498 Words About: Claptrap the Forgettable Robot
I can’t calculate how many hours of my life have been spent on the planet Pandora killing bandits and skags. In the literal 15 years since the game was released I’ve thought about the opening minutes of Borderlands at least once every other hour. My gray matter regularly replays footage of Mordecai swinging his blade, memorizing the number of pops in Brick’s neck as he cracks it, all while Cage the Elephant sings No Rest for the Wicked. The opening sequence on Marcus’s bus remains one of the best beginnings of any triple-A videogame I’ve played because of the way it perfectly established the narrative tone, visual aesthetic, and player expectations.
And then, there was a robot waiting on the side of the road.
A robot character in any science fiction story should be memorable, that’s just an understood philosophical agreement. It’s a tad perplexing then how one of the most memorable robot characters in such a popular science fiction franchise managed to begin with such an understated introduction.
Claptrap exists in Borderlands purely as a design element, and the CL4P-PT unit, or “Claptrap,” is the most familiar design element to any regular videogame player: the introduction-npc(non-playable character).
That isn’t an official term, by the way, just my own.
Claptrap exists only to guide the player to their first real playable location, in this case the town of Fyrestone. Along the way he’ll provide the player some basic exposition about the planet Pandora, player controls, item management, and customization options for player skins.
And that’s it.
After this introduction, any other Claptraps I encounter are either broken and need repairs, or else they’re gatekeepers. He would only later develop into a narrative figure, and then eventually as a playable character.
In this short essay I wanted to observe how my intellectual impression of Claptrap compared to my emotional one. I love the character, unironically, and what he became in the series (though I appear to be in the minority), and I admit I have a strong emotional attachment because of how much I played Borderlands. Nostalgia is a difficult filter to abandon.
Though having recently restarted Borderlands to play with my girlfriend, I’m honestly left agog by how little Claptrap’s presence is. There’s the occasional interruption when passing by I hear him say, “Check me out y'all! I’m dancing! I’m DANCING!”
That’s it.
This is an instance where hindsight provides as much context as it does; I hardly noticed Claptrap the first time I played the game (I was more concerned with giggling Psychos and their buzz-saws).
Looking back, Claptrap was only a design element, and narratively speaking he was, at most, an atmosphere element for the general aesthetic. It’s fascinating then to observe how one detail in an entire science-fiction videogame about a post-apocalyptic corporate wasteland went on to become not just an identifiable mascot for the franchise, but also one of the best robots in any work of fiction.
He even knew how to dance.
Joshua “Jammer” Smith
5.20.2024
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