Red Dead Redemption fan remake for PC shut down after lawsuit

Bad news for PC gamers who never got to experience Rockstar’s first attempt of creating an open-world adventure in the Wild West. Torrentfreak reports, that the modders behind the ambitious Red Dead Redemption: Damned Enhancement Project have been forced to cease work on their project after publisher Take-Two issued a lawsuit against them.

Only a few months ago did the modders originally announce their plans of remastering Red Dead Redemption on PC. Eager readers might be confused about how a game can be remastered on a platform where it never came out, to begin with. And you’d be correct. The Damned Enhancement Project was supposed to use the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of RDR and enhance it with improved visuals across the board. To play it on PC in the end, users would then have to use an emulator for either the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3. With both emulator for the two systems still being fairly unreliable across a vast array of games and being extremely power-hungry in terms of required PC grunt, this so-called remaster would never really appeal to the vast majority of gamers anyway.

This did not prevent publisher Take-Two to immediately take legal action against the modders, however. It may seem petty but the legal system is weird and when publishers don’t protect their IPs harshly enough, it could potentially lead to more trouble later down the line. Complicating matters was that the modders accepted donations, and mixing fan projects with money is usually a no-no. In the end, the modders have now declared Red Dead Redemption: Damned Enhancement Project’s cancellation and all users have a handful of awesome work-in-progress screenshots of what could have been (thanks to DSOGaming for preserving these).

Of course, there’s also the possibility that Take-Two plans to bring a proper PC port of Red Dead Redemption and thus shuts down any type of effort of enabling the game otherwise. In the meantime, you can play the brilliant sequel RDR2 on PC without issues – which you absolutely should.