"I think a lot of it comes down to passion and willingness to do whatever the game needs and whatever the team needs in order to make the game awesome," says Paul Hellquist. "Even as a creative director, my team sees me doing the same work that they're doing on a daily basis. I don't just [say]: 'move that move that, do this do that.' I do that all day and at night I'm actually building the game too. I still like to get my hands dirty."

Gearbox is a company of creators. How else would a game that by all accounts worked properly and was on course for an on-time, if mediocre, launch get completely derailed in order to overhaul ... the art? Where else would the lunatics be able to hijack the asylum in order to create a game filled with the chaos and exuberance of Borderlands? Where else would the keys to the game that launched the company into the big leagues of triple-A design be handed to a new team of new lunatics with their own, new lunatic ideas?

"One of the things that is pretty unique with Gearbox as a company is that it's very open to individuals' ideas," says Kevin Duc. "If you have a good idea and you talk to the right people about it and it catches on, the sky's the limit."

That freedom is infectious. And it works.

"Gearbox does a great job of cross-pollinating stuff between the teams," says Hellquist. "Some of the cool AI things that we're doing in Borderlands [were] actually stuff that they were using for Aliens: Colonial Marines. So we were able to take some of their code and consult with those guys and integrate some of their neat features intoBorderlands to get our characters moving around the spaces in more interesting ways. They're using a lot of Borderlands tools because we had a great tools programmer who created our toolset."

At Gearbox, the goal is to de-emphasize competition amongst teams. If Borderlands 2does well, it won't just be the Borderlands 2 team who benefits. At Gearbox, profit bonuses are distributed across the entire company, to each employee, regardless which game they happened to be working on. The result is a unified focus on making every game successful.

"IF YOU HAVE A GOOD IDEA AND YOU TALK TO THE RIGHT PEOPLE ABOUT IT AND IT CATCHES ON, THE SKY'S THE LIMIT."

"We all want all the games to do as well as they possibly can," says Hellquist. "We're all in the same building and are hanging out at lunches. Creative juices are continually flowing across all the games."

The "cross pollination" has another benefit: In an environment where ideas are free to flow, there's a built-in demand for them, and everyone gets to contribute. Developers feel as if their input matters, and as a result, they feel more personally and creatively invested in the product.

"The industry is so wrapped up in itself in a lot of ways," says Jeramy Cooke. "Everyone is copying everyone else who is copying everyone else. It gets very sort of watered down. Where are the new ideas? Who's really reaching? Every now and then you'll see these bright sparks show up and everyone is: 'Whoa what's going on?' And the machine is still in the background churning away and producing more of it.

"Gearbox has the freedom where we're like 'no we're gonna go do this' and whether it's a WW2 serious shooter or something as wild and zany as Borderlands, we dive into that and try to be true to that."

For the people making Borderlands 2, "being true" means both adhering to what worked in the first game and remaining true to themselves, as artists. Each team member brings something new to the table, and just as with the slap-dash, 11th hour art redesign, the various additions and subtractions combine into a whole that is more pure than the sum of its parts. More interesting. More real. And hopefully more fun.

"It's supposed to make you smile," says Hellquist. "That's how I think it will touch people. I hope it will bring some joy to people. I think people are just going to smile a lot.

"There's nothing better than making people happy."