Borderlands 1's artstyle overhaul filled Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford with dread because he thought he'd 'Have to go in and look at what they did' and 'shoot it in the head'

I'd be hard-pressed to come up with a series that 'plays it safe' more than Borderlands—and this isn't an insult. Every game I've played in the series has taken the same formula and added another nice crunchy little layer on top of it, and as a result, I've enjoyed basically every one I've touched. It's my ol' faithful, my pal, my homeboy, my rotten soldier, my sweet cheese, my good-time boy. What I'm saying is I like them a lot.

But there was a time when looter-shooters weren't ubiquitous. Not only was Borderlands doing something new back in (oh man) 2009, it also pulled off one hell of a Hail Mary—a complete top-to-bottom revamp of its artstyle that saw most of the game remade.

That's per an interview where Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford, ever-passionately spoken, tells Game Informer's Brian Shea: "Before we launched it, there were a lot of people going, 'Well, cute, but it's a post-apocalyptic vibe, and id Software is making Rage and Bethesda is making Fallout. You guys are screwed' … We believed in it, but a lot of people believe in things that don't work, so are we tricking ourselves?"

While Pitchford at the time said that "it's kind of got to be realism" or the game would bomb (you can still find some video footage from 2008 of a grainier, less cel-shaded Borderlands), "We knew it wasn't exactly right; it just wasn't exactly right for what the look and feel and vibe of what Borderlands was supposed to be—it didn't match the gameplay."

This led to Pitchford giving an art team composed of "like, five guys" a whole two weeks to "mess around with the look and the feel, and I immediately knew I made a mistake … I'm going to let these guys spin for two weeks, which means they're going to be even more invested in what they're doing, and then I have to go in and look at what they did, and I have to shoot it in the head.

"That's what's going to happen here. Son of a bitch. I'm an idiot. Why did I do that?' But there was something in my heart that knew that we had to at least look at and explore. I knew we weren't right."

Fortunately, Pitchford didn't have to pull out his Glock and double-tap two weeks of very hard, series-defining work: "I go into the meeting and, looking at it, it's fucking right; It's right … It feels right. And it's like everything we knew about what was wrong was confirmed when we felt it was right."

Game Informer also spoke to several art leads and devs, including creative director Graham Timmins (at the time a lead level designer), who called the choice "Fucking insane. We had already been working on the game for several years at that point, and not only did we change the art style, we basically threw out all of the levels—I think only Trash Coast and, like, one other level made it through—everything else, we remade basically from scratch.

"... We rebuilt the whole game to match the new art style from that time. It was an incredibly intense time, and we were like, 'What the hell are we doing?'"

Timmins and his co-workers saw the light eventually, though: "We started to figure out, 'This is what Borderlands is. I can finally see it. We have a great art style that represents the attitude. All the balance was coming together. So, it was a very intense time. It was crazy to see, basically, a whole game come together in a matter of months and ship it. It was a really special time."

Borderlands 4's art director Adam May concurs: "It was absolutely instrumental … I think we would have probably been lost in the noise. You couldn't not look at it because nothing else looked anything like that at the time, so at a bare minimum, it got the attention that we needed early on."

While I'm guilty-as-charged for giving Pitchford some (playful, Pitchford, playful!) flak for putting his foot in his mouth over prices or kinda losing it at random people on X over the Borderlands movie—I'm certain he made the right call, one that might not have been made by other executives in his position. That initial No Rest For the Wicked trailer grabbed many gamers, including my 14-year-old self (I'm 30 years old now, help) in a chokehold, and it wouldn't have done so without the absolute madcap decision to start over.

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