Take-Two CEO talks about Borderlands' visual style change - he risked $50 million and got a hit

And this is tested in practice. And it's tested at the most inopportune moment. I like to say that culture, like character, is tested at a critical moment. If everything is going well for you, then it's not a test: “Great, we released a hit, we're making a lot of money — great, we can celebrate.” But the test is when someone comes into your office [to ask for money and postpone the release]. That happened to me — and at that time we hadn't yet pulled the company out of the crisis, we had very few funds.

They tell me: “Listen, we think the game isn't good enough, we messed up, the art style isn't suitable and doesn't stand out. We want to redo the game.” I ask: “And what does that mean?” He replies — this was a long time ago, things sounded a bit different then — “It means 50 million dollars for development and another year of work.”

That game eventually became Borderlands. If we hadn't done that then, Borderlands wouldn't have been a hit. And now it's a huge, very successful franchise. And it wasn't an obvious decision. I'm almost certain that no one else in the industry would have done that. Because it was crazy. They would have said: “The game is ready. We're releasing it and moving on to the next project. I'm not going to spend 50 million dollars to redo this game in a different art style without any proof that it will even work.”