. It happened when I was browsing a clothing catalogue in one of Red Dead Redemption 2’s general stores. Among the abundance of cowboy hats, a lone flat cap. After equipping that careworn burgundy outlier, a decade melted away. I was no longer crotchety desperado Arthur Morgan. Instead I had resurrected Sean Devlin, gutsy Irish racing daredevil, two-fisted scourge of jackbooted bullies and indefatigable liberator of occupied Paris. A memory rose, unbidden, of wild nights in the City of Light, incinerating Nazi zeppelins while yelling: “My toothless old gran’s tougher than you!”
With his distinctive headgear and over-the-shoulder satchel full of gelignite, Devlin was the throwback star of 2009’s scrappy sandbox city-break The Saboteur. Though inspired by the life of English secret agent William Grover-Williams, a former Formula One driver who set up clandestine networks in France during the second world war, developers Pandemic were clearly looking for a more rough-and-tumble Irish lead. The result was a square-jawed drinker, smoker and skirt-chaser with a Sam Worthington-esque avatar and an arsenal of blarney-fuelled insults.