Last month, Saber Interactive released the first trailer for its upcoming rideshare game, Rideshare Stimulator. The game appears to be a mix of Crazy Taxi and a more grounded taxi sim game, with some oddball writing and humor. It looks…fine. But the most interesting part of the trailer is a license plate that briefly appears and which, according to Saber’s CEO, is a direct shot at Gearbox CEO and co-founder Randy Pitchford and his infamous USB drive story.
As recently reported by Game File, the trailer for Rideshare Stimulator (yes, Stimulator, not simulator) features a brief moment at around the 63-second mark that shows an SUV with a Texas license plate. The plate features the letters “USB,” a gear symbol, and then “DRV.”
This isn’t random. Borderlands developer Gearbox is located in Texas. And in 2018, Pitchford found himself in hot water after he left a USB drive behind at a Medieval Times restaurant. On the drive was a video he described as “barely legal porn” starring a woman who was “only 18.” This USB stick was part of a lawsuit against Gearbox filed by the studio’s former lawyer. The suit was settled in 2019.
But the story of Pitchford leaving behind a USB drive containing porn has never gone away and is referenced by people online to this day. And according to Saber CEO Matt Karch, Rideshare Stimulator is indeed directly referencing the USB boondoggle in its trailer, and it’s doing so as payback for what he believes was a dig at Saber and Gearbox’s former parent company, Embracer, found in Borderlands 4. In that game, you can find a terrible location marked as “Embracer’s Bluff” that is filled with trash. Karch saw that location as a shot at Embracer, a company that many in the industry hate, but which the Saber CEO has defended.
“The dig is because Randy took shots at Embracer in Borderlands 4,” Karch told Game File when asked about the license plate. “Without Embracer, Randy is performing magic tricks at birthday parties for a living.”
Kotaku contacted Gearbox, but the studio declined to comment. Neither Take-Two nor Gearbox have ever confirmed with Kotaku that the Borderlands 4 location was a shot at Embracer.
As part of Embracer’s historic and infamous attempt to become a big publisher, the company bought up a bunch of studios, including Saber in 2020 and Gearbox in 2021. In late 2023, after everything started to collapse at Embracer when a massive deal fell through, both studios were sold. But at one point, the two companies were corporate siblings.
Pitchford has publicly been critical of Gearbox’s former parent company and even claimed that the story of Borderlands 4, which features an all-powerful maniac controlling everyone on a planet, was inspired by the studio’s time under Embracer.
“It’s amazing to me how fast people forget those who went above and beyond for them,” Karch told the outlet.