TGV Interviews Randy Pitchford of Gearbox Software

Written by Jim McIntyre Saturday, 12 September 2009 19:29

We were recently lucky enough to get the chance to sit down for a chat with Randy Pitchford the CEO of Gearbox, the creators of the Brothers in Arms series, and the upcoming Borderlands.

Jim: How did you get into the industry?

Randy: I had been an amateur for a long time, even as a young boy I learned how to program computers. I used to make text adventures and things like that. I was in Los Angeles going to law school, and I was working as a professional magician, and my wife convinced me, like I was spending all my free time still programming computers and making games as an amateur, so she convinced me to make a career out of that. So I listened to her. She was actually my girlfriend at the time, but she became my wife. So I started looking around at what opportunities there were, let a few people know that I was looking, and kind of showed a few things from my portfolio. I got two job offers almost immediately, one was from a company called Lucas Arts, and they wanted to make a shooter based on the star wars universe, which became Dark Forces. The other one was a company called 3D Realms and they wanted to make a game based on the 2D side-scroller Duke Nukem, they were working on a 3D game, and I took the job in Texas to work at 3D Realms to make Duke Nukem, because I thought Wolfenstein was really cool and they published that. Wolfenstein and Doom turned my eyes to action games, as opposed to adventure and role playing games. And also because they offered me a share of the profits, and that was really compelling. So I don’t regret any minute of that, so I took the job, I moved out to Texas and I became a professional game maker.

Jim: And how long have you been with Gearbox?

Randy: Well we founded the company in January of 1999, so its been over 10 years.

Jim: On to Borderlands, what made you guys go with the four set characters rather than allowing players to create their own characters?

Randy: Well in a sense you develop your character. First of all though we are blending a shooter with an RPG, we don’t take all RPG elements. For example in Borderlands there are no dialogue trees, we think that’s slow and also not very interesting to play a flowchart, like when you get it wrong, and like everyone has short term memory loss, and it resets, and you start at the top of the tree. It just doesn’t make any sense, and I thought something that’s always silly about role-playing games is a very complicated character development process, where I’m asked to make choices about what skills my character has, before I understand anything about the gameplay. So what we do instead is we start with a general class, classes we understand when we play shooters. Like we understand generally the idea of a hunter as a master sniper. He is the sniper ok I got that, or Brick the big tank, we understand that, ok he is the heavy, rocket launchers, fists ok got that. The soldier, he is the general infantry. We can understand these general classes, but as I play the game, I unlock skill points I get the ability to customize my character further, and I can turn him into a very specific class. Like as a soldier I can actually turn him into a full on medic, or I can turn him into basically an engineer, another support class. I don’t know that, that’s what I want to do until after I’ve been playing the game, when I understand what challenges I’m faced with, and what I like doing, and then I can specialize my character. The idea of specializing your character at the beginning always felt odd to me, because I don’t even know whats in front of me yet. Sometimes its an uncomfortable experience, when I play an RPG and I don’t know how I’m gona be tested, I don’t know if this skills important, or that skills important, yet these points are very precious because your only giving me a few. So I think that’s wrong. I think most role-playing games get that backwards. I think Diablo and World of Warcraft they get it forwards. You pick a class, then you develop a class, and develop the specific skills of your character as you play.

Jim: Aswell as the co-op, you mentioned earlier in your presentation there are arenas, how many players can fight there?

Randy: In the game the maximum number of people you can get in the co-operative game is four players, but the game doesn’t focus on competitive it focuses on this grand adventure and the blending of the shooting and roleplaying, but having said that we discovered that sometimes it is fun to beat on your friends. So we added a few ways to do that. I actually hope it gets really popular. Theres both the duel which you can do anywhere in the world, or you can go into an arena and set up a kind of more organised match the way we sort of expect to. I hope it becomes really popular and people ask for more, I think if that happens we can expand that even more and maybe find more ways to have people connect for larger games. For right now its all in the context of the world. We want people to just enter the Borderlands and feel like they are there, and if you want to fight, you go to an arena, and that’s where you do that. It's all just kind of in the context of the world.

Jim: Do you have any plans for DLC?

Randy: Yes! Yes! Very cool stuff. I haven’t announced it yet, but its coming. I think it's going to surprise people with how quickly downloadable content comes for the game, and how big and interesting it is. We will be announcing it. I’ll probably be announcing the first downloadable content right as the game launches. In fact we are focused right now on shipping the game, so most of the team as we go into certification are done. And so these guys know we have all this momentum, we finished what we wanted to do for the retail game, and now they are like hey what else can we add to it. So that’s when some people started working on some DLC. We dreamed up new content, and we’ve added new effort after we finished Borderlands to create DLC. Right around when the game launches I’ll be able to announce the first pack. You can expect that we will do a lot of support, not just throughout this year but into the next year as well, and maybe beyond if things are going really well.

Jim: With the rise of piracy in the games industry there seems to be a lot of games that are not even bothering to coming out on the pc. Was it always a plan that you would come out on the three platforms?

Randy: I love the PC platform. A lot of people at Gearbox are PC gamers, so I think it's really neat for us to be able to bring out a PC game. I wish there weren’t thieves in the world. I wish that didn’t happen, but with the world we live in, you know? The challenge for us is to try and make things inconvenient for thieves, but without hindering the legitimate customer, and that’s the thing that really frustrates me with digital rights management, when a legitimate customer, especially when like I get a game, and I’ve paid for it, and my experience is hindered because of some thief, that I don’t even care about. I don’t know what the solution is. I’ve got a lot of ideas about that, but I don’t think its fair to deny PC gamers the game at all, just because some people are jerks. So we will see. I hope we are not punished for that decision. I hope we are rewarded for bringing the game to the PC. Maybe if it really hurts, maybe you can add us to the others that are walking away from PC gaming, for now we are committed to the platform.

Jim: How did the original concept for the game Borderlands come about?

Randy: Back in the day, a long time ago, the idea was to blend the fun moment to moment action of a shooter, with sort of the long range meta-game, the compulsion that comes from finding loot, getting gear, levelling up, building a character, building skills, and stuff like that. And so really the basic pitch was what if we took Halo, and we layered Diablo on top of it. That was really the basic idea, and when we say that, what we really mean is what if we took a solid type shooter and we layered on top of it the best compulsion mechanics from an RPG. And we’ve had this idea for long before we even started on the game. When we finally decided to get started with the game then we had to imagine the rest of it, not just the design but also the story and the style, and the story sort of followed the game design in the sense that we were like ok it's about growth, it's about choice, it's about discovery, it's about finding gear. So we need characters that are treasure hunters. At the end of the day we’re in there for loot, so our character's motives need to be about loot too. So we kind of created this idea that we blend sort of a Mad Max character with an Indiana Jones character, and we created this mythology and this story in this universe, about this lost vault, this alien vault that inside is believed to be incredible wealth, and incredible alien technology, and incredible power, that they kept there, that whoever finds this will be the wealthiest, most powerful person in the universe. So it becomes a race to get it. So your kind of like a Mad Max meets Indiana Jones. You know the Indiana Jones side of you, the vault is sort of like your lost ark, and we developed this to follow the game design, so that the game design goals are aligned with the story goals. The art style we sort of started there with our concept art, then as we built the game we actually started building it more realistically, but the artists sort of revolted, and they made us bring back the concept art. It was really, you know, sort of stylized with a lot of attitude, and a lot of personality, and I thank them for it. I wish I was one of the artists on the game so I could take credit for the amazing beautiful stuff they have done.

Jim: Can we expect to see more of Pandora in future games?

Randy: I certainly hope so, but you can absolutely expect to see more in the DLC that will be coming very soon after launch. So we are really excited about that. We can’t wait to spend more time in this place.

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