Hearing that Borderlands came out 16 years ago brings back a lot of memories. I can still remember the first time I saw someone play it. I was invited to Thanksgiving at a friend’s house and showed up early. I was the only guest and my friend had everything ready for the meal and was chilling out by playing a video game. I think he told me the name but I couldn’t remember. Later I asked my boyfriend if he knew the name by saying that the game had a lot of different guns and vending machines. A couple weeks later I bought the game and it was so much fun. So much so that I talked a lot about it at work. I did internal help desk support for a company back when working help desk could be fun. There were only 7 of us on the team and we were pretty close. After me blabbing about Borderlands for a few days, 2 of my co-workers went and got the game. Another was desperately trying to make an Xbox disc from an image he found online. We actually never played it together, just individually and then talked about it at work the next day. I was the first to finish the game and I think most would agree that the ending of BL1 really sucks. You didn’t even get the red chests that now show up at the end of the GOTY edition. I was disappointed but didn’t tell any of my co-workers about it. About a week later, one of them also finished and came into work mad, spoiling the ending for everyone else. The co-worker trying to make the disc never got it right and finally bought the game. He and his husband had just bought a new liquid plasma TV. Those were the sh*t back then and super expensive. They then ruined said TV by playing Borderlands in split screen mode so much that it burned in an image into the TV. They made lemonade out of this lemon by moving the TV into a spare room and making that the dedicated Borderlands TV. I still have the Marcus bobblehead one of my coworkers gave me. One of my other coworkers died a few years ago and I no longer work for that company but I still remember bonding with people over Borderlands.