Randy Pitchford is happy there’s finally a version of Borderlands his mom can get into

polygon.com:

Anyone who loves a video game has almost certainly struggled to explain why they love it to someone who simply doesn’t play video games at all. Randy Pitchford makes games, as the CEO of Gearbox Software, home of the Borderlands franchise, and even he has.

But as of this summer, he also makes movies. Pitchford served as producer on Lionsgate’s Borderlands, directed by Eli Roth and starring Cate Blanchett (Tár), Ariana Greenblatt (Barbie), Jamie Lee Curtis (Everything Everywhere All At Once), Kevin Hart (Jumanji), and Jack Black (The Super Mario Bros. Movie). And among all the hopes he has for the production, a primary one was that it would help Borderlands fans share the world of the games with the non-gamers in their life.

“Like, my mom loves me and is proud of me,” Pitchford told Polygon, “but she doesn’t play my video games.” Polygon sat down with Pitchford to talk about the long road to making a video game movie, and the surprising place it started: Telltale Games’ critically lauded Tales from the Borderlands.

Polygon: It’s safe to say that video game adaptations have a less-than-stellar reputation — though one that’s changing with more recent releases , especially in TV — do you feel you have a different perspective on movie adaptations of video games now that you’ve made one?

Randy Pitchford: I mean, I’m definitely a different person now than I was when we started. But I know there’s a reason why people love the characters that we’ve made in the universe that my team and I created. And you want to be careful — I never want to have too much bias towards the things that I like. But I put myself into it, and you you put it out there in the world, and Wow, people are digging it, and it makes you believe that there are some other ways that people maybe who don’t play video games can enjoy the storytelling value, or the characters and the universe and all these relatable situations that they find themselves in. We seem to have found some angles that aren’t