Gearbox’s Borderlands wrapped up development last week, but it’s been a long time coming; The company started working on the game way back in 2005 when they launched the first game in the now six-titles-strong Brothers in Arms series, CEO Randy Pitchford revealed in a recent chat, saying “there’s a lot of invention in the game and a lot of new things that we haven’t done before and no one’s done before.” Things that needed time so they could be done “properly and effectively and accessibly.”

“We started the game with layering Diablo-style compulsion gameplay — like ‘Oh I want more loot’, or ‘I want to level up’, or ‘I want to develop my character and get more skills,’ the idea of choice, discovery and growth — we wanted to layer that on top of a shooter. That was the original design intent.”

It was 2008 when they realized they’ve made it work and decided to “go all the way” with what they had, “We added a character class. We took it from like a linear kind of shooter into a larger connected world with what we added, like 100 side quests instead of just only story missions. And that’s when we said, ‘Okay, we’re going to come in 2009.’”

And come they shall — Borderlands is out on the 360 and PS3 on October 20th in North America and October 23rd internationally with the PC version following a bit later, on October 26th in North America and 30th internationally.