Anyone who spent a significant amount of time exploring the Wild West in 2018’s Red Dead Redemption 2, is guaranteed to have memories of a distraught Englishman by the name of Nigel searching for his dear friend Gavin. Nigel appears in small towns, along winding roads, and big cities across the game’s five states, incessantly calling out Gavin’s name.
The mystery of who Gavin is, whether he can be found, and why Nigel is searching for him has been one of the most popular enigmas in a game chock-full of them. And all these years later, one of Rockstar Games’ co-founders finally spilled the beans on why this puzzling NPC was dangled in front of the player at all. Spoiler: We may have all been duped.
Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser spoke about the synthesis of Nigel and his search for Gavin during a nearly three-hour interview with podcaster Lex Fridman. Here, he admitted that there is an element of Rockstar trolling the player with this character.
“We didn’t want it to be a totally clear mystery,” Houser explained. “You wanted it to have a little bit of adventure to it. But it was meant to be, without ever being explained, that Gavin’s not there anymore. Gavin’s either gone home, Gavin’s left him, and we were going to keep exploring that idea that he was going to reappear in some way or another.”
The Red Dead community has proposed many theories about who Nigel and Gavin are over the years, with four being the most popular. The first, citing evidence from a letter that can be found in the game, is that Gavin is suffering from a split personality disorder and that Gavin is actually a version of himself. The second is that Gavin is already dead and Nigel is in denial about it. Third is that this was an unsolvable mystery that Rockstar added as a red herring. And fourth, that Gavin is actually the Strange Man NPC that appears in both Red Dead Redemption 1 and 2.
When given all of the theories, Houser said that in his mind, the answer is somewhere between the split personality theory and the theory that Nigel is in denial. But the official plan was to explore the Gavin character in future Red Dead games.
“Gavin existed,” he said definitively. “The only thing we hadn’t really decided was in a future game, were we going to reveal that Gavin was dead or was Gavin going to turn up having long since abandoned this maniac.”
As for the humorous way it manifested in the final game, it ultimately comes down to the writers loving the way the name Gavin sounds when shouted in a British accent.
“He was so weird, and intrinsically there was just something funny about an English person screaming ‘Gavin,’” he laughed. “I don’t know why.”
“Gavin was supposed to be amusing. I thought he was amusing. But you never know what people are going to get obsessed by,” he explained. “There are other characters I think are funny, and the people don’t even notice them or see them in a completely different way.”
At the very least, having this clear-cut answer on the origins of Gavin can put this old mystery to bed for those still hoping to uncover it.
In 2020, Dan Houser left Rockstar Games after 22 years with the developer. He and his brother Sam were lead writers on all of Rockstar’s biggest hits from 2001 to 2018, including titles like Max Payne 3, both Red Dead games, Bully, and all of the Grand Theft Auto games since GTA 3. Houser has since gone on to found Absurd Ventures, a multimedia entertainment company that has released several stories, including a comic book, a novel, and an audio drama, all of which take place in the dark but comedic “Absurdaverse.” Houser’s new company has already confirmed that it's working on an open-world game, though not much has been revealed about the project so far.
