Take-Two spent $50M to redefine Borderlands’ art style, CEO reveals

Back in the late 2000s, the first entry in the Borderlands series was completed and ready for release in just two months. But the team at Gearbox Software took a final glance at the game’s original gritty, realistic visual style and felt that the game’s muddy, post-apocalyptic vibe, seen in many Xbox 360 shooters of the time, felt a bit stale. The studio decided it wasn’t good enough and wanted to go back to the drawing board, and that’s exactly what they did. 

Gearbox Software rebuilt the entire game from scratch, this time with a cartoonish and vibrant cel-shaded comic book art style that has become iconic for the series. However, that decision alone was pretty risky and could have sunk both the franchise and the studio. Still, Gearbox Software managed to convince Take-Two Interactive to provide an extra $50 million and to push back the release by more than a year.

This story was shared by none other than the CEO of Take-Two Interactive, Strauss Zelnick. Recently, he sat down for an interview on a podcast hosted by David Senra. During the interview, he looked back and recounted how the head of Gearbox’s division walked into his office at the tail end of Borderlands’ development and laid his thoughts out plainly: “We think we screwed up, and the art style is not appropriate and it’s not differentiated, so we want to remake the game.”

At this point, Zelnick was curious, so he said that he “dug in and did [his] homework” before making the call. He continued, “In the end, I supported the decision. And the title became Borderlands. Had we not done that, Borderlands wouldn’t have been a hit. And that was a non-obvious decision. And I pretty much can assure you no one else in the business would have done it.”

He posed and then answered his own question:

“Why? Because it was insane. They would have said, ‘The game is done. Put out the game. Move on to the next thing. I’m not spending $50 million to remake the goddamn thing in another art style.’”

At that time, in 2007, Take-Two had limited cash reserves. Early previews of Borderlands from 2007 depicted a grittier, more realistic world akin to Gears of War or early Fallout 3 concepts.

The game then largely disappeared from the internet for a brief period before finally resurfacing in 2008 with its now-iconic cel-shaded comic book art style, which has since become a hallmark of the series.

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