Shack: Can you explain why, even though you're coming up with this stuff now while the game is still in development, you can't incorporate it into the retail release?

Mikey Neumann: We're shooting for October 2009, so you can subtract two and a half to three months for certification time. Certification is what you go through with Microsoft and Sony, and to a lesser degree your publisher.

Certification is to make sure the games are bug free and shippable. Without certification, you'd have games that crash and not work.

Subtract three months off of October and you're, you know, now.

What happens a lot of the time is you finish your game and it's time for cert, and during cert a lot of bugs crop up that you have to fix, and a lot of them are really, really big bugs. You are certainly not adding any content to the game at all. A level? No way.

But, during cert, if you have a lot of level designers who have nothing to do--which is pretty common, you pull level design and art off first--they're gonna be making cool shit and want to make cool shit. That cool shit, that tends to be what DLC ends up being. It's the stuff we couldn't add to the game because we're making it during cert, which is impossible to get into the [retail] game.

Games are hard to make now. I don't know if people are aware of this, but they're really, really hard to make. So we're just coming up with cool ideas and setting them aside so we can do them later.

Let's say I wanted to add an elephant to the game [right now], which I know, your readers are going to be sad, now they just found out there's no elephant.

For the content path of the elephant, you start with the art, probably, do some concept art of what you'd want it to look like. That then goes into a turnaround, which is taking a few pictures of the front and both sides, and putting out a model on top of that. Somebody's gonna go in and make a high poly version, that high poly is gonna get tossed over or go to the same artist to make a low poly version of it with all the normals off. Somebody's gonna have to do the texture maps, and then that's gonna go into the game, you're gonna have to do shader work on that to bring it all together, spec map all that.

While that's happening, hopefully you have an animator rigging it, so that we can now have all the animators working on all the animations. I need the animation list for the programmers that you need handling the AI for that, then that goes over there.

You kinda have the AI and the animation going out at the same time, you're making sure it moves and does stuff. You're gonna have a lot of bugs there, a lot of impolish there. Go into game design, make sure it does stuff like shoot shit out of his mouth.

Shack: I've heard some crazy stories about some of the stuff they do during cert, like making sure nothing weird happens if you mash start and select simultaneously 11 times in a row.

Mikey Neumann: The best cert bug we ever got was in Half-Life PS2. Long time ago.

It was this very specific corner in the game, and if you went into this corner and you crouched, and you spun around 39 times, I think, and stood up, the game would crash.

It was replicatable. 38? No crash. 41? No crash. Those dudes are serious. The thing is, cert is so necessary for gamers to have the best experience possible, especially with a game like Borderlands where you can go anywhere and do anything you want. A lot of ways to potentially break that. We need to hammer hard as we can to make sure anyone doesn't get screwed in the end.

Shack: What about PC? Unlike the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, there isn't a big corporate entity to safeguard gamers there.

Mikey Neumann: Most publishers have a certification process for PC. You don't just go to a publisher and say, "the PC game is done, don't worry about it, just put it in a box." They hammer on it, they do it themselves for the most part.

Developed by Gearbox Software and published by 2K Games, Borderlands arrives on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in October.