Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford is confident Borderlands 2 will prove you don’t need to be a Call of Duty or Halo to succeed in Q4
Bordering on greatness
The original Borderlands was a sleeper hit and its hotly anticipated sequel is ready to shock retail all over again. James Batchelor spoke to Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford about how this fledgling IP could become a blockbuster
BORDERLANDS shouldn’t have worked.
It was a cel-shaded, core-focused shooter that was a bizarre mix of stat-heavy role-playing and niche customisable gunplay.
It was released in Q4 amongst the
likes of FIFA, Call of Duty, Halo and Assassin’s Creed. And it had a marketing budget that paled in comparison to those blockbusters. Borderlandsshouldn’t have
worked. But it did. For Randy Pitchford, president, CEO and co-founder of developer Gearbox Software, it is one of his studio’s greatest triumphs. “Borderlandslaunched in October 2009,” he tells MCV. “There was
22 July 20th 2012
Halo: ODST in September, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 in November – we were sandwiched between some serious business. Everybody thought we were crazy.” But publisher 2K Games’ sanity was proven when the game became one of 2009’s biggest surprise hits. To date, the title has sold more than 6m units worldwide – raising the bar for its impending sequel, which arrives on September 21st. Fortunately, Pitchford says the loyal fanbase, the early media reaction and strong pre-order demand means another 6m sales for Borderlands 2 is “probably conservative”. “It seems like an impossible dream that every metric that we can look
I’m used to being the underdog. I still feel like we’re heading down that Death Star trench, fighting off the Empire.
“ Randy Pitchford, Gearbox
at puts it as certainly a Top Ten game of 2012 – and it looks like a Top Five game,” he says. “Every indication is that Borderlands 2will do better than the first Borderlands. I’m really excited about seeing what’s possible for Borderlands 2. “You never want to be overly confident because that’s where you get in trouble. But we’re going to have a lot of demand for this and every metric we have tells us that it’s going to exceed the supply.” It’s not just Pitchford who expects big things from Borderlands 2. The Gearbox boss tells us that retail partners such as GameStop are also banking on the sequel’s success –