I just completed re-playing the original Red Dead Redemption on PS3 yesterday - following on from completing Red Dead Redemption 2, when you combine the whole story together, it's one epic tale of the Dutch van der Linde gang and specifically Arthur Morgan and John Marston.

So it caused a lot of buzz when a rumour surfaced a few days ago suggesting that a re-make of the original was in the works for next-gen consoles and PC in 2020 / 2021. The rumour suggested that the game was being re-made with Rob Wiethoff even returning to re-record dialogue, with added mentions of Arthur and new events and expansions to the world.

The rumour also suggested a new DLC was coming for Red Dead Redemption 2 featuring Arthur and Aliens, in the vein of the first game's Undead Nightmare.

We held off from reporting on any of this as it seemed very shady and we couldn't find any verifiable sources to back up the claims. It turns out that was indeed the case, as the entire saga has now come out as a big hoax.

The original redditor who started the rumour returned to the board to confirm the entire thing was a hoax, or 'social experiment' as he puts it;

This was an experiment I have always wanted to do regarding the spreading of rumors in video game culture. 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.

The fact that some mainstream news sites (who clearly care little about sources) started reporting on the "news" lead to the original post creator to cough up with the admission.

Once again it highlights the worry of the modern internet. A similar incident also went down with Roblox this week, where one user posting a fake news page suggesting the servers were shutting down lead to the game's official Twitter account getting bombarded with support tweets.

Seems you can say anything these days and people will believe you - but the biggest tragedy is, as far as we can tell, there is no Red Dead Redemption remake on the way.