videoGaming

The article profiles the life and career of video game design director Cliff Bleszinski of the company Epic Games. The article explores the influence of the video game Super Mario Brothers, the autobiographical qualities of his design for the game Gears of War, and corporate culture at Epic Games. Other topics include staff turnover, weapons in video games, and modern game design.

Gears of War was quickly recognized as the first game to provide the sensually overwhelming experience for which the console, launched a year earlier, had been designed. Gears won virtually every available industry award, and was the 360's best-selling game for nearly a year; it has now sold five million copies. On November 7th, a sequel, Gears of War 2, will be released; its development, long rumored, was not confirmed until this past 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 of War's signature weapons - an assault rifle mounted with a chainsaw bayonet.

Despite the rapid growth of the video-game industry - last year, sales were higher than either box-office receipts or DVD sales - designers are largely invisible within the wider culture. But Bleszinski, who is known to his many fans and occasional detractors as CliffyB, tends to stand out among his colleagues. Heather Chaplin and Aaron Ruby's "Smartbomb," a book about the industry, recounts the peacockish outfits and hair styles 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.

To do that, I had to do what was considered the most difficult: realistic human characters." Sakaguchi and his partners have built a digital studio from scratch in Honolulu, hiring animators from both Japanese anime and cutting-edge films like "Toy Story" and "The Matrix." The director won't talk ducats, but it reportedly cost Disney $200 million to build a similar studio and hatch a comparable project, "Dinosaur."

But because videogame-inspired films have had a rocky history at the box office--"Super Mario Brothers" bombed, but "Mortal Kombat" was a solid hit--it took them two writers and 38 drafts to finally get a script that the studio would sign off on.

The task ahead was even more difficult. God may have rested on the seventh day, but the 200-person "Final Fantasy" team has been slaving away nonstop in Honolulu for the past two years--and they still have another year to go. The process goes something like this: Dialogue is recorded in Los Angeles by Alec Baldwin, Ming-Na Wen and Ving Rhames, among others. Then a handful of actors play out the scenes, dressed in black Spandex with silver Ping-Pong balls affixed to key points of their bodies so that 16 special cameras can precisely capture their movements from every angle. That process, called motion capture, has been used widely in videogames. Filmmakers have always considered it too unreliable for extensive use in features, but Sakaguchi's team wrote new software to work out the kinks. "It's like dubbing a voice," says actress Tori Eldridge, who plays both the heroine, Aki, and a female Marine, "but instead you're dubbing a body." The face and hand animations, however, still have to be done the new old-fashioned way--on a PC--with programs that let them control a character down to the throat and nostrils. "This is even harder than Claymation," says Lee.