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.

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