Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford is proud of Borderlands' legacy as father of the looter shooter genre, even if he says some of the more experimental games to follow in its influence "twist it too far."
Talking to GamesRadar+ at Gamescom 2025, Pitchford described the Borderlands concept as something of a hybrid between a shooter and an RPG, which, in fairness, is pretty much exactly what it is.
"'Borderlands' are places between things that don't belong," he said. "A borderland is a thing between two things that have no business being together. So, Borderlands is the borderland between a role-playing game and a shooter.
It's the borderland between comedy and drama, it's the borderland between surrealism and realism. Even the characters are in a borderland between who they are and who they wish they were."
Pitchford is right to claim credit for Borderlands popularizing, if not inventing, the looter shooter. It's possible that there were games that came before it that were similar, but none made the impact Borderlands did.
"We didn't realize at the time that, because of the success of Borderlands, there would be a lot of other folks that wanted to jump in and do things," Pitchford said. "It's kind of exciting – in a few cases, some of the game makers I admire most started making shooter-looters too, and it's really cool, because it proved that it wasn't just a one-off – that Borderlands ushered in a whole new genre."
In the same interview, Pitchford said the industry at large fully expected Borderlands to be a flash in the pan, and that its endurance has been "humbling" for him.
One thing Pitchford does take issue with is developers messing around with the fundamentals of the looter shooter formula too much.
"The genre's kind of evolved, but I've noticed that, when people twist it too far, and they go off the deep end, it doesn't work," he said. "There are core things that we understand to why the shooter-looter feels so good. And we tend to commit to the bit."
