Person of the Year - 2008: Cliff Bleszinski
The race for our Person of the Year award was tight, filled with folks who either brought us memorable games or helped influence the direction of the industry. But when it came to choosing one person above the rest, we overwhelmingly decided on Cliff Bleszinski, design director at Epic Games and mastermind behind the Xbox 360 supersequel Gears of War 2. And who better to celebrate our 2008 Person of the Year than last year's winner? BioShock architect Ken Levine of 2K Boston (pictured, below left) professes his admiration for all things Bleszinski far better than we ever could. Ken, the floor is yours.
When you play games for as long as I have, when you play as many games as I have, and when you play games for as many hours a week as I play them, you can get kind of jaded. You can overintellectualize games. You can overanalyze games. You can overthink games. You can't play games as a 42-year-old game developer the way you used to play them as a 13-year-old gamer.
Or so I thought until 3 a.m. one Friday night. I don't care how old you are, how jaded you are, or even if you're a dude or a chick. Playing Gears of War 2's Horde mode at 3 a.m. turns you back into the 13-year-old kid you once were, screaming at the TV, screaming at your friend, cursing, laughing, and basically being reimprinted with the DNA of fun.
Cliff's work defines the very essence of being a gamer: the same primal competitive spirit that makes us need to finish the damn kickball game no matter how many times our moms call us in for dinner. He took a medium founded by engineers, eggheads, and dorks (like me) and injected the schoolyard into it. The headshot. The curb stomp. The double kill. For a guy like me, who was the victim in the schoolyard, Cliffy gave me the chance for a little payback.
The heroes of the deathmatch are sometimes the real-life captain of the football team and the ****bully. They're the mathlete and the debate club president. Sometimes they've run marathons. Sometimes they're in a wheelchair. They bring the competitive joy of sports-the thrill of victory, and the ****ing agony of defeat-to everyone, whether they're in the prime of their life or in a wheelchair.
For most people, Unreal Tournament would've been more than enough to define a career. Launched nearly 10 years ago, it's still intensely popular despite the fact that its core mechanics remain largely unchanged. But Cliff wasn't satisfied with defining one genre. He had to an invent another.
"Gears of War is the game that defined the Xbox 360." Find me someone who can dispute that and I'll call them a liar. Every one of us who's had success on that platform owes a debt to Cliff and his team. Without Gears, the core shooter audience may never have gravitated to Microsoft's box, at least not until Halo 3 came out a year later. Without Gears, publishers would've been far less willing to invest money in the platform. But also without Gears, Cliff wouldn't have been able to prove that console shooters could be more than running down corridors blasting wildly away.
There's an old saying (which I, of course, only know from Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country) that goes: "Only Nixon could go to China," which essentially means only somebody who's seemingly in opposition to a concept can make others truly embrace that concept. With Gears of War, CliffyB, the rocket-jumping, kill-spreeing patron of the death-metal Mountain Dew crowd, said, very simply: "Slow it down, brother."
Here was a game not about speed but about cover. Not about mile-a-minute but flanking and teamwork. It was the first truly unique concept of this generation. Gears 2 takes the formula and refines it, enhances it, and takes the stunning co-op of the first game and brings it to a whole new level with awesome bots and dedicated modes. It is a game brimming with both generosity of gameplay and an embarrassment of polish.
But something else must be said about Cliff. He's a pretty damn nice guy. I'll never forget when he approached me at E3 many years ago and told me that he was a fan of System Shock 2. I was kind of stunned. Most people had never heard of System Shock 2, and here was this famous guy (in a white pimp suit, natch) unabashedly gushing over our game. I never forgot that about Cliff; he was probably the first game celebrity who could go toe-to-toe with celebs in other medias, but he differs from them in two key ways: He's insanely talented, and he's a mensch.
So congratulations on Person of the Year, Cliff. You deserve it, whether it's 1999 or 2008.
Ken Levine
Creative Director, 2K Boston
http://www.1up.com/do/feature?pager.offset=1&cId=3172166
Kojima fans am cry but well done Cliff, I thought Gears 2 was a worthy sequel...in single player and horde mode, the rest is kinda broken at the moment though
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