Let me put it this way... I had the same idea. I loved Samba de Amigo on the Dreamcast.

RP: Who doesn't have that idea? If you loved the Dreamcast...

It's just obvious.

RP: Everybody! It's so obvious.

And I'm like, "Gearbox? Really?" With Blue Shift, a Halo port, Brothers in Arms... there's a certain trajectory, and then whoosh, you're going to veer off.

RP: Here's the thing, though, man. I play games. If you were to look at my Gamertag on Xbox Live, you'd see that I have like 58,000 Gamerpoints. And that's not from playing shooters. That's from playing everything. That's just the Xbox. I have all the platforms.

We're gamers. The industry will want to put us in a box, but we play a lot of games, and we love a lot of games, and there's a lot of dreams we have as game makers, too. It's a cool opportunity to make a sequel to Samba on the Wii.

And the guys working on it, they're awesome. They're really good. I wish I could be down there and actually doing some of the work, because that's a really fun little project.

Sega/Gearbox Software's Samba de Amigo

Do you feel as a business that it's useful to have that core competency with shooters? Does that help you sign deals? Does that help you as a development studio?

RP: I don't know. I think if you're a publisher and you're examining Gearbox, you might think, "Wow, they have a wide range." We're not like Bette Midler, we're like Pavarotti. We've got a wide range of what we can sing with. That's pretty neat. As long as we're capable of doing well with where we apply our range, then we're okay.

I think you look at Gearbox and you can see a couple of threads. On one hand, there's a lot of cool things out in the world that other people have made, and we like to get ourselves involved in those cool things. That's why we did the Half-Life thing, and that's why we got involved with Halo and why we're even doing Samba and other things that are peoples' properties. It's why we're doing Aliens now.

The other thread is building original things, and we're doing that too. That's Brothers in Arms and Borderlands, which is coming soon. I think that, from a business point of view, the sum of all that actually helps, because it shows that there's a range there, and there's an understanding of game making beyond just this one genre.

It's interesting. I was talking to someone with High Impact. They've done both the Ratchet & Clank games for PSP, and some of them are ex-Insomniac. What we were talking about was, to an extent -- there's a regionalization, or you think of regional competencies. I mean, in Texas, the two things I think of are shooters and MMOs.

RP: That's true. I'm in Texas because I once worked for Scott and George from 3D Realms on the Duke Nukem franchise. The last-gen one. Well, not last-gen, five gens ago. (laughs) The Duke Nukem 3D era. There's a lot of folks like me that are in Texas because of id, because of 3D Realms, and because of the shooter companies.

And the people who were at id, and some were at Ion Storm. Then the other thing down there was Origin.

RP: Yeah, in Austin, you have all these MMO companies. You've got NCsoft, and all the things that have come in the wake of Origin.