About that Borderlands skillet
Last Christmas, Gearbox Software, makers of the Borderlands games, gave members of their team cast iron skillets with the company logo on them. It was picked up by the gaming press in early January, and it’s been on my mind, on and off, ever since.
I’m quite interested in the business of how companies make themselves better employers. Gifts are a complicated thing because they can be a nice touch when things are going well, but a bit tone deaf when they aren’t — it can smack of papering over the cracks.
But that’s not it. Although the Borderlands film suffered critical and commercial immolation earlier in the year, let’s assume the team was happy with the progress being made on the upcoming Borderlands 4, which there is no reason to think won’t be quite a good game. Indeed, a senior writer alluded to the team’s work on Borderlands 4 when revealing the skillet on X over Christmas.
The thing is, we have a cast iron skillet with a custom design, and I know how lovely they can be. Ours has a beautiful Day of the Dead-inspired sugar skull design by Lourdes Villagomez — thank you, Lodge, which is never not joyful to look at. Their Dolly Parton collection is a hoot too.
What bothers me about the Gearbox skillet is that it’s a missed opportunity to do something beautiful. The logo is perfectly serviceable as logos go — a bit route 1, perhaps (it’s, like, a gear? in a box?) — but this was a moment when the logo, though better than nothing, wasn’t really enough.
Every time I look at our pan, I think of the many brilliant artists and designers who surely work at the studio, any one of whom could have been brought into the circle of trust and given the brief “design something beautiful and Gearbox-y or Borderlands-y for the underside of a 10-inch skillet”.
It might have been an ornate variation on the logo or a depiction of one of the game’s vibrant, unhinged characters (team Claptrap, anyone?) Or, very likely, something better. Although I’m sure it was well received — and it was a nice thing to do, of course — there is a slight whiff of corporate hubris about it. It was an idea without the all-important creative follow-up meeting with the right people in the room to figure out what would really make people happy. Something of the managerial “we know best”. Never mind, eh?