#Gearbox Studios

[demifiendrsa]

Official character posters for Borderlands (2024 movie)

[cinemaquiles]

Pior do ano? O fiasco de "Borderlands: o destino do universo está em jogo" (2024)

[mvfm-25]

" Every bit of Blue Shift is worthy of the Half-Life legacy! "

Computer Gaming World n204 - July, 2001.

[subspaceskater]

still really just jaw on the floor that gearbox is outsourcing a risk of rain gacha game (Risk of Rain: Hostile Worlds) to a studio (Frima Studio) that has smash hits with names such as "nun attack", "young thor", "the build-a-bear workshop mobile app" and "family guy: stewie 2.0"

[half-an-ox]

splatstuff

[they-have-the-same-va]

Amara from Borderlands 3 shares a voice actress with Livewire / Leslie Willis from My Adventures with Superman.

Voiced by Zehra Fazal

[pixelatedaudio]

PC Music with WASD – PA171

PC Music with WASD – PA171

Following up our last show on CANYON.MID, we’re joined by the artist that closed out the show, Austin Green. Austin is a guitarist and leader of the band WASD. We’re going all in on PC game music today with a mix of Austin’s favorites as well as PC game music covers from his recently released album Escape. For more info about Austin and WASD, check out the following links: Linktree |…

[savingcontent]

Neverwinter heads to the Northdark Reaches in latest module expansion, simultaneously released onto PC and consoles

Neverwinter heads to the Northdark Reaches in latest module expansion, simultaneously released onto PC and consoles

(more…)

[henrykathman]

The Miraculous Horror of Stop Motion

From the same artform that brought you Coraline and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, comes three stories that evoke the existential fear of art.

Original Music by Molly Noise

Bibliography below

Atrocity Guide. “The Animators Who’ve Spent 40 Years on a Single Film.” YouTube, 9 Oct. 2021, www.youtube.com/watch?v=73hip3pz0Xs&pp=ygUMdGhlIG92ZXJjb2F0. Accessed 19 June 2024.

Brubaker, Charles. “The Japanese Studios of Rankin/Bass.” Cartoon Research, Jerry Beck, 14 Apr. 2014, cartoonresearch.com/index.php/the-japanese-studios-of-rankinbass/.

Bute, Paris. “Introduction to “a Rankin/Bass Retrospective from a New Perspective.”” Citizen Jane, Stephens College, 19 Nov. 2021, www.citizenjane.org/home/cwwicd2ucb2fvs64kgfaocfykjhaum. Accessed 19 June 2024.

Crome, Althea. “Coraline.” Althea Crome | Micro Knitter, 2012, www.altheacrome.com/coraline. Accessed 19 June 2024.

Harold Halibut. Directed by Onat Hekimoğlu, Slow Bros., 16 Apr. 2024.

Hekimoglu, Onat, and Gabriel Schmitz. “Unite Berlin 2018 - Harold Halibut and Making a Stop Motion Game.” Unity, YouTube, 6 Aug. 2018, youtu.be/9usssSQc0wQ. Accessed 6 May 2023.

Jon "Sikamikanico" Clarke. “The Making of Harold Halibut.” XboxEra, YouTube, 21 Mar. 2024, youtu.be/WMyxM9t3o7A. Accessed 19 June 2024.

LAIKA Studios. “Sweater and Gloves: Knitting Coraline by Hand.” YouTube, 11 July 2017, youtu.be/zUvkfcGR-7U. Accessed 19 June 2024.

Mad God Productions. “Phil Tippett’s “Mad God.”” Kickstarter, 17 May 2012, www.kickstarter.com/projects/madgod/phil-tippetts-mad-god/posts.

Olson, Mathew. “Report: Michel Ancel Accused of Abusive, Disruptive Practices on beyond Good & Evil 2.” VG247, 25 Sept. 2020, www.vg247.com/report-michel-ancel-accused-of-abusive-disruptive-practices-on-beyond-good-evil-2. Accessed 19 June 2024.

Ono, Kosei. “Tadahito Mochinaga: The Japanese Animator Who Lived in Two Worlds.” Animation World Network, AWN, Inc, 1 Dec. 1999, www.awn.com/animationworld/tadahito-mochinaga-japanese-animator-who-lived-two-worlds.

Orland, Kyle. “Claptrap Voice Actor Accuses Gearbox CEO of Assault, Underpayment.” Ars Technica, 7 May 2019, arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/05/claptrap-voice-actor-accuses-gearbox-ceo-of-assault-underpayment/. Accessed 19 June 2024.

Pilling, Jayne. A Reader In Animation Studies. Indiana University Press, 1998. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/book/40033.

Prehistoric Beast. Directed by Phil Tippett, Tippett Studios, 1984. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlaXIRTjNfo

Randles, Jonathan. “VFX Studio with Star Wars, Jurassic Park Credits Goes Bankrupt.” Bloomberg Law, 1 May 2024, news.bloomberglaw.com/bankruptcy-law/vfx-studio-with-star-wars-jurassic-park-credits-goes-bankrupt. Accessed 19 June 2024.

Shanley, Patrick. “Gearbox Software CEO Accused of Contempt in Latest Filing.” The Hollywood Reporter, 27 Aug. 2019, www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/gearbox-software-ceo-accused-contempt-latest-filing-1235064/. Accessed 19 June 2024.

The Making of “Jurassic Park.” Directed by John Schultz, Amblin Entertainment, 1995. https://youtu.be/8r01mk6F_Pk

The Making of Mad God. Directed by Maya Tippett, Shudder, 2021. https://youtu.be/sfUOHh0xmwc

The Tale of the Fox. Directed by Irene Starewicz and Ladislas Starevich, UFA GmbH, 10 Apr. 1941. https://youtu.be/Us_Pn6Q1dBQ

Wikipedia contributors. "List of films with longest production time." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 12 Jun. 2024. Web. 19 Jun. 2024.

Wikipedia contributors. "List of media notable for being in development hell." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 19 Jun. 2024. Web. 19 Jun. 2024.

Wikipedia contributors. "List of Rankin/Bass Productions films." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 9 Jun. 2024. Web. 19 Jun. 2024.

Wikipedia contributors. "Tadahito Mochinaga." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 28 Nov. 2023. Web. 19 Jun. 2024.

Wilson, Josh. “Phil Tippett: 24 Frames per Second < the Fabulist Words & Art.” The Fabulist Words & Art, 5 Nov. 2021, fabulistmagazine.com/24-frames-per-second-the-phil-tippett-interview/.

Worse than the Demon. Directed by Maya Tippett, Shudder, 2013. https://youtu.be/ghKqvDNRe4c

[hedwyn-here]

I still see people obsessively hating on Hello Games for the launch of No Man's Sky, saying they will never trust them, never buy a game from them etc... A very ambitious game made by (for most of it's development) less than 10 employees had to cut some of it's planned content before launch. They were (reportedly) pressured into announcing the game before they were ready, their studio flooded, they had to borrow internet from their neighbours by running ethernet out of the windows, they had a huge company suddenly advertising it as the next big AAA release despite the fact the studio was running out of money...

They aren't blameless, but it doesn't take a whole lot to see how a small group who were incredibly passionate about their work (and without a PR team) could get caught up in this situation.

But you know what? They've spent the last 10 years continually working on that game. Adding more and more content, getting it to where people expected it to be and even beyond in ways nobody could have predicted. Every single trailer they've released since has shown nothing but precicely what the game will offer. And we still see people treating them like industry villains.

There's a particular reason this bothers me so much, and it's name is Randy Pitchford.

A few years before No Man's Sky was released, Gearbox advertised the game Aliens: Colonial Marines with fabricated trailers, gameplay and screenshots. Not just things that had to be removed from the game for budgetary or time reasons, but literally just things they faked purely to advertise the game. What can only be construed as an intentional attempt to lie to the audience so they would buy a game. They were accused of using money SEGA had given them for the development of the game to fund their own proejct, Borderlands. Not only did Gearbox never try to fix Colonial Marines, to my knowledge they never even acknowledged any of the shitty stuff they did. Pitchford routinely attempted to slide that blame onto others (and if I remember rightly even said some pretty unpleasant stuff abotu Steff Sterling for daring to criticise the game on multiple occasions). Yet people are still more than happy to jump on Gearbox games uncritically. Even though they reportedly treat their staff like shit. Have very questionable means of paying their staff that afford them the opportunity to deny them bonuses even management (like Pitchford) are taking home huge bonuses of their own.

This is an example of a large developer very intentionally and maliciously lying to the audience and nobody seemed to give a shit about it even as little as a year after release.

For my money, Hello Games have proven themselves. I'll take an over-ambitious passionate group of artists who can't quite deliver on their promises over a malicious and predatory corporation any day of the week.

Fuck Gearbox.

<3 Hello Games.

I can't fuckin wait to play Light no Fire, I will buy that shit day 1.

[demifiendrsa]

First look at the live-action Borderlands movie.

The film is slated to hit theaters on August 9, 2024.

[toskarin]

What's the most embarrassing video game company to still be a fan of?

I thought about this for a bit. the easy answer would be [studio that did something Bad] but that kind of defeats the point of the question

I was torn between Gearbox and Ubisoft, but it's really gotta be Ubisoft, if only because it's all so dreadfully boring. Gearbox games aren't interesting to me, but I can imagine how someone could enjoy those on a level deeper than one might enjoy anxiously chainsmoking after a long day at work

the most embarrassing studio for me to be a fan of, personally, is Square Enix. I hate that I'm a Square Enix fan. I hate that they make so many games I like when their output is like 70% mid and 20% garbage

[megafreeman]

We are literally witnessing a wannabe monopoly falling apart holy shit

[mvfm-25]

" While exploration and puzzle solving are important aspects of the game, there is more than enough action to keep all but the most twitch-oriented gamers happy! "

PC Powerplay Magazine n93 - December, 2003.

[raptorific]

My favorite thing about the weird contingent of people who pick a video game studio, any video game studio, and make Hating Them into their whole personality, is when the studio they’re obsessed with unveils something new that people like, and they google “[game studio] controversy” and post the most recent result with a comment like “wow, like CLOCKWORK” as though to indicate that all popular releases are a PR move to bury some controversial story or another

When the reality is like. It’s a video game studio. There is a very public labor controversy every nine seconds. If you have a broken clock that always says Controversy-O-Clock, and someone who only looks at the clock when they’re given candy, of course it’s going to seem to them like there’s a pattern of “I always get candy at Controversy-O-Clock.”

Like, “there are controversies round-the-calendar” is actually worse but not quite as flashy as the more conspiratorial “EA/Blizzard/Rockstar/Gearbox/CDPR/etc etc etc is only announcing this or that to cover up the fact that they’ve been  paying employees in scrip or sending animators into caves to mine for crypto manually or grinding up voice actors for food”

[spacevixenmusic]

Unfairly Maligned Games, Vol. 2

Games I loved that got low scores, review bombed, or have some other weird negative stigma attached to them that I think is unfairly earned.

NOTE: I don't believe in giving games a number score or a letter grade. Maybe I'm just bad at criticism or very easy to please, whatever.

We Happy Few [2018]

Originally advertised as some kind of procedurally-generated stealth horror survival game that people kept insisting was "like BioShock" even though there is literally zero correlation or even vague resemblance to BioShock, this game's crowdfunded development process was a long hard rollercoaster ride through concept and scope changes, getting picked up by major studios and publishers, a constantly evolving marketing campaign, and a loud, rude blasting of negative press right before and right after launch due to bad take misinformation and some game-breaking bugs on Day One.

We Happy Few started as a Kickstarter project from Compulsion Games, a small studio known only for their previous game Contrast. In Contrast, you play as a child's silent imaginary friend in a cabaret dancer costume who can phase in and out of backgrounds to become a shadow on the wall and solve platforming puzzles. Working together, you help the child navigate through her emotions as her parents struggle through their own relation-shit in an early 1900s European port town. Seeing as their first game was stylish as hell and widely praised among indie crowds, it's no surprise that a Kickstarter for a new game from that studio became an instant success, so much so that it caught the eye of several big studios (Microsoft and Gearbox Publishing), and it quickly turned into a vastly bigger project with many more hands working on it. The proc-gen element was downtuned and streamlined, and the main emphasis of the game became about survival, stealth, and story.

And let me tell you. In terms of story, this game is phenomenal. The simple premise is that you play through the lives of three people living in 1950s-60s England, under a government that is forcing everyone to take these candy pills called Joy that make you instantly and excessively cheerful, so you can easily forget about all the horrible things that the government wants you to forget ever happened about The War, the Missing Children, and all the people still actively dying of malnutrition from the ongoing Famine and all that. The people are mandated to forget their worries, grin and bear it, pretend everything's just peachy keen, and if you refuse to take that pill, people will notice your un-cheerful behavior and call the police to track you down and beat you senseless. Can't have any Downers in our perfectly lovely happy town, now can we?

The game's art direction features two stark parallels between a dreary English village and early 60s-70s psychedelia (with a hint of A Clockwork Orange for good measure), and a soundtrack influenced by bands of the era, such as The Doors, The Beatles, The Byrds, etc. The dichotomy of looting dilapidated rural homes while avoiding plague-ridden peasants versus the rainbow streets and lava lamp light show sex dens in the cities is truly astonishing. It's a game about, funnily enough, Contrasts between the bright and cheerful life everyone is forced to think they're living, and the grim depressing reality that lies underneath. Many people initially assumed this meant the game had some kind of anti-drug message about not relying on your depression medication cause pills can't fix everything, but it's clear right from the get-go that's nowhere near the case. We Happy Few is a story about revisionist history, the pressure to conform, submission to a corrupt system that might not even know what it's doing, and the very British notion of Keeping Calm and Carrying On as if major atrocities hadn't just been committed in a massive world war.

Gameplay-wise, this is a strange hybrid of survival and stealth, with combat definitely being present, but taking a backseat for the most part. It's much easier to distract enemies than fight them, and many of the characters excel at hiding in plain sight, provided you don't do anything to make people suspicious, like running and jumping around or breaking into houses to raid them for food. You do have options and skill trees though, so the game does allow you to tailor it to your own playstyle to a degree. I had significantly more fun playing it slow and methodical, sneaking up and choking out enemies, and watching NPCs bump into each other awkwardly while quoting ancient English literature for no apparent reason. Taking it slow, reading every scrap of paper and Journal I found, my final playtime was about 50~ hours.

Again though, let me gush about the story for a second. The base game has three full chapters, each of which has you play as a different character with different strengths and game mechanics (including such wildly inventive ideas as the burden of motherhood taking up inventory space if you don't periodically check on the baby you have to leave at home, and carefully maintaining a balanced blood sugar level so you don't collapse?!). Their stories are all deeply connected in ways that aren't immediately apparent but are cool as hell once the pieces of the puzzle come together. Each chapter more or less takes place at the same time, but the events always play out slightly differently, because memory-altering drugs fuck with your sense of reality and make us all question the reliability of each narrator. If that wasn't already cool enough, the game also features three DLC packages where you play as three ADDITIONAL characters, each of whom is also a recognizable face in the main story if you're paying attention. These DLCs add even more neat mechanics and open up the story events even more in and around the main game. They were honestly all an absolute blast to play, especially if you were already as invested in the story as I was. And the subject material goes all over the place, touching on such highly specific topics as 60s science fiction, gay lovers, Beatlemania, trippy drug-induced murder mysteries, the British occupation of India, and plenty more. I can't stress enough what a unique storytelling experience this game has to offer. It really is unlike anything else I've ever played! But alas, we should probably talk about why nobody else seems to be as enthused about the game as I am...

Aside from the huge misunderstanding about the game's message, We Happy Few was bombed with criticism on Day One due to some major bugs that hadn't been ironed out - remember, for a $60 game backed by some big names in the industry, it was still very much an indie passion project from the start, and it's clear it wasn't given the full AAA treatment at all. Several big-name Game Reviewers (a field I detest almost as much as Cartoon Reviewers) ripped into the game for its bugs, and while I can't fault people for being mad at broken quests and at least one full-on softlock, not everyone experienced those bugs, and many of them were ironed out in later patches. It's almost like chasing those Day One reviews and videos are a bad idea for people who want to Enjoy Games. Sadly, first impressions are all that seem to matter anymore in gaming, so those early negative reviews still sting to this day. But people out there will give games like Skyrim a perfect 10/10 despite a significant number of similar bugs (hell, they're almost a charm of the series at this point), so why should an indie game not be given the same graces?

In closing? We Happy Few is a phenomenal story in a completely fresh setting that really doesn't feel like anything else before it. The game has been criticized to hell and back for its early bugs or for "boring" gameplay or whatever the Review outlets chose to report, but to me it stands out as an extremely unique experience in a sea of Lowest Common Denominator games. I'd rather play an imperfect or buggy game with a unique or highly niche premise than yet another polished piece of pristine pop pleasure, and I genuinely think people would enjoy games like We Happy Few if they just lowered their goddamn expectations for once in their lives.