It’s hard to imagine Borderlands without all the stylized ink lines and butt stallions, but when the game was first teased nearly two decades ago, it looked much greyer and more brooding—the sort of thing you’d expect from a shooter released in the late aughts. CEO of publisher Take-Two, Strauss Zelnick, said in a recent interview with podcaster David Senra that the game’s final look took a big overhaul that cost $50 million dollars and an extra year of development time.
“We had not turned around the company yet, we had very limited capital, and we were developing a game that was about to be released two months later, which is to say it’s done. I mean, we had spent a lot of money,” he said in the interview. “The head of the division came into my office and said, ‘Look, we just don’t think this is good enough and we think we screwed up, and the art style is not appropriate and it’s not differentiated, we want to remake the game.'”
While it was a costly risk for Take-Two, Zelnick said he “dug in and did my homework” and ended up supporting the decision, though he noted it was “non-obvious … no one else in the business would have done it.”
I admit I’m curious to know how that original, moody take on Borderlands might have felt in a full game—I was never that sour on beige classics like Quake and Gears of War—but the team’s instinct that it was hurting the game was probably right, given that early testers thought the game looked an awful lot like id Software’s Rage or Fallout 3 (as you can read about in former PC Gamer EIC Samuel Roberts’s full story on the way Gearbox’s shooter almost looked). Rage and even Fallout 3 look a bit dated and indistinct now that we can view the dominance of muddy brown shooters in retrospect—love or hate Borderlands, it certainly has a style all its own.
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