in a non-climatic fashion, while others involve Arthur suddenly blasting off into space due to an unexpected glitch. Temporary-Shirt-8783’s deadly encounter with a freshly-skinned bear is clearly a case of Red Dead Redemption 2’s programming malfunctioning, but some Reddit users have compared the frightening sight to the original game’s zombie-centric Undead Nightmare DLC.
Part of what makes Red Dead Redemption 2 such an enduring game is the fact that virtually anything can happen within its large open-world sandbox - even things that are the result of unintended glitches and programming quirks. Having a dead bear suddenly come back to life with vengeance on its mind is a harrowing experience for any would-be cowboy, but at least the Old West could gain a new legend from Temporary-Shirt-8783’s ill-fated encounter with the skinless bear that would not die.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is available now for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.
