Cliff Bleszinski Knows What Went Wrong

Cliff Bleszinski has a list.

He picks the paper off his desk during the tail end of our interview and waves it toward me when I ask him what went wrong.

It’s a neatly typed, itemized accounting of the lowest moment in his life, and he’s ready to share.

Perhaps most famous for his work on the Unreal and Gears of War series of games, Bleszinski also found himself, in 2018, infamous for two other shooters: LawBreakers and Radical Heights. Both were products of Boss Key Productions, which Bleszinski co-founded in 2014: LawBreakers barely lasted a year, and Radical Heights barely a month.

The failures of the two games and the studio hit Bleszinski, 51, hard.

Looking back today, he shoulders most of the blame, saying that they suffered death by a thousand cuts, a thousand mistakes and bad decisions, fed — in part — by what he later came to realize was his alcoholism.

“I was a functioning alcoholic,” he said. “Then I became a non-functioning alcoholic.”

But the post-failure haze of drinking, sleeping, reading, and avoiding video games that on and off marked the past eight years led to a moment of clarity in a hospital bed this spring. Now four months sober, Bleszinski finds himself once more drawn to creating, and his first love: video games.

“It’s been a journey,” he said. “I don’t want to be that person where my defining aspect is my alcoholism. I want to be that well-known, hopefully loved, successful game designer who is a great husband who also happens to be an alcoholic.”

You can read the full story, which was first published July 17, on 80Lv.