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Borderlands screenshot

VideoGamer.com: Where you surprised by the impact Fallout 3 had? It seemed to be a game that a lot of people took to heart.

RP: Yeah, I’m a fan. I’m a customer, and I was really happy to see that it sold well. Fallout is a brand, but in reality that was like an original thing. The brand had never been treated that way before and it had been a long time since there had been a Fallout game. So that was really exciting to me. That was like the new original thing of that year. That’s cool, and I’m glad that they were paid for it.

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VideoGamer.com: Has anything else caught your eye lately?

RP: Well, I’m looking forward to Assassin’s Creed 2. We talked about original stuff - the year before [Fallout 3] Assassin’s Creed was the original thing. Now, that was their first effort with that kind of promise and it was a big huge investment. There were a couple of things there that they needed to work on, but the fact is they were very successful, which means they have the money to put into it. So by default, even before the game I was thinking, “It was a huge success, and there was a lot to that promise that was cool. If they learn some of the lessons they could learn and use the value they have to apply those lessons, the next thing they do is going to be great”. And the idea of taking it to Italy and Da Vinci doesn’t hurt. It’s really cool, so I’m really looking forward to playing that game. I’ll be a customer.

VideoGamer.com: We’ve talked about sequels a lot… do you think there are too many on the market?

RP: Yeah, I do. I don’t want to bash anybody, but there are some where you’re [thinking] “really? Are we really doing this? Can’t we do something new here?”. And there’s also some amazing talent where I want something different from those guys, because they’re so frickin’ incredible. I keep waiting to hear what Bungie is going to do that’s not Halo. Those guys are amazing, right? They walk on water! And the same with Infinity Ward. It’s like, “Dude I’m totally psyched to get my Call of Duty fix every year, but you guys are amazing! What else have you got? Can you give me something I haven’t seen before?”. I’m totally a day one customer for Modern Warfare, those guys walk on water. I’m totally going to love that game, but I kind of already know what I’m going to get. It’s going to be exciting, it’s going to be tight and I’m going to spend a billion hours online… but surprise me. I want to be surprised. There’s some amazing talent there, and I want to see what they can do.

VideoGamer.com: So what needs to be done to change things?

RP: I don’t know. The folks that are innovating need to be rewarded so that the folks that are making big bets can take that risk. That’s one thing. It’s too big of a risk for Infinity Ward to do anything but what they’re doing, because there’s too much value and there’s really big scope for it. I mean, we saw that Bungie got to the point where… I don’t claim to have any inside story, but from the outside what it looked like was, here they’ve done their third Halo game and it’s like they’re just going to be the Halo guys for the rest of their careers. These are really talented, smart, inventive people! No-one can do that “I want to do Halo for the rest of my life”, right? So they actually got to the point where they broke away and became independent from Microsoft to have a hope of doing something different. So we’ll see what that turns into. It’s a big risk that they’ve taken, and I hope they get paid for it too. If that works out, and they get paid, that’ll make it easier. If Borderlands works out, people will look at that. The more guys who take risks and do interesting stuff that works out, it makes it easier. The folks that take those risks and don’t get paid for it, they can’t make that investment. At the end of the day, what we do is very hard and it’s also very expensive. It’s not free to do what we do, and the folks that fit the bill for this stuff , they’ve got to believe that they’re going to make more than they spend. If they don’t believe that, they’re not going to do it.

VideoGamer.com: Randy, it’s been a pleasure.

Borderlands will be released later this year on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360.

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