Take-Two CEO says "Borderlands wouldn't have been a hit" without $50 million art style change gamble

For those who probably don’t have a few grey hairs yet, the original Borderlands started life looking eerily similar to every other aesthetically muted mid-2000s shooter. When it was initially revealed in 2007, it was more Mad Max than Mad Moxxi, following the vogue set by the likes of Gears of War and Halo. However, the devs at Gearbox Software knew this wouldn’t be enough to set it apart. In a fresh interview with podcaster David Senra, Take-Two boss Strauss Zelnick regales the eleventh-hour pitch that changed the series’ trajectory, and the call he had to make knowing how much time and money – a whopping $50 million – it would take.

“We had not turned around the company yet,” Zelnick tells Senra, “we had very limited capital, and we were developing a game and it was about to be released two months later – which is to say it’s done, and we’d spent a lot of money. And 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. So, we want to remake the game.'”

With a $50 million conundrum hanging over his head, Zelnick “dug in.” The dev’s suggestion would set the project back another year – a huge gamble. As history has it, Zelnick backed the FPS game’s team. “Had we not done that, Borderlands wouldn’t have been a hit,” Zelnick says, and I’m inclined to agree. The shift to its now-iconic hand-inked style gave it a vibrancy that its contemporaries often lacked, and in my opinion aligned considerably better with its chaotic narrative and gameplay loop; the team was spot on in pivoting.

“That was a nonobvious decision,” Zelnick continues. “And I pretty much can assure you no one else in the business would have done it.” When asked why by Senra, Zelnick says, “because it was insane. They would have said ‘the game is done. Put out the game, move onto the next thing. I’m not spending 50 million bucks to remake the goddamn thing in another artstyle, and I have no evidence that one will work either.”

This particular anecdote is a fabulous example of what can happen when the business side of the development coin puts its full trust into its creatives’ vision. “Be the most creative, be the most innovative, be the most efficient,” Zelnick concludes. “I hired the most creative people. I said, ‘you have to pursue your passions, we will support you.’ They came and said, ‘this is our assessment, this is our passion, are you going to support us?’ And I said, ‘yes.'”