Borderlands’ well-documented 11th hour art style change cost Take-Two an extra $50 million in development costs and delayed the game by a year, but without it the now successful franchise would have flopped straight out the gate.
That’s according to Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick, who in a sweeping interview with David Senra about his career said his approval of the last minute switch and associated extra cost was “a non-obvious decision” that no-one else would have made, but his trust in the developers was rewarded with a new hit franchise.
“We had not turned around the company yet, and we had very limited capital,” Zelnick began, speaking of Take-Two as it was after he had taken over the company in 2007. At the time, Borderlands was due out in 2008 with a realistic art style, but then Zelnick was asked to approve a significant change with the game basically done that would see it rebuilt with a cel-shaded, cartooney art style.
“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,” Zelnick continued. “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.’ I was like, ‘What does that mean?’ He said, ‘It means $50 million of incremental dev costs [which was a lot of money to us], and another year.’ It was on a release schedule, which we’d announced. And I dug in. I mean, I don’t give knee-jerk answers. I dug in and did my homework. In the end of it, I supported the decision. And that title became Borderlands. Had we not done that, Borderlands wouldn’t have been a hit. And that was a non-obvious decision. And I can pretty much assure you no one else in the business would have done it.”
Why wouldn’t anyone else have made the same call? “Because it was insane,” Zelnick explained. “They would have said the game is done. Put out the game. Move on to the next thing. I’m not spending 50 million bucks to remake the goddamn thing in another art style. And I have no evidence that one will work either.”
Zelnick said he had to trust the intuition of the developers at Gearbox. “That’s the story,” he added. “Be the most creative, be the most innovative, be the most efficient. 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.’”
The rest, as they say, is history. The looter shooter franchise has now sold over 100 million units, with Borderlands 3 publishing label 2K’s fastest selling title, and Borderlands 2K’s top selling title with over 30 million sold.
While it worked out in the end, the art style switch caused a great deal of stress to a number of people. In an interview with Game Informer, Borderlands 4 creative director Graeme Timmins, who was the lead level designer on the original Borderlands, thought the idea was “f***ing 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,” he said. “From January to, like, August or September of that year, all of the level designers — at the time, level design, mission design, and level art were all just under ‘level design’ under me — 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?'”
In 2019, Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford told IGN that while he believed it was the right move, the switch to a non-realistic aesthetic put a cap on the Borderlands franchise’s success. “I knew it was putting a ceiling on us because there’s — especially back then — there’s just a huge percentage of the gaming audience that does not want a cartoon,” he said.
With Borderlands 4 out the door and continuing to get updates, it’s unclear what’s next for the franchise. Borderlands 5 seems like an obvious next step, but Zelnick has admitted sales haven’t met expectations.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
