Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford recalled a time where he was envisioning a Half-Life based idea and out of nowhere received an unrelated call from Valve boss Gabe Newell.
After leaving 3D Realms Randy Pitchford joined Rebel Boat Rocker with fellow ex employees, "It was very difficult. We were taking every risk building a new game, creating a new engine, building a new IP, and building a company all at the same time," Pitchford explained in the Shacknews documentary 24 'Til Launch: The Making of Borderlands 4. However, if you don't recognise the studio, that's because its debut game was cancelled by EA and the staffers all jumped ship, with a number of them founding Borderlands 4 developer Gearbox, as Pitchford explains " I called up some of the folks that I'd respected the most that I'd been working with and asked them if they wanted to kind of come along and let's get this thing going."
After the previous studio folded while making its own IP and engine, Pitchford wasn't keen to repeat that in case Gearbox faced the same fate "Half-Life had just launched, and so I had this idea," with Pitchford describing "we have a parallel story going on simultaneously that we know must have took place because we played Half-Life, but we didn't see that experience, the point of view of one of the soldiers in Black Mesa, and everybody loved it." And it turns out that would come to fruition far quicker than expected.
Pitchford recalled, "I don't believe in manifestation – I believe in coincidence – literally that afternoon, with no action on my part, Gabe Newell calls me because he had heard that we had left Rebel Boat Rocker and that I was starting a new thing, and he wanted to see if we would be interested in working on Half-Life." He "immediately got on a plane" and pitched the game that would eventually become Half-Life: Opposing Force. However, since Valve didn't own Half-Life at that point, with publisher Sierra owning the IP.
Pitchford added, "they said, 'Sorry, we don't actually own Half-Life. You gotta drive down the street to Sierra On-Line and talk to the publisher. We're going to call them and tell them you're coming, and tell them we think what you've got is cool, but you gotta sell them, they're the ones that are going to have to pay for anything and agree to do it.'" This resulted in Opposing Force releasing just over nine months after Gearbox opened its doors and the rest was history.
