The Gearbox boss dropped an unusual take: he says developers are only now figuring out what it really takes to craft a true classic.
Gearbox founder Randy Pitchford recently sat down with Shacknews—alongside several colleagues—to talk through the development of Borderlands 4, which launched on September 13. Near the end of the 73-minute video, Pitchford laid out what it takes to build something on the scale of Borderlands 4. In his view, the industry at large is only just “catching on,” and games still haven’t had their Citizen Kane moment.
“Making a game like Borderlands 4 requires significant investment. It’s a massive game. Hundreds and hundreds of people work on it for years. And that’s very expensive. The budgets of our big video games are now larger than those of blockbuster movies. It’s not an easy decision to commit those kinds of resources to a project, whether you’re the one with the cash or an individual on the team. It’s a significant commitment of time and effort.
This can only happen if everyone involved believes that the imagined product is worth more than the cost of creating it. That means you need the vision, you need belief in the effort to realize it, and you need to understand the value if it comes to fruition. Everyone has to understand this, or it just doesn’t work. I love that I’m in this industry, and I love that we’re just getting started. By ‘we,’ I mean the entire industry. We haven’t even had our Citizen Kane, let alone our Jurassic Park or Star Wars. We’re just figuring this out. But it’s fun.”
Pitchford was referencing Orson Welles’s 1941 film Citizen Kane, widely hailed as cinema’s first true masterpiece. While he may be right that games are still evolving compared to other media, it’s been 54 years since the first commercial video game (Computer Space), and many players would argue the medium has already produced multiple works worthy of that label.
Two perennial 10/10 candidates frequently cited are Tetris and Half-Life.
Source: WCCFTech
