Borderlands behind-the-scenes development titbits revealed

Posted by Mister-X on December 4th, 2009 at 04:54am

Game Informer has posted up a great list of things you may not have known about Borderlands, what went into making it, and how certain elements of the game came to be.

For example, did you know that there were roughly 64 000 check-ins (where new code and art additions are submitted to a central development database) during the development of Borderlands? What about the fact that not only was ClapTrap the last character added to the game, but was also voiced by a Gearbox employee?

Even if you knew those things about Borderlands (which is doubtful), there are a bunch more behind-the-scenes titbits available for you to read below:

There were about 64,000 check-ins to make Borderlands.
Mikey Neumann (creative director) did the motion capture acting for the intro featuring Lilith strutting and blowing a kiss.
The dog paw around Brick’s neck was his dog growing up. Her name was Priscilla. -You can see him as a child with her in the intro cinema to the game.
Crazy Earl, ClapTrap, Scooter and all of the enemy battle dialogue is voiced by Gearbox employees.
The player character Lilith went through seven full revisions until the art director was satisfied with the final version.
ClapTrap was actually the last character added to Borderlands.
Gearbox uses a proprietary automated build system that runs multiple platform builds nightly in addition to specific builds that are manually triggered by developers. The final shipping build of the Xbox game was number 5,700.
There was a suggestion to feature midgets attached to cables that other bandits could toss at you.
A full body explosion will spawn 1 liver, 1-2 kidneys, 1-3 limbs, skull chunks, lots of blood, and other random body parts that have a chance to stick to walls.
23 babies were born to Gearbox developers during the course of this game – three of them to a single designer and his wife.
The Borderlands Official Strategy Guide is the longest strat guide Bradygames had ever written for a single game.
We had a bug once that Lilith’s voice sounded ‘too sexual’ in the international versions, we let it slide.
The actress that played VoG appeared in an episode of Las Vegas on NBC.
“Turtles all the way down” is a reference to infinite regression popularized by Stephen Hawking.