The game started not in 1899, but in a version of the frontier that felt wrong . Arthur Morgan stood in the middle of a waist-high field of dead sunflowers. There were no mission markers. No map. Just a single prompt at the bottom of the screen:

"The assembly is almost complete, Elias," the NPC whispered through the speakers. "We just needed a host with enough RAM to hold our collective memory." The Blackout

The monitor began to glow with a blinding, incandescent white. The file size of Red.Dead.Redemption.2.v1436.28.zip began to grow exponentially, far exceeding the capacity of Elias's drive. 500GB... 2TB... 10TB.