The Borderlands 2 hands-on demo at E3 involves a bunch of 25-level characters from each of the game's four classes, partly to give players a chance to spec out higher-level characters and see what that's all about, and also to give them a taste of combat midway through the campaign.


But the gang at Gearbox is also letting folks take home a weapon if they fell in love with it. Not literally, of course. You get a code to unlock it when the game releases. There was one, and only one, gun I wanted: the Jakobs Horse Cannon.

Jakobs, according to the Borderlands canon, is known for making guns that deal a whole hell of a lot of damage, and fire as fast as you can pull the trigger. Keeping with their Wild West design themes, they usually have engraved gold plating inlaid into the grip or stock. The Horse Cannon is one of those that come up with a purple name in your inventory, meaning this sucker is an "Epic" weapon, a step below "Legendary" and two below the unique firearms acquired from bosses.


The Horse Cannon has a drum magazine that looks like a motorcycle wheel—Jeramy Cooke, the game's art director, told me it is actually "a magazine of magazines." It blows up a ton of ass. I twice got second-wind saves just unloading into Badass-caliber construction mechs. But it has a reloading time somewhere in the neighborhood of baking a potato.

Well, anyway, this take-it-home offer is good only for the game's PC version, which means I won't be able to keep my trusty Horse Cannon. So I'm going to give away my claim to one lucky PC gamer. What that means is, I will send the winner the card itself with the redemption code on it. It will not work until the game releases, so there's no point giving this code out first-come, first-served over Twitter. There'd be no way to tell if you won.

Update: We have a winner! Jeff G. of Huntington, W.V. was randomly selected this morning from 94 qualifying emails. He receives the card that contains the code—which is an in-game code, unusable until Borderlands 2 releases. But it's a piece of memorabilia anyway. I think. Thanks to all for reading this post and for entering.

Now, I want to be sure this goes to a PC gamer who can use the item, not someone who can't read instructions or doesn't know it's not for the Xbox 360 or PS3. So email kotakucontest@gmail.com, and include a screencapture of your current playthrough in Borderlands. It'd help if there's some sort of visual proof this is the PC version.


I'll select a winner at random between now and the time I get home from E3 on Friday and mail him or her the card. So the winner will need to provide me a mailing address in the United States for purposes of this contest.

If you're curious about the Horse Cannon's stats, feast your eyes on them below. This sumbitch kicks like a mule. I suppose I should have specified this is a level 25 weapon, so it won't be available to you until you reach that level. If you win, either unlock it immediately and carry it around (or sell it, hell), or wait until you hit 25 and unlock it then. Good luck!