It is 2026, and somehow a dusty old cowboy game from 2010 still knows how to make grown players cry into their bandanas. Red Dead Redemption might have celebrated its sweet sixteen with a new coat of paint on modern platforms, but the achievements tied to its dusty spurs remain as stubborn as a mule. The Nintendo Switch and PS4 re-releases spared a few souls by stripping out the multiplayer, which means the PS4 version lost those grindy online trophies. Yet anyone who dares to chase 100% on Xbox or via backward compatibility knows the truth: these achievements demand a mix of luck, patience, and the kind of planning usually reserved for heists. The following list ranks the ten most infamous challenges that still test the mettle of achievement hunters in 2026, whether they are replaying the original or diving into the standalone Undead Nightmare.
Something feels almost backwards about the first entry on this list. Heading South on a White Bronco is an achievement that remains rarer than the 100% completion badge. To unlock it, a player must outrun US Marshals while riding a Hungarian Half-Bred horse. The task sounds simple only until you realize how specific the setup needs to be. First, you need to acquire the right horse breed, which luckily appears during the side quest Love is the Opiate. Then you must actively accumulate a bounty of at least 20 law enforcement kills, save the game, and keep reloading until the Marshals finally decide to spawn. A guide makes the process straightforward but so obscure that no one would stumble upon it naturally. It is a secret achievement, so most players never even know it exists until they scan a completion tracker and scratch their heads. The image of a lone Hungarian Half-Bred thundering across the plains while bullets whiz past is cinematic, but the grind behind the scene is anything but glamorous.
If you think one elusive horse causes trouble, wait until you meet the wildlife. Unnatural Selection asks the impossible: kill every single animal species in the game. Without a comprehensive guide, this is a needle-in-a-haystack nightmare. Even with a checklist and spawn maps pulled up on a second screen, the animals seem to know when they are being hunted. A player can ride to three different confirmed spawn points for a skunk, for example, and find nothing but tumbleweeds. The frustration builds quickly. Birds are the worst offenders, requiring just the right combination of time of day and weather to flutter into existence. By 2026, dedicated achievement communities still trade tips on the most stubborn critters, and the consensus is clear—finding all animals here makes Metal Gear Solid V’s zoo menagerie look like a relaxing nature walk.
Then there is the mind-numbing grind of Mowing Them Down. 500 enemies must be killed using a mounted weapon. Mounted guns appear only a handful of times during the base single-player campaign, and even a thorough playthrough will net you maybe a tenth of the required bodies. Smart players quickly set their sights on Undead Nightmare, where a cannon becomes a zombie-shredding factory. Even with that infinite supply of undead targets, the process is a tedious loop of positioning and firing that stretches on for hours. In 2026, those who still attempt this achievement often turn on a podcast and zone out, because no amount of Old West charm can make a mounted weapon fun for that long.
Zombies bring their own special kind of headache. Spinning Plates requires saving all 23 territories in Undead Nightmare. On a digital copy, this is a harmless scavenger hunt. On a physical Game of the Year Edition played through backward compatibility on a Series X, however, a notorious bug rears its ugly head. Zombies and NPCs lose their heads—literally—and the missing models break territory saves and graveyard cleansing events completely. The only reliable fix is to reboot the entire game, and the bug strikes with such frequency that many players give up and buy the digital version out of pure spite. It is a cruel joke that a 2010 disc can still cause such misery in 2026.
The road to Redeemed, the 100% completion achievement, is paved with busywork that saps the joy out of the Wild West. Unlike Grand Theft Auto V, where completing everything felt like a victory lap, Red Dead Redemption turns its challenges into a series of arbitrary chores. Players must kill specific numbers of enemies with certain weapons, gather hundreds of plants, and master every minigame. The only bright spot is the treasure hunting. The rest is a slog that has aged poorly, and in 2026, many a fresh-eyed cowboy has set out for 100% only to abandon the journey somewhere around the fifth herb-picking session.
Undead Nightmare’s own full completion achievement, Zed’s Dead, Baby, is less painful than the main game’s grind but still packs its own nasty challenges. The tasks are fewer, which is a mercy, but they retain that forced grind flavor. And if you happen to be playing on that bug-ridden disc copy, the experience transforms from a minor chore into a rage-inducing cycle of hard reboots and lost progress. The community still scoffs: at least it is shorter than GTA IV’s DLC completions, but that is not saying much.
Multiplayer achievements are where the true madness begins for those playing on Xbox or through legacy services. Slow on the Draw demands ten assists in a single multiplayer hideout. The math is cruel: the number of enemies per hideout rarely reaches ten, so unless every single kill becomes an assist, the achievement is impossible in a normal run. The saving grace is a bizarre exploit. Players discovered that shooting you and your partner’s horses counts as an assist. Yes, horse deaths pad the stat. It is absurd, but once you know this trick, the achievement becomes a matter of setup rather than skill.
How the West Was Won is the max-level multiplayer grind that haunts anyone who fully completed Grand Theft Auto IV. In GTA IV, a dual monitor exploit let players earn XP while mostly AFK. No such luck here. The most efficient method is to repeat hideouts over and over, and it takes a ridiculous number of hours. Veteran achievement hunters recommend playing no more than an hour a day to avoid burning out completely, which turns this into a months-long project. In 2026, with the player base thinned out, finding consistent partners for hideout grinding adds another layer of difficulty.
The poker table holds a particular kind of rage. Pa-Pa-Pa-Poker Ace is a clever Lady Gaga reference, but the actual requirements are brutal. In a full six-player multiplayer poker game, you must win the table when the blinds are at their maximum. Rookie players, with no real money on the line, tend to go all-in on every other hand, making strategic play impossible. The blinds take a long time to rise even under perfect conditions, and getting six people to sit through a slow poker session on such an old game is a logistical nightmare. Most players resort to boosting sessions, where everyone agrees to play by rules, but even those are tough to organize in 2026’s sparse online lobbies.
And here stands the king of nightmares. Kingpin is widely regarded as the hardest achievement in Red Dead Redemption, and its crown remains unchallenged. The player must kill eight separate enemy players while being the kingpin in a Land Grab match. Legitimate attempts in the current empty online servers are a fool’s errand, but boosting isn’t much better. The achievement requires nine total people—including yourself—all online at the same time, all coordinated to let one person get the kills. Coordinating time zones, schedules, and the sheer flakiness of strangers over an aging peer-to-peer connection turns this into a project that can take weeks to set up. As any TrueAchievements session organizer will tell you, getting nine people for a 2010 game is like herding cats through a sandstorm, and that is exactly why Kingpin sits alone at the top.
As the sun sets on another year of digital frontiers, these achievements remind everyone that no amount of hardware upgrades or re-releases can fully tame the wild heart of Red Dead Redemption. They demand patience, obscure knowledge, and a community willing to chip in for the toughest multiplayer feats. For achievement hunters in 2026, the pursuit is rarely just about a shiny badge—it’s a battle against bugs, empty servers, and their own endurance. Some trophies just refuse to ride quietly into the sunset.