New Tales from the Borderlands – Gearbox on modernising a cult classic
When developer Telltale Games launched the first season of its acclaimed and enormously influential The Walking Dead adaptation in 2012, it hit upon a choice-driven narrative formula the studio would rigidly adhere to across every one of its titles until its sad closure in 2018. Some found masterful ways to adapt that increasingly well-worn template, others were merely okay, but none were perhaps as odd, memorable, and quietly beloved as Tales from the Borderlands.
Tales from the Borderlands seemed like a bizarre, if not outright doomed, proposition from the off, attempting to marry Telltale’s rich, character-driven formula to a puerile, open-ended looter shooter best known for its oodles of procedural guns. But against all the odds, it worked sublimely, the team at Telltale using the Borderlands series’ loosely sketched canvas to deliver an experience that, for many who played it, proved to be not only the best Borderlands game, but Telltale’s finest work – a five-part adventure that, largely free from the shackles of continuity and expectation, gleefully experimented with form and structure, melding dizzying invention and anarchic, unabashed silliness to something with surprising warmth and emotion.
And now, some eight years later, original Borderlands developer Gearbox is attempting to capture the lightning-in-a-bottle magic of Tales from the Borderlands all over again.
“I absolutely love Tales from the Borderlands,” Lin Joyce, head of writing at Gearbox, tells me during a recent chat about the studio’s long-awaited follow-up New Tales from the Borderlands. “It is also true that I have a doctorate in interactive narrative design, so it was a piece that I studied. It was like, What are they doing? How are they doing that? What kind of story are they telling? And without getting too academic about it, looking at how they played with narration, how they played with time, and space, and perspective changes. All of that was incredible to narrative structure and design.”
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Eight years on, Joyce’s love for what is perhaps Telltale’s most overlooked game has, of course, come full circle, with the team at Gearbox currently preparing for New Tales from the Borderlands’ imminent release. It’s a project that feels like an unenviable endeavour in some ways, given the incredible fondness for the original among fans, but it’s a challenge the studio seems thrilled to have had the opportunity to tackle. But why even consider bringing back an odd little series spin-off that, despite a strong critical reception, was far from a commercial hit?
