Gearbox eyes up Portal model

By Johnny Minkley Published 14 December, 2007

Box bonus is way forward.

Bundled in with The Orange Box as an experimental bonus, Valve's Portal has proved the surprise hit of the year. And the strategy has attracted admiring glances from Gearbox Software boss Randy Pitchford, who reckons it could be the way forward for his studio.

"What I like most about Portal was that it's a quick sample of a game," he told Eurogamer TV. "To me what that suggests is, that can be a business. That we can invest in creating these kinds of things, include them in bigger products, and there are people that will love those in their own right, even if it's only a two-hour experience."

Pitchford was over in London to show off the first playable build of WWII shooter Brothers In Arms: Hell's Highway (read Rob's impressions elsewhere), but regretted that the strict focus of that title did not afford him the freedom enjoyed by Valve with The Orange Box.

"I think that [Portal] might influence me in the future," he revealed. "There are brilliant things we're doing with Hell's Highway, amazing things technologically, but we also have to confine ourselves to the authenticity of the subject."

And he expressed a clear preference for the Orange Box model over standalone releases on Xbox Live or PSN, adding: "Xbox Live is neat, but why not include something of that scale in with your game? That's neat added value. If it can affect the purchase decision of the customer, you can rationalise what it costs to develop.

"I would love to do because it's fun and a great opportunity to play with gameplay elements that might be a little bit outside the scope of your core game."

As a former 3D Realms developer, Pitchford also hailed Portal for representing the realisation of ideas he says the team had been working on years ago for PC and 360 shooter Prey. "I worked on Prey in its first incarnation," he said. "And what Valve did with Portal was part of the concept of what we originally imagined with portals, and those were the puzzles that we hoped were part of the gameplay. I didn't see a lot of that come through in the final version of Prey."

Gearbox is currently keeping itself busy beyond Brothers In Arms with sci-fi shooter Borderlands, an Alien-based FPS, and a Wii update of the brilliant Samba Di Amigo. You can hear more from Randy in the next Episode of the Eurogamer TV Show.

Picture of Johnny.

About Johnny Minkley

Eurogamer TV's Johnny Minkley is a veteran journalist with a lifelong passion for games and the games industry. He uses Twitter more than most people use air.

Read more articles from Johnny by visiting the Johnny Minkley archive page.

You may also like...

Comments (14) Latest comment 4 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • Killerbee #1 4 years ago

    Interesting that he mentions Prey - I'm playing through that at the moment (picked it up for a fiver from Game) and it's clear the inspiration was there. It's just let down a bit by the generic alien space ship setting, the slightly weak story and characters and (so far) lack of any really clever puzzles with the portals.

  • thisisatempaccount #2 4 years ago

    The episodic game is dead!

    Long live the microepisodic game!

    My main gripe about this is a (possibly totally incorrect) fear that it lowers the expectations for full-length, full-price games. Eight hours for a game is not a lot of bang for your Nty bucks.

    'But don't worry!' We hear the developers cry. 'We were working on the sequel long before we forgot to tack an adequate ending onto the game you've just finished! And in the meantime, here's 100 minutes of low-cost, low-concept diversion [you really think you'll be lucky enough to get a portal every time? A genre reinvention? Pfft] to fiddle with until your attention span gives!'

    Expect EA to buy up popcap in the next week and start bundling Peggle with every copy of Football Simulation 2009, Celebrity Endorsement Golf Game and Car Racer 14.
    Edited by 1 at 14/12/07 @ 13:50

  • sharpfish #3 4 years ago

    It was well recieved because it was something different, out of the norm, a 'free' addition to a VERY good game.

    If it was made standard to include such things the novelty would soon wear off, personally there's not much replayability in Portal anyway, it wore off on me fairly quickly but then i've played prey and narbacular drop and it was 'old' already... still very good of course but not life changing.

    Crysis is more inline with the thing I want now that WAS awesome and ground breaking (but most people can't see that).

  • Bumhug360 #4 4 years ago

    Portal is just a tech demo for Episode 3 ;)

  • NickJD #5 4 years ago

    Yeah come back when you stop making WW2 shooters you unoriginal has beens.

  • neilka #6 4 years ago

    Brother's In Arms is he?

  • Toothball #7 4 years ago

    Experimental Bonus? I bought Orange Box specifically to play Portal. Getting Half Life and the rest was the bonus for me.

  • Tonka #8 4 years ago

    Fucking Minigames ruining the business. I wish they could invest their time in making real games instead of 2hr snack bite games are art crap.

    Portal spells the end of gaming as we know it

  • kangarootoo #9 4 years ago

    "Fucking Minigames ruining the business"

    I think the reverse is the case actually. Small games for not much money are probably the future. Just take a look at the revenue generated by mobile phone games as an example.

    If you had said "minigames ruining gaming as a hobby for me personally" I might agree with you (and I might not), but as far business is concerned minigames are a fine idea.

    Edit: as another example, Peggle is making an absolute FORTUNE.


    My take on portal is that Valve were testing out some tech for a future HL installment. However, if you release it as a product of quality, you get to test out some ideas, you get shedloads of user feedback, you get to make some money immediately, and gamers get another good product from your house and sing your praises. So everyone is happy :)
    Edited by 1 at 14/12/07 @ 15:48

  • Slamhound #10 4 years ago

    He missed the point utterly. Portal was special not because it was a neato game you could finish in the space of an afternoon (Even though it was), or not because it was practically a genre unto itself.

    It was special because it was excellently written, effortlessly humorous, and just, well, Portal.

    And these bloody Burnout Paradise ads are friggin' crippling me. I haven't had a banner ad shit all over my system specs since I was on a bloody 56k modem.

  • kangarootoo #11 4 years ago

    Adblock is your friend.

    Yes I realise it winds EG up whenever it gets mentioned, and I understand exactly why as your funding has to come from somewhere. But if they insist on ads that mess with readers' ability to read the site, its just going to happen. We are the hand that feeds them, in a roundabout sort of way.

  • kangarootoo #12 4 years ago

    @Slamhound

    I don't think he is saying that is why Portal is good. I think he is actually saying why he thinks games such as Portal are appealing for a developer to work on.

  • YourMessageHere #13 4 years ago

    Don't EG have any control over what ads they show? If EG is ad-supported, I don't have a problem with that, in fact it's directly because of an ad on this site reminding me that Perseus Mandate was out that I bought it, but if the ads stop me using the site, it's hardly helpful. I mean, these really flash-heavy ones that eat 100% of my CPU time and make everything including my mouse take several seconds to respond (the Stranglehold one most recently for me) are kind of obviously detrimental for everyone; the advertising equivalent of shipping pre-red ring of death'd 360s. I have a 20mb cable connection and it screws me over; what must this be like for dial-up or 0.5mb ADSL connections? Can't EG vet the ads and refuse the ones that will quite plainly make their site unusable?

    EDIT: oh yeah, the article. Portal is a one-off. That level of quality and/or originality can't be sustained or expected. I bought Orange Box for portal and Ep.2, and that only because it was cheaper than buying just those two individually - I already had HL2 and Ep1, and I played TF2 long enough to confirm my pre-purchase feelings of disinterest (about 4 hours). The only way I'd buy Brothers in Arms, assuming something I really liked came with it, would be if it was dirt cheap - i.e. probably in a big sale or preowned, so no return to speak of from the sale - because I know I don't want to play BiA in the slightest.
    Edited by 1 at 14/12/07 @ 17:36

  • monkie_king #14 4 years ago

    i remember reading a Prey preview in Edge in about 1998 that talked about all the tricksy stuff it'd do with portals -- rooms that loop back on themselves, rooms that are bigger on the inside than the outside, rooms that were different depending which door you entered from etc.

    it's surprising that no-one else took up the idea in the interim before the Narbacular Drop/Portal team, really.
    Edited by 1 at 17/12/07 @ 11:09

  • YourMessageHere #15 4 years ago

    @ lamadude: because I use Opera, and this is the only site I ever visit that does this.