Thought/Process: Gear Shift: An Interview With Cliff Bleszinski
We thought he should shut the f*** up during E3, but it turns out Cliff Bleszinski's got some insights worth hearing.
12/17/2008 3:52 PM | 3 Comments | Page 5 of 6
Crispy Gamer: You feel there's something more compelling about interactive entertainment than sitting back and watching TV?
Bleszinski: Yeah, I think this is the click generation, and they all want to be the hero. I was at Comic-Con this year talking to a guy who's got a hit show that shall not be named. All his life, he wanted to be a TV writer and he got there -- with a hit show, no less. This dude was talking to another television guy who said, "Hey, welcome to the tail end of it all." It's anecdotes like that that make me so glad to be in an industry that's still evolving.
Crispy Gamer: There are a lot of TV writers who are coming over to comic books. The one thing they always cite is the creative freedom. No studios to placate with notes and compromises. Just you, a word processor and an artist, putting your vision out there.
Bleszinski: I've found some of my most compelling entertainment lately in graphic novels. I finally started "The Walking Dead" [by Robert Kirkman], which is amazing, and I burned through "Girls" just a few weeks ago. "Girls" is the shit; it's amazing. What's so great about "The Walking Dead" is that zombies are just catalysts for the different facets of human behavior.
Crispy Gamer: Are you a big reader of non-illustrated prose?
Bleszinski: I could lie to you and say I've always got my nose in a book, but that's not true. I like Chuck Klosterman, Chuck Palahniuk, and I just finished "The Road" [by Cormac McCarthy]. I saw shots of the movie and thought that was a world I would like to experience. What a father would go through for his son. [The book] was very moving.
Crispy Gamer: What music are you into now?
Bleszinski: Jack Johnson; he's just great frat-boy beach music. I'm huge into Citizen Cope lately. Also, Butch Walker.
Crispy Gamer: I'm surprised how mellow that list is for the creative mind behind Gears.
Bleszinski: Don't get me wrong! I love my '80s metal! I hate all things grunge. I also like pop like Pink and the Pussycat Dolls.
Crispy Gamer: It's funny you mention pop, since the Gears games have been very much pop games.
Bleszinski: Yeah, it's a Michael Bay experience.
Crispy Gamer: What are you playing right now? This is always a loaded question to ask developers, since they're always working nose-to-the-grindstone on their projects.
It probably surprises folks that this browser game -- in which players resolve puzzles to bring color back to distant planets -- has given Bleszinski some of his best gaming experiences in recent times.
I played
Braid. Where
Portal made me feel smart,
Braid made me feel stupid. Everything is solvable; the question is how much time your consumer is willing to spend on it. When people tell me that I have to stick with a game for two hours, I say, fuck you. You have to catch attention right out of the gate or else people will move on.
[Otherwise] there haven't been a lot of commercial games -- mostly Xbox Live Arcade releases like
Bionic Commando Rearmed. But that game's impossible. We're not 12-year-olds any more. We don't have hours to dedicate to these games. I've played
Wii Fit, but that's really hard to do when you've been drinking. Everyone always assumes that it's really hardcore stuff [that I play], but that's not always the case. There's this really cute browser game,
Aether, where you're this little character floating through the stars, and it's just really cute. You don't have to pigeonhole people who make hardcore games by assuming they can only like hardcore games.
