Gearbox E3 2021 event set for Saturday, here's when and where it will air

Borderlands 3
(Image credit: Gearbox)

The Gearbox E3 2021 event has officially been set, confirming when we'll get our next info drop from the company behind Borderlands.

The main event will be hosted by Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford on the E3 Expo Portal, with an air time set for Saturday, June 12 at 2 pm PDT / 5 pm EDT / 10 pm BST and run for half an hour. That puts it early in the big E3 weekend, though if you consult our E3 2021 schedule you'll see that it's far from the start of the festivities - in fact, it will come after Gearbox reveals a new game during the Summer Game Fest Kickoff event on Thursday.

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Early hints indicate that that project may be named, or codenamed, "Wonderlands," and its "Be Chaotic Great" tagline hearkens back to the D&D-themed Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep DLC for Borderlands 2. It will probably have a limited amount of time to make its debut at the Summer Game Fest event, so there's a good chance Gearbox will go for a deeper dive into the same project when it has a virtual stage all to itself.

Gearbox says it will share everything that it's "been busy getting its hands into" during the event. On top of any internal projects it's ready to share, that will likely include an update from Gearbox Publishing, which has previously released games such as Godfall, Risk of Rain 2, and Subnautica under its label.

Gearbox hasn't done its own standalone E3 show in the past, though it did do a stage show at PAX East 2019 to debut Borderlands 3. It didn't go well. The game reveal itself was great once it started working, but that was only about 12 minutes of an hour-long live performance dominated by overlong magic tricks and technical difficulties. Gearbox only has a half-hour to fill this time, and the all-digital format hopefully means everything will be prepped ahead of time to minimize the risk of something (or many things) breaking. At the end of the day, it's all about the games, and that's what we're excited to see when the Gearbox event begins on Saturday.

Previous financial reports revealed that Gearbox will debut a new franchise with 2K Games this fiscal year - AKA before April 2022. 

Connor Sheridan

I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University - though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I've previously been a news intern for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and now I'm a staff writer here at GamesRadar.