Outlaws (1997)
Outlaws is a 1997 action video game made by LucasArts Entertainment.
Retired US Marshal James Anderson hung up his badge for a quiet ranch and a family. Then a gang with railroad money rides through his valley, and the star goes back on his chest. Outlaws is a first-person shooter built like a spaghetti western: dusty frontier towns, canyon shootouts, a slow whistling score that owes everything to Ennio Morricone. Between levels, hand-drawn cartoon cutscenes carry the story. Sniper rifle, six-shooter, shotgun, all of it aimed at a manhunt across the 1890s West. Stylish, deliberate, and meaner than its cartoon looks suggest.
Quick answers
What is Outlaws about?
Retired US Marshal James Anderson hung up his badge for a quiet ranch and a family. Then a gang with railroad money rides through his valley, and the star goes back on his chest. Outlaws is a first-person shooter built like a spaghetti western: dusty frontier towns, canyon shootouts, a slow whistling score that owes everything to Ennio Morricone. Between levels, hand-drawn cartoon cutscenes carry the story. Sniper rifle, six-shooter, shotgun, all of it aimed at a manhunt across the 1890s West. Stylish, deliberate, and meaner than its cartoon looks suggest.
When was Outlaws released?
Outlaws was released on 31 March 1997.
Who made Outlaws?
Outlaws was made by LucasArts Entertainment.
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A few thoughts on Outlaws
The tone sits somewhere between reverent and playful about its genre, same as The Good, the Bad, the Weird, which chases a treasure map through a hail of bullets and dust. For a modern frontier told with the same lonely-gunman gravity, The Mandalorian carries the western into space.
Westerns to ride out with
Outlaws is a spaghetti western in first person, all dusty towns and a whistling Morricone-style score. These carry the same frontier grit across media: The Good, the Bad, the Weird's manhunt chaos, the throwback gunplay of Land Raiders, the trashy fun of The Baytown Outlaws, and Red Dead Redemption 2, gaming's richest ride through a dying West.
Classic first-person shooters that shaped the genre
Beneath the cowboy hat, Outlaws was one of the late-90s shooters refining what the form could do, with a sniper rifle and level design ahead of its time. These are the landmarks that carried that torch: Half-Life's storytelling, BioShock's twist, the shooter reimagined as something smarter than simple point and click.
Star Wars frontier tales of bounty hunters
Outlaws trades on the outlaw-frontier fantasy, and Star Wars keeps building its own dusty edge of the galaxy. The Mandalorian is a bounty-hunter western in all but name, Boba Fett stakes out the underworld, The Clone Wars roams the war's fringes, and Tales of the Underworld digs into its lowlifes. Same lawless-frontier appeal, blaster instead of six-shooter.
Cinematic action-adventure games with a story
Between shootouts, Outlaws paused for hand-drawn cutscenes to sell its manhunt story. These modern action games take that marriage of gunplay and narrative much further, whether it is Uncharted's cliffhangers, Tomb Raider's survival arc, or Mass Effect's space opera. Pick one up when you want the story to hit as hard as the shooting.