The West According to Nicholas Gazin

Nicholas Gazin is a painter and illustrator from New York—dense, chaotic work, the kind that looks like it was made by someone who thrives on insufficient sleep. When I asked him what his all-time favorite video game was, he mapped the whole arc of his relationship with the medium before getting to the answer.

It starts with Super Mario Bros. 3. The bright colors, the friendly villains, the specific visual grammar Nintendo built that nothing has ever quite replaced. The bright colors and friendly villains of the Mario world have never stopped making me happy, he said, and that’s not nostalgia talking—that’s something structural. When he was twelve and depressed, he convinced his mother to repaint his bedroom the exact blue of the sky in Super Mario 64. That’s devotion, not nostalgia. Later he fell for Mario Kart for the opposite reason—not immersion but efficiency, the social game that didn’t demand your entire life in exchange for a few hours.

But the answer, the actual favorite, is Red Dead Redemption. He talks about it the way people talk about books that rewired them. It’s set in 1911, the American West grinding to a close as civilization pushes in from every direction, and Rockstar built that feeling of endings into every inch of it. The game is easier than their earlier work, which turns out to be a gift: the story moves at a good pace, the characters get room to breathe, and you actually come to care about the people you’re riding alongside. Every one of them is sympathetic, written and performed at a level that simply hadn’t existed in games before. I’ve never seen writing or acting of this caliber in previous video games, Gazin said—he loved Niko Belic in Grand Theft Auto IV but found everyone around him irritating. Here the whole world holds.

And beyond the story, it simply feels right to play. Riding across the plains on horseback feels, he says, authentically like being somewhere real. You can hunt animals, find buried treasure, help strangers who may or may not deserve it, take it online and lose yourself among other players doing the same. The game keeps circling themes of good and evil, freedom of choice, and as the title suggests, redemption—and none of it feels tacked on because the gameplay earns every word of it. I want to play it right now, he said at the end. That’s the best thing you can say about anything.