Extra Lives (7 page)

The people I saved that night still talk about my heroic action—and, yes, it
was
, it did
feel
, heroic—whenever we play together, and, after the round, two of the opposing team’s members requested my online friendship, which with great satisfaction I declined. All the emotions I felt during those few moments—fear, doubt, resolve, and finally courage—were as intensely vivid as any I have felt while reading a novel or watching a film or listening to a piece of music. For what more can one ask? What more could one
want?

I once raved about
Left 4 Dead
in a video-game emporium within earshot of the manager, a man I had previously heard angrily defend the position that lightsaber wounds are not necessarily cauterized. (His evidence: The tauntaun Han Solo disembowels in
The Empire Strikes Back
does, in fact, bleed.)
“Left 4 Dead?”
he asked me. “You liked it?” I admitted that I did. Very, very much. And him? “I liked it,” he said, grudgingly. “I just wished there was more story.” A few pimply malingerers, piqued by our exchange, nodded in assent. The overly caloric narrative content of so many games had caused these gentlemen to feel undernourished by the different narrative experience offered by
Left 4 Dead
. They, like the games they presumably loved, had become aesthetically obese. I then realized I was contrasting my aesthetic sensitivity to that of some teenagers about a game that concerns itself with shooting as many zombies as possible. It is moments like this that can make it so dispiritingly difficult to care about video games.

E
pic Games is a privately owned company and does not disclose its earnings. But on a Monday morning in late April 2008, while standing in Epic’s parking lot at Crossroads Corporate Park in Cary, North Carolina, where I was awaiting the arrival of Cliff Bleszinski, Epic’s design director, I realized that my surroundings were their own sort of Nasdaq. Ten feet away was a red Hummer H3. Nearby was a Lotus Elise, and next to it a pumpkin-orange Porsche. Many of the cars had personalized plates:
PS3CODER, EPICBOY, GRSOFWAR
.

Released in late 2006,
Gears of War
, a third-person shooter, was quickly recognized as the first game to provide the sensually overwhelming experience for which the year-old Xbox 360 had been designed.
Gears
won virtually every available industry award and was the 360’s best-selling game until Bungie’s
Halo 3
came along a year later. Bleszinski, along with everyone else at Epic, was currently “crunching” on
Gears of War 2
, the release date of which was six months away. Its development, long rumored, was not confirmed until the previous February, when, at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Bleszinski made the announcement after bursting through an onstage partition wielding a replica of
one of
Gears
’s signature weapons—an assault rifle mounted with a chainsaw bayonet.

Bleszinski, who is known to his many fans and occasional detractors as CliffyB, tends to stand out among his colleagues in game design. Heather Chaplin and Aaron Ruby’s
Smartbomb
recounts the peacockish outfits and hairstyles he has showcased at industry expos over the years. In 2001 he affected the stylings of a twenty-first-century Tom Wolfe, with white snakeskin shoes and bleached hair. In 2002 he took to leather jackets and an early-Clooney Caesar cut. By 2003, he was wearing long fur-lined coats, his hair skater-punk red. In recent years he let his hair grow shaggy, which gave him the mellow aura of a fourth Bee Gee.

Bleszinski drove into Epic’s parking lot in a red Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder, the top down despite an impending rainstorm. His current haircut was short and cowlicked, his bangs twirled up into a tiny moussed horn. He was wearing what in my high school would have been called “exchange-student jeans”—obviously expensive but slightly the wrong color and of a somehow non-American cut. Beneath a tight, fashionably out-of-style black nylon jacket was a T-shirt that read
TECHNOLOGY!
His sunglasses were of the oversized, county-sheriff variety, and each of his earlobes held a small, bright diamond earring. He could have been either a boyish Dolce & Gabbana model or a small-town weed dealer.

Bleszinski suggested that we go to a local diner. He professed an aversion to mornings, and to Monday mornings especially, but seemed dauntingly alert. “This car’s like a wake-up call,” he said. “By the time I get to work, my heart’s pumping and I’m ready to crank.” Before we were even out of the parking lot, we were traveling at forty-five miles an hour. At a stoplight, Bleszinski exchanged waves with the driver of an adjacent red Ferrari—another Epic employee. When we hit a hundred miles per hour on
a highway entrance ramp, Bleszinski announced, “Never got one ticket!” On the highway, he slowed to seventy-five. “One of my jobs in life,” Bleszinski said, cutting over to an exit, “is to make this look a little cooler.” By “this,” he meant his job. He is adamant that young people interested in gaming should seek to make it their career. After five minutes in Bleszinki’s company I was beginning to wonder why I had not attempted to make it
my
career.

Bleszinski’s brand of mild outrageousness—the “Cliffycam” on his blog page, which, some years ago, allowed visitors to observe him online while he worked; the photographs of him on his MySpace page alongside the splatter-film director Eli Roth and the porn stars Jenna Jameson and Ron Jeremy—qualifies him as exceptional in an industry that is, as he says, widely assumed to be a preserve inhabited by pale, withdrawn, molelike creatures.

There is some emotional truth to this stereotype. “This industry,” Bleszinski told me, “is traditionally filled with incredibly intelligent, talented people who don’t necessarily like a lot of attention.” In illustration he brought up Bungie’s Jason Jones, the primary creative force behind the
Halo
series. “Really, really great guy. But he’s shy. He’s almost like this Cormac McCarthy–type character. One interview every ten years.” When he was young, Bleszinski said, “I wanted to know
who
these people were creating these games. And I was like, ‘You know what? If I do a great job making games, maybe people will find it interesting.’”

The CliffyB nickname, he told me, was bestowed on him by some “jock kid,” when he was a small, shy teenager, and was meant as a taunt. Bleszinski took the name and fashioned a tougher persona around it, but, after spending a little time with him, I had the sensation of watching someone observing himself. Video games are founded upon such complicated transference. Gamers are allowed, for a time, all manner of ontological assumptions. They can also terminate their assumed personalities whenever
they wish, and Bleszinski had lately been asking game-industry journalists if they might not “sit on” the CliffyB moniker “for a while.”

Bleszinski was born in Boston, in 1975. His father, whom Bleszinski describes as a “very stressed-out guy,” died when he was fifteen. Bleszinski still remembered what game he was playing when he learned of his father’s death: the Nintendo game
Blaster Master
. He never played it again.

In 1991 Bleszinski’s mother bought him a computer. “I’m not that technical of a guy,” Bleszinski told me. “I started off programming my own games and doing the art for them, but I was a crappy coder and a crappier artist. But I didn’t want to let that stop me. I was going to kick and scream and claw my way into the business any way possible.” He thinks that it was perhaps only the death of his father that allowed him to do this. “If he hadn’t passed, he probably would have made me go to Northeastern and become an engineer.”

In 1992, a year after Bleszinski had taught himself the rudiments of computer programming, he sent a game submission to Tim Sweeney, the twenty-two-year-old CEO of Epic MegaGames, who had recently dropped out of a mechanical-engineering program at the University of Maryland. (Epic’s original name, Sweeney told me, was “a big scam” to make it look legitimate. “When you’re this one single person in your parents’ garage trying to start a company, you want to look like you’re really big.”) Sweeney fondly recalled Bleszinski’s submission, a PC game called
Dare to Dream
, in which a boy gets trapped, appropriately enough, inside his own dreamworld. “At that time,” Sweeney said, “we’d gotten sixty or seventy game submissions from different people and we went ahead with five of them, and Cliff was one of the best.” Once his game was in development, Bleszinski became
more involved with the company. Sweeney said, “We’d have four or five different projects in development with different teams, and every time one started to reach completion we’d send it off to Cliff, and he’d write off his big list of what’s good about this game and what needs to be fixed. Cliff’s lists kept growing bigger and bigger.” Bleszinski was only seventeen. When I asked Sweeney if he had had any reservations about entrusting his company’s fate to a teenager whose driver’s-license lamination was still warm, Sweeney said, “That’s what the industry was like.”

Upon its release,
Dare to Dream
, in Bleszinski’s words, “bombed.” His second game for Epic, released a year later, featured what he calls a “Rambo rabbit” named Jazz, who carried a large gun and hunted frenetically for intergalactic treasure.
Jazz Jackrabbit
, which imported to a PC platform a type of gameplay previously exclusive to Sega and Nintendo consoles, made Bleszinski’s reputation. Epic had begun as a company churning out somewhat réchauffé fare—pinball simulators, clone-ish retreads, but also a popular shooter known as
Unreal Tournament
, the updated and augmented engine of which has since been adopted by hundreds of games. It was Bleszinski, along with the Unreal Engine, that helped to fill Epic’s parking lot with sports cars.

At the diner I asked Bleszinski which games had most influenced him.
Super Mario Bros.
, he said, “is where it really kicked into high gear.” Indeed, the first issue of
Nintendo Power
, published in 1988, listed the high scores of a handful of
Super Mario
devotees, the thirteen-year-old Bleszinski’s among them. “There’s something about the whole hidden element to
Mario,”
Bleszinski said, “where you jump and hit your head on a block and just out of nowhere secret things would appear. They made you feel like a kid in the woods finding god knows what.”

Released in 1985,
Super Mario Bros
. was a game of summer-vacation-consuming
scope and unprecedented inventiveness. It was among the first video games to suggest that it might contain a world. It was also hallucinogenically strange. Why did mushrooms make Mario grow larger? Why did flowers give Mario the ability to spit fire? Why did bashing Mario’s head against bricks sometimes produce coins? And why was Mario’s enemy, Bowser, a saurian, spiky-shelled turtle?

In film and literature, such surrealistic fantasy typically occurs at the outer edge of experimentalism, but early video games depended on symbols for the simple reason that the technological limitations of the time made realism impossible. Mario, for instance, wore a porkpie hat not for aesthetic reasons but because hair was too difficult to render. Bleszinski retains affection for many older games, but he says, “If you go back and play the majority of old games, they really aren’t very good.” He suspects that what made them seem so good at the time was the imaginative involvement of players: “You wanted to believe, you wanted to fill in the gaps.”

A game like
Gears of War
differs so profoundly from
Super Mario Bros
. that the two appear to share as many commonalities as a trilobite does with a Great Dane.
Super Mario
requires an ability to recognize patterns, considerable hand–eye coordination, and quick reflexes.
Gears
requires the ability to think tactically and make subtle judgments based on scant information, a constant awareness of multiple variables (ammunition stores, enemy weaknesses) as they change throughout the game, and the spatial sensitivity to control one’s movement through a space in which the “right” direction is not always apparent. Anyone who plays modern games such as
Gears
does not so much learn the rules as develop a kind of intuition for how the game operates. Often, there is no single way to accomplish a given task; improvisation is
rewarded. Older games, like
Super Mario
, punish improvisation: You live or die according to their algebra alone.

Gears
is largely the story of a soldier, Marcus Fenix, who, as the game begins, has been imprisoned for abandoning his comrades (who are known as COGs, or Gears) in order to save his father, who dies before Fenix can reach him. He is released because a fourteen-year war with a tunnel-using alien army known as the Locusts has depleted the human army’s ranks. This much we glean in the first two minutes of the game; the next ten hours or so are an ingeniously paced march through frequent and elaborately staged firefights with Locusts, Wretches, Dark Wretches, Corpsers, Boomers, three blind and terrifying Berserkers, and the vile General Raam. Along the way, players can treat themselves to the singular experience of using the chainsaw bayonets on their Lancer assault rifles to cut their enemies in half, during which the in-game camera is gleefully splashed with blood.
(Gears
is one of the most violent games ever made, but Bleszinski maintains that it contains “very much a laughable kind of violence,” like “watching a melon explode in a Gallagher show.”)