The unusual shooting and role playing game Borderlands, which hits Australian store shelves tomorrow, features an astonishing 16 million weapons.

“It's more guns than every game ever launched on the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 all added together,” laughs Randy Pitchford, CEO and President of Borderlands developer Gearbox Software.

“It's got to the point where the number is not as relevant as the fact that what we have done is developed an artificial intelligence that procedurally generates these things. The reason why we have done that is that we wanted choice and we wanted growth in the gear that we discovered in the game.”

Pitchford says that a typical first-person shooter which takes two or three years to develop might contain 15 or 20 weapons. But when his team were trying to put together a list of guns they wanted they were thinking: “Why can’t we have them all?”

“When we typically make these games we'll sit around and say: 'ok guys, lets decide on what our shotgun is going to be' because the game will have one shotgun. That's just how first-person shooters are developed in the traditional way. In our discussion when we're thinking about choice and growth and having a lot of loot, we're thinking: 'Why can't we have all the shotguns? The Doom 2 Super Shotgun was awesome, but we like the Half-Life shotgun , and the Halo shotgun was cool, and hey, remember that game Painkiller with that crazy jackhammer shotgun, we should have one like that!'

“Before long we were thinking: 'Why don't we have them all? And what if we fill in all the blanks in between, and what if we have more and more powerful versions of each variant. And what if we had crazy stuff like instead of shooting metal bullets we shoot a little pellet of acid that could burn a guy's face off.' We were totally going wild with it and 10 minutes later we had virtually designed 1000 weapons and we were just talking about shotguns.

“So we had to create an artificial intelligence that could procedurally generate this stuff if we really wanted to follow through on the commitment we made to have choice and growth in the loot system. And that system has evolved as we have developed the game and we have continued to add more and more content to it. So today the count is over 16 million weapons.”

Pitchford is really happy with the procedurally generated system, which comes up with weapons that often surprise even him.  

“The result is, if you look at the weapons in the game, they are quite interesting. There is a variety there and sometimes the results are very surprising and different to what you would expect. And some of those surprises are really gratifying, like a pistol that fires grenades out of it, or I just got a sub-machine gun those shoots fire.  That's pretty cool. Those novelties give it a lot of flavor and interest.”

When asked to describe Borderlands to a non-gamer, he says it is “both an action game that is very accessible, but also a game where you have a lot of choice and discover and growth”.

“You actually explore this really wicked place that is kind of like a cross between a Mad Max wasteland and a really interesting science fiction world like (if you've seen the series) Firefly. Or if not, some of those more plausible science fiction landscapes. It kind of blends those kind of things.

“You're this character that is  like a cross between Mad Max and Indiana Jones, a treasure hunter. You're the only sane guy in this mad world. Your target is this legendary alien vault which is belived to have incredible alien wealth and alien technology inside. Kind of like the lost Ark. In the game you'll have amazing adventures, see a lot of things, do a lot of things, and become very powerful as you progress. It's very rewarding in that way.”

The game has taken the team four years to develop, and apart from the weapons system its defining characteristic is the blending of the two popular genres of first-person shooters and role playing games. “These genres have never really ever been effectively blended together and are very different,” says Pitchford.

“Our goal for Borderlands  was to take the moment-to-moment action of an action shooting game and blend on top of it the compelling meta-fun that we have from collecting loot and leveling-up and growing that we see in an RPG.”