The Daily Populous Wednesday May 20th, 2026 evening edition
Authored by pcgamer.com and submitted by Darth_Vaper883

It's hard to imagine Borderlands without all the stylized ink lines and butt stallions, but when the game was first teased nearly two decades ago, it looked much greyer and more brooding—the sort of thing you'd expect from a shooter released in the late aughts. CEO of publisher Take-Two, Strauss Zelnick, said in a recent interview with podcaster David Senra that the game's final look took a big overhaul that cost $50 million dollars and an extra year of development time.

"We had not turned around the company yet, we had very limited capital, and we were developing a game that was about to be released two months later, which is to say it's done. I mean, we had spent a lot of money," he said in the interview. "The head of the division came into my office and said, 'Look, we just don't think this is good enough and we think we screwed up, and the art style is not appropriate and it's not differentiated, we want to remake the game.'"

While it was a costly risk for Take-Two, Zelnick said he "dug in and did my homework" and ended up supporting the decision, though he noted it was "non-obvious … no one else in the business would have done it."

It's hard to know what factors Zelnick is considering when he claims the delay came with a $50 million price tag, but it's especially surprising to hear given that Borderlands 2 had a budget of around $35 million according to an estimate by Randy Pitchford from back in the day.

I admit I'm curious to know how that original, moody take on Borderlands might have felt in a full game—I was never that sour on beige classics like Quake and Gears of War—but the team's instinct that it was hurting the game was probably right, given that early testers thought the game looked an awful lot like id Software's Rage or Fallout 3 (as you can read about in former PC Gamer EIC Samuel Roberts's full story on the way Gearbox's shooter almost looked). Rage and even Fallout 3 look a bit dated and indistinct now that we can view the dominance of muddy brown shooters in retrospect—love or hate Borderlands, it certainly has a style all its own.

reverandglass on May 18th, 2026 at 15:16 UTC »

I still have the OG trailer on my PS3. It would have been a cult classic that didn't sell and only a few people played, not a franchise.

Chazzwazz on May 18th, 2026 at 11:17 UTC »

I'm by no means a game developer but how can a style overhaul cost 50 million?

WuShanDroid on May 18th, 2026 at 07:25 UTC »

That is 10000% accurate. Before getting me interested in a form of singleplayer mmorpg, the cel-shading is what really pulled me in. I think I would have ignored it and passed it off as "another" shooter had it not had the style it did.