Sega blames Gearbox for Aliens: Colonial Marines disaster

Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford has been personally blamed for Colonial Marines’ misleading marketing, as the class action lawsuit continues.

Aliens: Colonial Marines is a terrible game, but the question of how it turned out so bad, and who’s to blame, is one of the more complex in recent gaming history.

Unusually, very little of the blame is put at the feet of publisher Sega, and instead Borderlands developer Gearbox is accused of a whole raft of misdeeds; these include creating a demo for E3 that bore little resemblance to the final game and subcontracting the work on the single-player to a completely different developer (who subsequently went bust) and forcing them to make it in just nine months.

On top of that Gearbox is accused of funnelling the money it got for Colonial Marines into making Borderlands, causing Sega to temporarily cancel the game when it found out.

The odd thing about all this is that Sega never tried to sue Gearbox, and GameCentral’s understanding is that this is largely due to embarrassment over the whole debacle at Sega’s Japanese headquarters, and an unwillingness to air the details in public.

But a class action lawsuit by a disgruntled gamer has dragged both companies to court anyway, where Sega has been putting the blame for the marketing blunders squarely on Gearbox’s Randy Pitchford.

Claiming it had nothing to do with the marketing has been Gearbox’s main excuse for getting out of the lawsuit, but according to leaked emails discovered by Polygon that’s not how Sega sees it.

‘I spoke face to face to [Gearbox's Steve] Gibson about their persistent panel leaking,’ wrote Sega of America’s Matt Eyre in one message to other Sega officials.

‘Effectively — it’s Randy [Pitchford] doing whatever the f*** he likes. Apparently he did it twice on [Borderlands 2] also, against, against all plans and despite the fact they asked him not to. I think our best result here is that we have no more panel sessions …’

Pitchford also personally demonstrated the infamous E3 2011 demo (we know, because we were there when he did it) that mysteriously looked so much better than the finished game.

‘During one of my conversations with Gearbox today I verified that the E3 demo is indeed the bar that we should use to determine where the entire game will be,’ said Sega’s Matt Powers in another email.

‘That is Gearbox’s plan and what they believe in. I just wanted to double-check with them and since I did I figured I would pass that along to you.’

There are several other examples of Gearbox doing its own thing in terms of marketing, although how this will affect the outcome of the lawsuit, the next hearing of which is October 29, is unclear.