Control Freak: My Epic Adventure Making Video Games - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Cliff Bleszinski, former Epic Games Design Director and twenty-five-year veteran of the video game industry, shipped his first commercial title, Jazz Jackrabbit, before graduating high school. During his tenure at Epic, he was a key visionary behind the award-winning, multimillion-selling Unreal game series and the billion-dollar Gears of War franchise. While at Epic, he also lent his creative expertise to games such as Fortnite, ChAIR Entertainment’s Infinity Blade series, and multiple unannounced projects. Bleszinski is the cofounder of Boss Key Productions, which released two titles but ultimately folded. He’s now actively involved as a producer on Broadway and figuring out what's next.

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1. Origin Story

ORIGIN STORY

Every game needs a hero, a larger-than-life figure adept at slaying every challenge thrown their way. Think Solid Snake from the Metal Gear series. Ex–Green Beret, special-ops good guy who demolishes nuke-carrying baddies.

You also have Master Chief from the Halo games, who shows up just in time to save the universe. And Mario, who rescues the princess.

Every childhood needs a similar kind of real-life hero who makes the world safe from monsters and their mayhem.

Mine was no exception. With four older brothers and sports legends like Yaz, Esposito, and Havlicek, who cast their shadows across Boston and its neighboring suburbs, including North Andover where I grew up, I had plenty of choices. But none measured up to the man who assumed that role for me—my father.

Take this one example: I was almost a teenager, hormones stirring shit up inside me, and I wanted to be a ninja warrior. No mutant jokes, please. This was serious stuff. I didn’t want to be a ninja warrior. I became one. So did my friends Rick, Chris, and Mike. We found a catalog that offered authentic ninja outfits—black tunics, baggy pants, a cowl with cutouts for our eyes, and the split-toed shoes that ninjas would wear—pooled our paper route money, and bought the requisite outfits.

We also got a few shuriken, or ninja stars. Rick already had nunchucks. We were going to be truly badass.

Two weeks later, the stuff arrived. Since it was summer, we didn’t have school, so the days belonged to us, and we blazed a trail on our Sting-Ray bikes to our secret fort out in the woods. There we excitedly transformed ourselves into the baddest clan of mercenary fighters ever to declare themselves ready to raise hell in suburban North Andover, Massachusetts. We were the way I imagined the band KISS was the first time they saw each other in full makeup and rock regalia—freaking ecstatic. Look at us. Holy shit.

We high-fived each other, posed, snarled, snorted, karate chopped, kicked, and were, as was popular to declare at the time, ready to rummmmmble. Oh, fuck yeah.

We acted as authentic, cool, and fierce as we looked—sort of. I was sneaking out of the house one night around three in the morning to rage with my friends when my brother Jeff came home from a night of heavy partying. I could see he was drunk, and I didn’t want to get into anything with him. Quietly, stealthily, I crouched in the far corner of the dark front porch, hoping he wouldn’t see me. He didn’t seem to. He reached for the door handle and, without turning around, he said, “Hey, Cliff, what are you doing?”

“Uh, I’m doing my paper route early,” I said.

“It’s too early,” he said. “Go back to bed.”

“Okay,” I said, before heading out to join my fellow shinobi.

A group of rival ninjas existed about a mile from us, over on a street like ours called Bridle Path. Like us, they also had a fort in the woods. We taunted each other, arguing about whatever was going on: Ray Leonard versus Tommy Hearns, Reagan versus Mondale. One day the tension reached a breaking point and war broke out. Our dojo versus theirs. The fighting took place over several days. We ambushed each other without warning. We threw rocks and screamed threats and lodged complaints. Dude, not in the eyes. You almost hit my eye.

It was a miracle no one got hurt. Then late one night, being the true ninjas we were, my friends and I snuck out and trashed our rival ninjas’ fort.

That ended the war.

My friends and I regrouped in our fort. While guzzling large bottles of Gatorade, we recounted the battles and compared welts and bruises from where rocks had hit us, or we had slid taking cover. Once our exploits had been thoroughly rehashed, our version of Hesiod’s classic telling of the Titan wars, we moved on to the real raison d’être for our fort in the woods—this was where we kept and maintained our stash of porn magazines, Penthouse, Oui, Playboy, even the stray issue of Swank. Every religion has its holy book. These were the sacred scroll of puberty. And we were studying them with great intensity when all of a sudden my father paid an unannounced visit to our fort.

“Boys!”

The lot of us looked at one another, frozen with a mix of shock, fear, confusion, and panic. Our magazines were everywhere.

“Dad?”

I poked my head out, and he motioned for us to step outside.

“Safety check,” he explained. “I want to take a look around.”

After we had filed out and my father had gone inside, my friend Rick leaned close to me and whispered, “Dude, what the fuck?”

I shrugged. I didn’t know.

“This really sucks,” he said.

My father probably wasn’t inside the fort for more than a minute, maybe two at the most, but the wait was interminable. When he stepped back outside, his expression was unreadable. He stared at each one of us. We were shaking in our sneakers. I’d spent my entire life decoding his looks and I had no idea what he was thinking about the glossy display of breasts and vaginas he had found in the fort. Finally, just before one of us developed a nervous tic, my father winked and said, “It’s all good, boys. Everything looks fine. Carry on.”

I watched him walk away. A total hero.

I loved my father. He wasn’t cool. He was a dad. Serious, responsible, funny, stern, and occasionally crude, Walt Bleszinski was an engineer at Polaroid who married my stay-at-home mom, Karyn, and created a picture-perfect middle-class life in a quiet neighborhood that was pretty much straight out of Stranger Things, minus the parallel dimension and monsters. My parents were Catholic. They hoped to have a girl at some point, but every time my mom farted out a kid at Mass General, the doctor saw another baby boy weenie. Greg and Jeff were the first two, followed by Chris, and then Tyler and me.

Forgetting about the fact that after they saw me, they either said “Ugh, that’s enough” or “Finally, perfection,” the fraternal dynamic was important and inescapable. Greg was the original prodigal son, the home run, who attended West Point. He was buddies with Jeff. Growing up, I had zero in common with either of them. They were eleven and eight years older than me, respectively; in fact, Greg and I have the same birthday, which meant I ruined his party by popping out, and took away some of the spotlight every year thereafter. Chris, the middle child, was the black sheep of the family. Do the math. The two eldest sons paired up, as did Tyler and me, the two youngest, leaving Chris on his own and adrift.

He got sent home from eighth grade for showing up to class drunk and setting off a fire extinguisher. He fought constantly with my father, which caused serious discord in the house. In high school, he came home one night so hammered that my parents called an ambulance for him. Another time I woke up on a moonlit evening and saw a shape shambling out in the backyard, moving between the bedsheets on the outside clothesline that my mother had put up, and it scared the shit out of twelve-year-old me. I woke my parents and told them there was a ghost in the yard. It was Chris, unable to even find the door....