Borderlands 4 is coming on September 12, and it’s been a long wait for fans.
But not as long as the wait for Randy Pitchford to realize the ambition of the Borderlands universe. He’s been working on Borderlands as a franchise for 20 years, and he finally believes that the technology of making games has caught up with the ambition of the IP.
The game survived the transition from Embracer Group to Take-Two Interactive. Pitchford sold Gearbox to Embracer in 2021 for up to $1.3 billion. Then, as Embracer sank under the weight of too many acquisitions during the pandemic, Take-Two bought Gearbox for $460 million in March 2024.
But the team kept working on the game and now it’s finally coming out.
I caught up with Pitchford and Sam Winkler at Gearbox’s Borderlands 4 booth at PAX West in Seattle. It was noisy there, and I could hear the sound of breaking glass in the “rage room” that Gearbox set up for Borderlands fans.
Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
GamesBeat: How is Borderlands 4 working out for you?
Randy Pitchford: I’ve been working on Borderlands games for more than 20 years. I think we’re starting to get pretty good at it. It’s awesome. This is the culmination of all of our experience, all of our arts. One of the cool things for me–I think you can feel–I think even in the very first Borderlands game, you can feel our ambition with it. But I think with Borderlands 4 you can feel the technology finally caught up to that ambition. That’s why it’s seamless. We don’t have to put you at a choke point and make you wait a minute while the game loads. We’re finally able to live to what I think Borderlands always wanted us to be.
I’m pretty stoked. I think we’ve done something really good here. I can’t wait to get it out.
GamesBeat: Did you ever expect to do this many Borderlands games?
Pitchford: Hell no! You remember. I was trying to stream from the tallest mountain to get anyone to pay attention to us when we did Borderlands one. We had Brothers in Arms, remember? The whole industry said, “What are you fucking doing? You could just make more Brothers in Arms until the end of time. Nobody wants this.” The industry predicted that we were going to die on the vine. They thought we were being sent to die. What are you blending RPGs and shooters for?
Sam Winkler: It’ll never work.
Pitchford: So no. Obviously you hope that it works. Frankly I’m still in that world, where–man, if somebody has a good time and enjoys the game we made, I’ll feel good about that. But also, if the suits feel good enough about it, if they call and say, “Randy, can you get the team back together again and make another one?” I’ll be like, “Yeah!” That’s the best.
GamesBeat: You got to try your hand at film. What did you think of that versus making games?
Pitchford: Well, I’m not a filmmaker. If a major studio comes to you–if you made something and a major studio comes to you and says, “Hey, what if we spent a huge amount of money and got some of the best A-list talent on the planet, Oscar winners, and we’re gonna go all in on marketing and everything, so can we use your IP? Please say yes!” All entertainment, you don’t know how it’s going to go. But holy shit, dude, I got to walk the red carpet at the Chinese theater with Cate Blanchett and Jack Black and fuckin’ Kevin Hart and Jamie Lee motherfuckin’ Curtis. You say yes to that shit.
You know what’s weird? I’m not objective. I like the movie. I thought it was fun. But even with critics doing what they usually do with a video game movie, we had a massive spike in our catalog sales. Whatever that magic is, it showed a lot of people Borderlands that didn’t know about it before. That’s what I care about. Obviously we believe in it. I’ve committed a ridiculous portion of my life to this. I want other people to find out about it and see where all the fun is and come along and join us. The movie helped a lot of people discover Borderlands that didn’t know it existed. That’s amazing.
We booked zero on the suit side. Zero was booked. They predicted that maybe there would be this little lift from the marketing campaign. And it was like 5X what they predicted. So holy shit.
GamesBeat: Everyone has been wondering about the state of triple-A. I don’t know what you think about it as far as whether you’re happy with it or unsure which direction triple-A is going to go.
Pitchford: Entertainment is all about the quality of what’s being offered. All markets of entertainment scale based on what’s being offered. I remember when there was a year where I didn’t go to see a single movie all year. But that particular year, Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings happened to come out within, what, a month of each other for Christmas? I was in the movie theater twice, because I want my eyes to pop out of my face when I see something like that.
We all have different tastes. One thing that’s interesting, we used to have a monoculture. Now there’s just a zillion niches. That’s cool. Just make good stuff. There’s lots of different ways to entertain people. I’ve dedicated my life to trying to create joy and happiness for people. I hope to die in office. I don’t think that’s going away. Happiness–the hope that we can get it drives all human behavior. All human motivation. We know what happens when we no longer have hope that we’ll have happiness. That’s when people take themselves out of the game. But if we have any hope for happiness in the future we’re motivated.
Any of us that can create something and add something–it’s not always going to work. But to me that’s the noblest thing of all. The Beatles, I fuckin’ love the Beatles. There are some weird tracks on some of their albums that, in my opinion, are unlistenable. But fuck, I wish I had more Beatles music. It pisses me off that we’ll never have anymore. I think anyone we can do to encourage anyone that’s making stuff to just keep making it–the stuff that works is going to bubble up and be okay.
There’s not just one business model. That’s all just additive. We’re still watching live theater on Broadway. That’s a tough business. I see the Star Trek booth over here. We’ll get the holodeck where your brain can’t tell the difference between a completely simulated reality and real life, where you can be anywhere you want with anyone you want doing whatever you want, and there will still be live theater. It’s all just additive. Just more options for people. It’s cool to have options. It’s not obligations.
GamesBeat: What do you think we need to get the industry back to rapid growth?
Pitchford: I don’t care about growth. To me, it’s about just doing a good job. We’ve been working on Borderlands 4 for–Sam and I got started on it before we even shipped Borderlands 3. We had a handful of us. It’s been more than six years. To me, that’s time well spent. It’s about just focusing and committing and making the best entertainment we possibly can.
There’s going to be a moment–if you think about the industry on a chart, looking at total sales or total revenue, yeah, we had this really crazy moment where the entire world couldn’t leave the house. What did we do? A lot of us played video games. We saw this ridiculous spike. What happens with suits–I’m gonna draw this. Here’s the line. This is the growth of the games industry. Then it does this. What do Wall Street nerds think? They imagine this is going to happen. They invest, invest, overinvest, insanely overinvest. That was anomalous. This is the line. If you take that and go back to the correction, the line is the same. The long term line is pretty reliable. We just had this weird crazy anomalous overinvestment and then a correction.
That’s for the suits to worry about. I just have to work on the games. I have to focus on our entertainment.
GamesBeat: What are fans going to like about Borderlands 4?
Pitchford: One of the challenges we have–it’s cool that on some level–I don’t want to say it’s mass market, but Borderlands tends to be bigger than a lot of triple-A games. It’s gotten to be one of the bigger franchises. But we also have this awesome rabid audience that treats the game like a hobby. Even though it’s a premium game, they almost treat it like a live service kind of thing. They put thousands of hours into it. They’re mad at us because it’s not a live service game. We haven’t updated Borderlands 3 since 2021, I think. That was the last real major thing we added to Borderlands 3. We can’t make stuff fast enough for that audience.
I’m just excited to get this out to them. That’s what that group wants. And then of course when they’re there, depending on how they feel and what the zeitgeist will know–I’m absolutely convinced that this game–there’s no angle that I can look at where it isn’t better than Borderlands 3. It’s definitely better than Borderlands 3. I think it’s the best Borderlands game we’ve ever made. But it’s not up to me to decide. It’s up to the market to decide. If that group thinks so, it’ll just permeate out.
What do we want? We want good games. If there’s a good one out there we’re going to check it out and go for it. That’s just been our mission, trying to make that happen.
GamesBeat: Do you think AI is going to be helpful in some way?
Pitchford: I don’t know. We’re weird. We like making stuff. Every single thing in Borderlands is because someone, a human being, did it. We crafted it. I think there’s some utility there. I’ll talk to ChatGPT every once in a while. But I’m really just using it like a better Google search engine. We’ll see.
I like working with people. I like that people are weird. Borderlands is kinda weird. The thing that’s fun to me is making the stuff that I’m making and seeing the stuff that the weird people around me are making, so I can be surprised and delighted by that. That’s what I prefer. Fortunately I think that that’s part of why Borderlands definitely works. It’s because it’s made by people. You can feel that. When you play Borderlands you can feel Sam. You can feel the talent. You can feel us in the game. You can feel that it’s our touch. It’s not a machine doing it.
I have a hunch that as we spend more and more time with AI, we’re going to value those real things even more. That’s my hunch.
GamesBeat: What does the Vault bring to the experience?
Pitchford: There’s the Vault right there. That’s the core storyline. The Timekeeper is the villain in Borderlands 4. He has unlocked the secret to his immortality. But to keep that he has to have the most insane rigid control over this entire planet that anyone’s had over anything. The most extreme, ruthless, totalitarian dictator ever known doesn’t compare to the Timekeeper. Borderlands 4 is about breaking free of that, about dealing with that balance between order and freedom, or chaos and totalitarianism, depending on how you want to slice those ideals.
The Vault is the center of it. That’s why the Vault Hunters in the Borderlands universe are the heroes of the story. You get to be a legend in Borderlands 4. Be a fuckin’ legend. We’re just nerds making video games. We kind of want to be legends. So we do this shit so we can feel cool.
Sam, you and I got together on this with a handful of people in the war room back in 2019, before we shipped Borderlands 3. We started dreaming up what this was going to be. Do you think it resembles where we started?
Winkler: We set the pillars down. A lot of details changed along the way. A lot of names changed. But what’s happening and why it’s happening? I don’t know. It feels very much the same.
Pitchford: We probably did one of the better jobs we’ve done in that war room.
Winkler: A lot less drift than we previously have. It was a very clean premise. Coming at it from a philosophical standpoint. Let’s tell a story about order versus chaos and what happens in the weird spot in between. That was kind of our pole star that we always looked toward.
Pitchford: What’s cool about that–we called that shot six years ago. That was at the beginning of what we were going through. As a studio we’ve always been independent. We were like the Rippers. And then we said to ourselves, do we tighten up a bit? Do we get organized? Do we join up with one of these publicly traded companies? Will that increase our ability to do what we want to do, which is make great entertainment and reach as many people as possible and gratify them more than we ever have?
But there’s a tradeoff there. There’s a tradeoff between liberty and control. We were dealing with that as individuals. You know what happened. It turned out the whole fucking world is thinking about that balance. The whole world is dealing with–where is power, where is freedom, and where is the balance between these things? We weren’t trying to call the shot, but holy shit. The themes being dealt with on Kairos and in Borderlands 4, the stuff that Sam and the team wrote, this is real shit. Borderlands is sometimes a goofy crazy comedy, and on the other hand this is a serious drama, kind of reflective of our reality in a way that’s making me think about shit that I don’t always think about.
GamesBeat: Do you ever have a dilemma around how soon you have to put the game out? There’s Call of Duty every year and Battlefield every four years.
Pitchford: What’s funny is we don’t have a really reliable cadence. I think that’s one of the reasons why we have partnered with Take-Two and become part of the Take-Two family. Strauss Zelnick and Karl Slatoff and the Take-Two team understand the reality of how art and entertainment are made. There’s consequences to that. Sometimes you don’t know when the next Borderlands game is coming. Sometimes you don’t know how long it will be before we get a Grand Theft Auto. But you know what? That commitment is to the customer, to quality, and to the artists that want to deliver that.
What we’ve learned together is that when we hold true to that commitment, it works out. Some of the best entertainment in the world can come from that. I love this partnership and I love this relationship. It’s because of that that we have this game, which I think is really going to make people feel things and experience things and just have a lot of joy and happiness that wouldn’t have existed without it. That’s all I care for. That’s all I hope for.
GamesBeat: Have you gone through they breaking glass room there yet?
Pitchford: I haven’t gone in there yet. They’ve asked me to do it. Obviously they want to get some footage of me breaking some shit in there. But you know what’s weird? I don’t know that my mood right now is rage. What I really need more of is love. But I’ll do it. I’ll go in there and I’ll break shit.
Winkler: They said no to the love room.
Pitchford: Sam Winkler, everybody. But I have a feeling that once I actually get in there and I’ve got a fuckin’ bat my hand, the inner monster is going to come out. I’ll see what happens.