If you watched the recent trailer for Saber Interactive’s upcoming Rideshare ‘Stimulator’ (the quotation marks are part of the title) you may have thought it seemed a little bit hinky in spots. Midway through the video, after a quick rundown of some of the game’s oddball passengers, the narrator says, “And when I think I’ve met the randiest of passengers, someone even stranger gets it.”
First of all, who says “randy”—a synonym, mostly British, for “horny”—anymore, aside from people in those cozy English countryside murder mystery TV shows my mom likes? And second, where are these randy people to begin with? Nobody in the video looks all that revved up to me.
A few seconds later, another oddity: A personalized Texas license plate, not zoomed in enough to be conspicuous but clear enough to read without trouble: USB DRV.
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And there’s sort of a gear-looking thing on it too, not the sort of symbol traditionally associated with the Lone Star State.
It’s something I would never have picked up on, because I tend to not pay much attention to what’s going on around me. Fortunately, Stephen Totilo at Game File did notice, and he asked Saber Interactive CEO Matt Kartch about it—and Karch told him it’s an intentional jab at Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford.
There’s a semi-famous story about Pitchford copying a video of a pornographic camgirl performance onto a USB drive—not because he’s a particular consumer of camgirl porn, but because the performance was especially impressive and Pitchford, a well-known aficionado of magic, wanted to “work out the method.”
But then he left the drive at Medieval Times by mistake; someone found and returned it, but Pitchford was off on a work trip so everyone else at the studio looked at it instead (which seems a little bit weird to me, but what do I know about Gearbox studio culture I guess) and got an eyeful, and thus was a legend born.
It’s an amusing story, but the impetus for the references in the Rideshare ‘Stimulator’ trailer is less lighthearted. “The dig is because Randy took shots at Embracer in Borderlands 4,” Karch told Game File. “Without Embracer, Randy is performing magic tricks at birthday parties for a living.”
Embracer Group bought Gearbox in 2021 in a deal worth up to $1.3 billion, depending on various financial targets being met—but just three years later, amidst its desperate downsizing, it unloaded the studio onto Take-Two for $460 million. That was only a month after it sold off Saber Interactive for $247 million.
It all seemed amicable at the time—Pitchford endorsed the sale after it was completed, calling it “best possible scenario and an obvious net positive arrangement for Embracer Group, for Take-Two and, of course, for Gearbox Entertainment.”
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But in 2025, Pitchford said the Borderlands 4 story was inspired by the sale of Gearbox—and then a month later, the game arrived with some not-very-subtle shots at its former parent, including a trash-strewn town named Embracer’s Bluff featuring a vending machine that kills its would-be customers, a talking AI-powered toilet, and a ruler who, we noted at the time, “seemingly lives in a hot tub surrounded by dildos.”
As far as I know, neither Gearbox nor Pitchford ever confirmed that the Borderlands 4 location is a reference to Embracer Group (but I mean, come on). But Karch—who since the Saber sell-off has expressed ongoing support for Embracer and its CEO Lars Wingefors—has no doubts, and he wasn’t impressed with the way Gearbox, and Pitchford in particular, so quickly turned on their former owner.
“It’s amazing to me how fast people forget those who went above and beyond for them,” Karch said. And, clearly, he did not forget.
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