Aliens: Colonial Marines Cost Gearbox CEO $10-15 Million Dollars
Easily, one of the more recent controversial and disappointing game titles of this decade was 2013’s Aliens: Colonial Marines, which had a lot of potential. Unfortunately, the game completely stunk, as stated by both reviewers and gamers alike. Talking with IGN, Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford noted that he lost $10-15 million dollars on the project. Pitchford claimed he still doesn’t know how it all went wrong.
“I don’t know,” he begins when asked what happened. Pitchford continued: “We made an Aliens game. I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything in the world. I got to, the team and us, we got to rebuild the Sulaco. We got to work with Syd Mead to do that. We got to build all of Hadley’s Hope, not just the few hallways of the colony that you see in the film. We built power loaders and APCs and dropships. Holy crap, we went out to The Derelict! I’m just so glad that I got the opportunity to spend time in that space. I understand that there’s some people that didn’t enjoy it and I’m very sorry about that. That’s the nature of entertainment – some of my favourite bands who’ve made some of the songs I think are the best in the world have other songs on B-sides that I completely don’t care for. It’s going to happen. So I don’t know what to say.”
In addition, Pitchford addressed the rumors that Gearbox took the money invested into Aliens: Colonial Marines and spent it on Borderlands instead. Pitchford denies those embezzlement claims and tried to explain why they are ludicrous: “I lost somewhere between $10 million and $15 million that I invested in that game. I still don’t regret it – I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything. But no, the plan was to entertain people with this awesome Aliens experience. What’s weird is that I actually like the game. Some people invented this myth that if we tried it would have been good, so we must not have tried. Maybe we didn’t spend the money on this game, maybe we spent it on another one that was good? So there’s this rumour we’d embezzled money from Aliens and spent it on Borderlands. Firstly, that’s absurd, and secondly the actual truth is the opposite, which is a lot more embarrassing. We took a huge amount of the money that we’d made off the first Borderlands, invested it into Aliens trying to make it as good as we could, and still ended up disappointing a huge number of people. That’s a whole other kind of failure! But it’s all from this fundamental truth, which is we tried to do a good job and entertain people and some people didn’t like it.
You can read the complete interview via the link above.