Enlarge / When you’re as big as Rockstar, this kind of image is all the marketing and press coverage you need. (credit: Rockstar / Twitter)

For most game makers, hyping up a big-name franchise sequel that’s been in the works for years is a big hairy deal. If you’re Bethesda, you’ll come back to E3 just to devote a huge chunk of your press conference to walking through the beginning of the new Fallout. If you’re Nintendo, you’ll devote your entire E3 booth to your big Zelda sequel, ignoring literally everything else your company makes. If you’re Valve you… well, you just go silent about Half-Life for over a decade and leave it at that, I guess.

If you’re Rockstar, though, all you have to do is put out a couple of tweets strongly hinting at a new Red Dead Redemption game for everyone to go completely. Utterly. Nuts.

It all started Sunday morning, with this unassuming tweet covering the Rockstar logo in red paint. In case that was too subtle, Rockstar followed it up almost precisely 24 hours later with another tweet, this time showing seven familiar looking Old West-y silhouettes marching toward the foreground with an orange sun low over the horizon.