Randy Pitchford, Gearbox CEO, chronic tweeter, and known warlock, has performed his greatest magic trick yet. The magician has resurrected the dead—summoning the spirit of the most tedious videogame discourse of 2010 in a new documentary from Shacknews called 24 'Til Launch: The Making Of Borderlands 4.
"I love that we're just getting started," says Pitchford, right as the documentary wraps up. "When I say we, I'm talking about the whole industry together." Then he says it. He says the dread phrase that I truly thought we'd heard the last unironic use of at least a full decade ago. "We haven't even had our Citizen Kane yet, let alone, you know, Jurassic Park or Star Wars."
It's disturbingly possible that some people reading this might be too young to remember the videogame discourse of the late 2000s, but it was a time when the industry as a whole—and especially a lot of game players themselves—were seized by a kind of paralysing inferiority complex.
Were games legitimate, like novels and films were? Were they art? What did we even mean by 'art'? Lots of people, it turns out, did not really know what they meant by art, outside of some vague conception of 'a thing people older than me can't look down on me for enjoying.'
Anyway, during this period, the notion of the 'Citizen Kane of gaming' was bandied about incessantly. What was the one game that proved, beyond a shadow of doubt, that games were truly art and that we were actually very cool and cultured for liking them? More often than not, this label was applied to BioShock, because it was about ideas, you see. Gotta be art if you're about ideas. QED.
It all seems very quaint now. Elements of that discourse still rumble from time to time, but for the most part the demographics of people that play games have gotten old enough that we're a bit less desperate for approval from mum and dad.
Which is why it feels like Randy Pitchford has just arrived in the Shacknews documentary through a portal from 2007 when he suddenly says games "haven't even had our Citizen Kane yet," when he suggests that the medium has yet to be legitimised by a single breakthrough success.
I am even more confused by Pitchford's reference to Jurassic Park and Star Wars. The money and special effects tech sloshing around the games industry—which is what I associate those two franchises with—puts the movie industry to shame. What would it take, in Pitchford's mind, for a game to attain 'Star Wars' status? I guess literally being a Star Wars game isn't enough. There have been a few of those.
Anyway, Pitchford seems to be enjoying himself, at least. "We're just figuring this shit out," he grins. "But it's fun." To be fair, 2007 was a pretty fun year.
