Cliff Bleszinski, Gears of War's Creator, May Return to Game Development

Cliff Bleszinski spent the better part of a decade insisting he was finished with games. The man who built Gears of War at Epic, then blew up his own studio chasing multiplayer, is now saying the opposite in public for the first time.

Back in 2018, after Boss Key Productions collapsed, he made it official. As the headlines put it, Cliff Bleszinski swore off making video games forever, and he meant it then. The arena shooter LawBreakers had launched to decent reviews, and almost no players in 2017, and the '80s battle royale Radical Heights lasted barely a month before the studio ran out of money. Bleszinski walked, wrote a memoir, produced a Tony-winning musical, and spent years nowhere near game development.

That changed this spring, and the reason is grim. In a long 80 Level interview with Brian Crecente, Bleszinski explained how getting sober pulled him back toward the work. He landed in a hospital in March after a seizure tied to years of heavy drinking, and he hasn't had a drink since. Four months clean, he started missing the thing he'd sworn off.

"At the end of the day, I want to create characters and worlds. I want to make stuff that people will cosplay and get tattooed on their bodies."

— Cliff Bleszinski

He doesn't dance around how bad it got. Bleszinski, now 51, described the arc in the plainest terms he could.

"I was a functioning alcoholic. Then I became a non-functioning alcoholic."

— Cliff Bleszinski

The eight years in between weren't empty. Bleszinski published a memoir, co-produced two Broadway shows, put out a comic, and launched a podcast called F13 with Brian McGuinness. He also spent a lot of that stretch drinking, by his own account, until his body forced the issue in a hospital bed.

To understand why the comeback is a surprise, it helps to remember how hard the fall was. Bleszinski made his name on Jazz Jackrabbit, spent two decades at Epic as lead designer on the first three Gears of War games, then left in 2012. He returned in 2014 to co-found Boss Key with Arjan Brussee, signed a Nexon deal for a shooter codenamed Project BlueStreak, and grew the team to around 75 people. The trouble arrived in November 2014, when Blizzard revealed Overwatch and the Boss Key crew realised they were building a hero shooter into the same lane as the biggest company in the genre. LawBreakers shipped in 2017 anyway, climbed for a moment, then flatlined as low player counts broke matchmaking and scared everyone else off.

Most of the interview is Bleszinski doing something studio heads almost never do on record: itemising his own mistakes off a typed list. He turned down Rod Fergusson, his old Gears production partner, because he wanted the studio to be his alone. He signed a Nexon deal so favorable to Boss Key that, by his telling, the publisher stopped caring whether the game succeeded. He put LawBreakers on PlayStation instead of Xbox, away from the players who actually knew his name. The cast never had an identity worth cosplaying. And he ran the place as everyone's friend rather than as a CEO. He sums up the timing with the kind of line only hindsight allows.

"LawBreakers tripped so Concord could faceplant."

— Cliff Bleszinski

The end came in May 2018. With Brussee gone back to Epic and a pitch for a dragon-riding samurai game failing to find backers, Bleszinski gathered the team for a final meeting. Radical Heights, the studio's last scramble, had shipped in early access with no cheat protection and drowned in hackers within weeks.

"I'll never forget that day when I had to stand in front of the company for an emergency meeting and tell them that all of this just isn't working. It was one of the hardest days of my life."

— Cliff Bleszinski

What matters for anyone hoping he returns is what he says he won't build. Bleszinski is finished with player-versus-player. He's already consulted on an asymmetric horror game called Soul Walker, and when he talks about his own next project, he points straight at co-op PvE.

"Good luck to anyone in that space. I'm more of a fan of PvE these days. Horde mode saved Gears 2, and I believe that space is evergreen because players just want to hop online with friends and shoot some stuff, no frills, no questions asked."

— Cliff Bleszinski

He isn't promising anything. He won't describe the game he's obviously turning over, beyond a hint about where his head is.

"There's so much more than just chainsaws."

— Cliff Bleszinski

While Bleszinski decides whether he's actually coming back, the franchise he built is doing fine without him. Gears of War: E-Day, The Coalition's prequel, lands October 6 on PC and Xbox Series X/S, and it's carried more pre-launch noise than anything in the series in years. Its pre-orders info leaked ahead of the Xbox Games Showcase, its system requirements and first gameplay arrived alongside a new 12-player PvE mode called Horde Siege, an alleged $400 million budget made the rounds before being debunked, and the game got cancelled for PlayStation 5 at the last minute in favor of Xbox exclusivity.

That last call is the one I keep chewing on. I like what The Coalition has shown of E-Day, and the PS5 cancellation reads to me less like a loss than a live test of the whole Xbox-exclusive strategy. If E-Day ships clean on Xbox and PC alone and still sells, I expect more first-party games to follow it back behind the platform wall, and the idea of something like Bethesda's catalog going exclusive stops sounding like a joke.

Bleszinski has already given E-Day his blessing, which tracks. His entire reason for coming back is the same instinct that made Gears land in the first place: characters people care about, and a co-op mode they keep booting up. Whether he gets his "full foot back in the business," as he put it, is the open question. He said something similar in 2020, and nothing came of it.

Read also, Bleszinski recently revealed the original Gears of War 4 he'd planned at Epic before Microsoft took the series, a darker story built around JD Fenix wrestling with addiction and a "humans against humans" war, pitched with the tagline "Before, they came from below. Now, they come from above."