Cliff Bleszinski

Cliff Bleszinski is a lead game designer at Epic Games.

Although he is best known for his work on intense, graphically impressive shooters, Bleszinski started out, at age 17, by independently developing a point-and-click adventure game called The Palace of Deceit: Dragon's Plight. Bleszinski created the game while he was a student at Bonita High School in La Verne, California, and released it in 1991 via his own company, Game Syndicate Productions. He also sent a copy of the game to Tim Sweeney, the founder of Epic Games (then known as Epic MegaGames). Sweeney was impressed with the game and brought Bleszinski onboard at Epic. Bleszinski's next game, Dare to Dream, also a point-and-click adventure, was released by Epic in 1993.

Bleszinski then worked on Jazz Jackrabbit, a successful 1994 platformer for the PC, and its 1998 sequel, Jazz Jackrabbit 2, which was noteworthy at the time for offering players a robust level editor, called the Jazz Creation Station.

It was with his involvement in designing the first-person shooter Unreal, though, that Bleszinski began the work for which he is best known today. Unreal grew out of an idea by fellow Epic designer James Schmalz, and was by far the most ambitious project Epic had ever undertaken. Bleszinski felt that it was crucial to Epic that Unreal be a success, stating, "Up until that point, we had made some pretty cool little platform games and pinball games, but no one really took us very seriously." Unreal's development was protracted and difficult, but the result was a tremendously successful first-person shooter. The game had a huge impact on the expectations people had for graphics in PC games, as it broke new ground with regard to color (introducing 16-bit or "real" color environments) and various visual effects, including light bloom. John Carmack of rival id Software, which had previously dominated the first-person shooter market with Doom, Doom II and Quake, praised the graphical innovations of Unreal, saying, "I doubt any important game will be designed with 8-bit color in mind from now on. Unreal has done an important thing in pushing toward direct color, and this gives the artists a lot more freedom." Unreal was also widely praised for the AI of its enemies, which was considered smarter and more adaptable than the AI in most games at the time. Also vital to Unreal's success, and the success of the spin-off Unreal Tournament series, was the ease with which players could edit and create levels or other modifications of their own, thanks to tools included by Epic for just that purpose.

In addition to his work on Unreal Tournament 2003 and Unreal Tournament 2004, Bleszinski served as lead designer on the Xbox 360 shooter Gears of War. Gears evolved out of the development of what was going to be a game called Unreal Warfare. As Bleszinski explained in a speech at GDC 2007 entitled "Designing Gears of War: Iteration Wins," the game started out as another first-person shooter in the Unreal universe. Over time, however, influenced by the cover mechanic in Namco's 2003 game kill.switch and the third-person, over-the-shoulder perspective of Resident Evil 4, Unreal Warfare became the game known as Gears of War. Not unlike how the Unreal series raised the standards for graphics in PC games, Gears of War was widely considered the most visually impressive console game to date upon its release in November of 2006. The game, propelled by strong reviews, a massive, Microsoft-supported marketing campaign, and a strong showing by Bleszinski himself at Microsoft's E3 press conference earlier that year, was a tremendous success. A PC version with an added section, and, in true Epic form, a level editor, was released in November of 2007.

The game's sequel was released in November of 2008 for the Xbox 360. In an interview with The Escapist, Bleszinski summed up his approach to the design of Gears of War 2 by saying, "Once you establish the core loop of the game, the classic 'what you're doing for 30 seconds over and over again,' you need to then switch it up…And what that's pushed for is a game that, while it may not be very heavily scripted in some ways, also moment to moment has things happening one thing after another. Always something bursting through the door, always something chasing you, always a new creature being introduced, new weapons, new dialogue ... there's always something happening that you can latch onto as the proverbial water cooler moment."

He is focused on making games that appeal to a broad spectrum of players, stating, "I think there's room for, essentially, art-house games in this business, and little independent games that push the envelope in their own unique direction. But we at Epic, we are in the business of blockbusters, and we are going to continue to attempt to make multi-million-selling phenomena, because that's what we do."

Young Clifford hard at work.

Bleszinski, whose work on the Jazz Jackrabbit games was heavily influenced by console platform games such as the Super Mario Bros. series, has cited platform game innovator Shigeru Miyamoto as a source of inspiration, praising him during an acceptance speech at the 2007 Game Developers Choice Awards. In an interview the following day, Bleszinski said, "Shigeru Miyamoto is why I do what I do; from being a boy and saving up my paper route money to be able to purchase Zelda and Mario and all those games. To be in that company and to be in that position is an honorable position and it's kind of like living the dream, so to speak."

Bleszinski lives in Raleigh, NC. (Epic Games is based in nearby Cary, NC.) He has been widely referred to as Cliffy B., but has since retired this moniker, saying that it's "time to grow up a bit.". He has since stated, in a comment on Kotaku, that he now wants to be called "Dude Huge". Bleszinski also has a personal website at www.cliffyb.com, where he has shared thoughts on games, movies, food, and music, as well as offered some tips to people seeking work in the gaming business.   
His official twitter is @therealcliffyb where he posts almost daily regarding everything and anything.
 

Quotes

• “The dimensions of video game characters, even when they're scanned from real people, are beefed up with exaggerated proportions in games like Def Jam: Fight for NY to give them more pop.”
• "Is it so wrong that I expect a game to save automatically for me these days?"
• "We continue to make the games we wanna play. We only use violence if we think it serves a gameplay purpose."
• " I dress in a T-shirt and jeans every day when I go to work. When I go to conventions I like to dress up. Sue me."
• "Everyone knows Game Development is about making the coolest game possible, right? What they seldom fail to mention is that you have to do this with limited resources, limited time, and a team of often very opinionated folks."
•  "If you look at a [360] controller right now it looks like an alien spaceship"
• "After playing Gears 2, you might wanna consider being a vegetarian."
• “The Halo deal was an interesting model because it allowed the game creators to have control over their IP instead of just allowing Hollywood to do God-knows-what with it. The process of taking a game to the big screen is not an easy one. Things do have to be changed for film.”
• “We're going to continue to see games turned into movies."

Cliff´s top 10 games ever