Borderlands last-minute art change cost Take-Two $50M

At this point, the Borderlands franchise has sold an estimated 93 million copies across its numerous games. However, the series' future could have looked very different if not for a last-minute art change.

In a recent interview with David Senra, Take-Two CEO, Strauss Zelnick, talked about Borderlands being one of his first big risks. The game had initially been developed with a more realistic art-style, matching the dull grey and brown tones of many shooters from the Xbox 360 era. According to Zelnick, pivoting from this art style and granting an extra year of development to Borderlands 1 ended up costing around $50 million.

As you can see from the teaser above, it is pretty clear why Gearbox wanted to pivot from its original plans. The initial vision for Borderlands looks highly generic for the time. I am not joking when I say that almost every shooter / action game looked a bit like this during the mid to late 2000s. The Cel-Shaded style that Gearbox ultimately ended up with injected a level of personality into the game that was sorely lacking in the AAA games industry at the time.

It is unclear exactly how true the $50M price tag is. As PCGamer points out, Randy Pitchford, head of Borderlands studio Gearbox Entertainment, had previously stated that the budget for Borderlands 2 was $35M. It is hard to imagine an art overhaul and an extra year of development would amount to $50M when the entirety of Borderlands 2 was made on much less than that.

With that said, there are a number of R&D costs associated with spinning up a new IP. While Borderlands 2 was developed in around three years, the first game had been in development for almost five years, so the apparent budget difference may not be as crazy as it first seems.

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KitGuru Says: The Borderlands art style has become iconic at this point. It is hard to imagine a scenario where the game has a more ‘realistic' look. 

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