Cliff Bleszinski Wants To Make Stuff Again

Cliff Bleszinski wants to create again, whether that means making a new video game or indulging in his passion for writing and drawing. The former design director for Epic Games and co-founder of Boss Key Productions is one of gaming’s biggest and most recognizable names, known for his role in the development of Unreal and Gears of War.

“I need to create,” Bleszinski tweeted. “I miss it. I don’t know what it will be, writing, drawing, maybe a game, but, lord, since I was a kid I loved doing it and I need to do SOMETHING again soon. The itch is back. No promises to those of you who care. But it is soooo freeing to make, well, stuff.

“And no, I’m not going to stream or be a [You]’tuber. I’m friggin 44. C’mon, man.”

Bleszinski departed Epic in 2012 after 20 years at the company, before going on to co-found Boss Key. The studio released Lawbreakers, a multiplayer first-person shooter, in 2017, but the game’s positive critical reception wasn’t enough to help it gain a healthy player base, so the servers were shut down in September 2018. After this, Boss Key launched the battle royale shooter Radical Heights in April 2018, but the company closed its doors soon after, with Bleszinski describing the game as “too little too late.”

Since then, Bleszinski has stepped away from the gaming industry, getting involved in one of his other passions: theatre. He was an investor/producer for the play Hadestown, which won eight Tony awards, including Best Musical, and also co-produced another Broadway play, a new version of Terrence McNally’s “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune.” Aside from this, Bleszinski has invested in multiple restaurants and is planning on writing a memoir about his time in the games industry.

If he does make another game, Bleszinski says he doesn’t want to run his own company again. “I’ll tell y’all one thing–I will NEVER be a CEO again. I wasn’t that good at it and it made me miserable. Some creatives can do it, I cannot.”

Don’t expect to hear about a new game from him anytime soon, though. The Gears of War creator later clarified his earlier tweets, saying, “Haha literally just had a call with my agent from the video game space as he was driving to downtown LA for The Game Awards and realized that tweet is going to cause him to be inundated with questions there. To be clear, I’m just loving…writing…right now.”