E3: Gearbox's Hurley on Borderlands Vs. RAGE

Author: by Chris Remo, Staff

Speaking with Gamasutra at E3 about the studio's upcoming multiplatform shooter/racing-combat hybrid Borderlands, Gearbox Software producer Simon Hurley describes his surprise to seeing id Software's RAGE, also a multiplatform shooter/racing-combat hybrid. id software, which is headquartered in Mesquite, Texas (Gearbox is based in Plano, Texas), debuted Rage to the public in early August 2007 at computer gaming event QuakeCon, less than two weeks before Gearbox Software revealed Borderlands. "We kind of went, 'Wow, it's convergent evolution.' We had had that art style in place for quite some time, actually," said Hurley. "I suppose you could say great minds think alike. The id guys have always been making amazing games, and we're big fans of them." Making sure to separate Borderlands from Rage's post-apocalyptic setting, though, he emphasized that his sci-fi game takes place on a frontier planet on the borderlands of space. "When a magazine did an article and called it 'Diablo meets Mad Max,' we thought, 'That's actually pretty accurate.' We're all big fans of Road Warrior, Firefly, and all those types of things, so I think all those go into the melting pot, and we get different ideas from them." Noting the comparisons made between Borderlands and Diablo's similar implementations of persistent online characters and randomly generated procedural weapons, Hurley added, "There are definitely Diablo comparisons there. We're all big fans of that game from back when it was out, and we're all looking forward to the new one too."