ame Informer: Obviously Unreal Tournament 2004 did very well, is still doing very well. Were you surprised by that? Were you anticipating that?

Cliff Bleszinski: I don’t know, man. I mean, you never know. I thought Unreal 2 was cool. Apparently I was the only one. Expectations are a motherf*****. You know, I like to joke and say that we kind of low-balled Unreal Tournament 2003 so that people would have low expectations of 2004 and not judge it against some horrible standard. But it’s just one of those things that we had fun testing it, you know. And every time you would fire up play sessions, like, you couldn’t get on the server because everybody in the office would pull up the server. You’d be like, “Dammit, I didn’t get in today!” You know, we knew we kind of had magic once we started getting some of the unique s*** with the vehicles like squishing people, the butt stomp move, and all that stuff. And then once the blades got in and all that stuff it was just over, you know, finally. It was a very iterative design. You know we had a brainstorming session where we started coming up with like various vehicular announcer voices. We had all those recorded and then, you know, all the little s***. You know, car jack, and fender bender, and daredevil, and it just all started snowballing. Part of it was that the tech was done, which is always useful. I mean, we weren’t worrying about the game engine breaking constantly, which is always a pain. But yeah, we’re happy.

GI: Was there any thing that you wish would have been done differently this time around?

Bleszinski: I wish we actually had, like, less variety. I know that sounds funny, but it like, you know, there’s so many game types, there’s so many mutators, and there’s so many different ways to play that it’s like…there’s a certain beauty to like a consistent experience. I mean, you go to McDonalds in Texas, you go to a McDonalds in Tokyo, your cheeseburger’s going to be the same damn thing. And that’s part of the reason why you have McDonalds everywhere is because people, to a certain degree, they like to know what they’re going to get. And that’s partially what helps Counter-Strike be so huge. You know, you play Counter-Strike in Seoul, you play Counter-Strike in Sunnyvale and it’s pretty much Counter-Strike. It’s the same thing. It’s not low-grav one minute and, you know, a different game type completely the next. There’s a little variety in there, but it’s consistent. That’s something I hope we can find a balance of in the future, you know, as far as having that consistency, but still allowing that sense of variety that the gamers expect. There’s no way, you know, if we do Unreal Tournament 2005, or whatever it is, we can just keep adding game types. I mean, we gotta start consolidating at some point.

GI: Are there any mods that you’ve seen, you know, obviously you’re doing a lot with them for the editor’s choice edition and all that, but are there any that you’ve seen that you’ve just been like, “Damn, why didn’t we think of that. That’s awesome.”

Bleszinski: Well, there’s been a bunch of quirky ones I think kinda do that kind of stuff. Like, you know, the Clone Bandits one I think is just genius. I mean, I’m actually one of the judges for the Make Something Unreal Contest so when somebody makes something that’s basically a Counter-Strike clone I weight heavily my judging of it, you know? You could make the best Counter-Strike clone, but at the end of the day it’s just a Counter-Strike clone and, you know, do something a little different, a little bit original. You know, then you get Air Buccaneers, which was totally conceived in an opium den. It’s f****** awesome. And Clone Bandits I’m just a huge fan of, just some cool stylized stuff, and the art quality of that’s great. And for me it’s a plus 40 that they have something that makes me smile, which is a lounge tank. How genius is that? So it’s cool. I mean, Alien Swarm is tight. You know what impressed me the most though is the level designers out there. There’s so many of them now, and it’s just like they’re making such cool stuff. I mean, there’s this organic element that’s happening where they’re feeding off of each other’s feedback, and they’re training each other, and it’s beautiful. You’re seeing the next big designers are going to be coming out of there.

GI: Obviously, there’s a lot of games that have a very large mod community. Obviously Quake’s out there, Unreal obviously. What do you think makes the Unreal mod community different from the others?

Bleszinski: Well I think our stuff’s easier to use than most other people’s so the barrier to entry is slightly lower. And I think, you know, Quake fans generally tend to be like “Grrr, Arrrg,” you know? So the Quake fans tend to be kind of like having that kind of old school like, “Oh I’m a badass,” kind of Internet… It’s like the Unreal fans think that they… How do I explain it? I don’t know. Maybe Unreal fans are more like guys. You know, it’s like, “Hey buddy how’s it going?” (gruff, low voice). Whereas women are all so competitive with each other. I’m totally, like, digging my own hole with these comments. Be careful with how you edit this.

GI: Word for word.

Bleszinski: Our fans are mod makers, you know? They seem like they might be more interested in cooperating with one another. I guess that’s what I’d like to say. You know, it’s a good grassroots movement. What was that bit about, was it Chris Rock who said, “A guy’s with is buddy and he brings over and introduces his new girlfriend. And the guy walks away from that and goes, ‘Wow, I need to get me a girl just like that.’ Two girls have that happen, they could be lifelong friends, a girl meets a guy that she loves and she’s like, ‘I want that guy and I will slit that bitch’s throat to do it.’”

GI: (laughs) Have you played Doom 3 yet?

Bleszinski: For about an hour.

GI: What are your thoughts?

Bleszinski: I think it’s cool. I’m actually a little disappointed by the shotgun sound. I thought it was a little nerfy. And most of the audio’s phenomenal.  I mean, for UT 2003 we screwed up on the weapon sounds, and it’s critical to getting right. It’s f****** hard. But, I mean, it looks great. There’s a really cool sense of story and atmosphere. It sounds like id’s really upped it a notch. But the thing that bothers me the most, to be honest, is, you know, I’m at the point where, okay, I’ve got my shotgun and the first imp is introduced. And he looks amazing and he comes crawling out of this pipe. It’s amazing animation. He comes right at me and I’m like, “Bam, dead.” And he didn’t just die, he completely turned into dust. And I just completely whipped his ass. I’m like, “I didn’t have a chance to be scared there, guys.” You know, I mean, the player gets scared by feeling weakened. I’m a big fan, lately, as far as horror goes, you know, I love all those kinds of games, I find Doom 3 to be great. I haven’t found it to be incredibly scary so far. The kind of games that scare me now are like Fatal Frame 2 and Silent Hill. Fatal Frame 2 scared the ever-loving bejeezus out of me. Like, literally. Like my wife had to f****** stop playing the game. I haven’t actually had chills go up my spine in a long time. It’s happened with two things recently. The first one was seeing that movie The Eye. Did you ever see that one?

GI: No.

Bleszinski: It’s kind of like that movie Blank where that woman gets her sight restored and then she can see ghosts. And it’s not a very original story, but the execution of it is very, very good. I saw it in an independent theater. There’s a scene where she goes into an elevator, and there’s this old man ghost in the elevator. He’s facing the corner. And she has to go in the elevator to get home. And she goes in the elevator and you see him behind her and he starts turning towards her, right? And they show his feet, and it turns out his feet aren’t touching. His feet are just hovering over towards her. And then as he starts turning towards her you realize his entire head is caved in. It’s a real guy they got. He must have had some sort of midsection of his skull removed. And he’s just turning towards her and like just starts floating up right next to her. And it just f****** freaked me out. And it’s that kind of Japanese sensibilities about, like, Fatal Frame 2. That’s the stuff, like, The Suffering I played through start to finish, thoroughly enjoyed it, didn’t scare me at all.

GI: The Suffering’s not a scary game.

Bleszinski: Well, the problem is you have these monsters come at you and you have an awesome weapon like a shotgun. You’re like, “**** you, **** you. I’m not scared.” System Shock was scary because your weapon would occasionally jam. You know, they had very creative monster designs like the C3PO robot who’s like, “Oh dear, come here. I didn’t mean to do that.” And he’s next to a guy whose head he ripped off. You know, I think Doom 3 is cool as hell, man. It’s just… someday I want to get around to doing a horror game. I have a lot of thoughts on it.

GI: Do you feel that you’re in competition with them? Do you look at it that way?

Bleszinski: I think we’ve shifted into an adjacent space to be honest. It used to be like blow for blow. I mean, literally. Like back in the day when id released the Quake 3 tests and like the videos of all that stuff with the rotating mirror, we took the original UT and made a level that looked pretty similar.  I’ll tell you right now I’m moving forward. Anybody who’s a smart developer is going to diversify their portfolio and not just make PC games and not just make console games. They’re going to make stuff that’s multiplatform that, you know, you attempt to leverage each skew.

GI: What drives you?

Bleszinski: What drives us? It’s everything. It’s seeing, you know, id is certainly awesome and they’ve been our competition for a while, but I mean, Star Breeze is now too. I mean, Riddick’s f****** badass. You know, Valve is. It’s not just a situation where one person is dominating the landscape. I consider Konami and Metal Gear to be my competition, and Square and Final Fantasy now, you know? We’re much more “big picture” now. It used to be, you know, and coming from that old school, PC, first person shooter sensibility, you know, it limits a lot of designers. You look at what they did with Riddick with, like, snapping people’s necks in first person and all the blending of the genres there. I doubt you’d see that come out of a lot of those Texas first person shooter-type houses because there’s a notion of purity that these guys have. It’s very strange as far as, you know, “What? You can’t do melee in first person. It would suck.” Well a couple games recently did it and did an okay job with it. Good for them. You can’t get caught up in a mentality of, “Well I’ve never seen that in another game before so we can’t try it.”

GI: Yeah, but that’s what you’re going to do in Unreal Championship 2 is focusing, not heavily focusing, but there’s aspects of it.

Bleszinski: Well it’s first and third person. Gamers now accept that kind of stuff.

GI: Is it liberating to work on Unreal Championship 2, really kind of take it somewhere else and really adapt it to console space instead of…

Bleszinski: Well, the most liberating thing is making it for just the Xbox and focusing on what the Xbox does, and not having to worry about if, because if the game runs, it runs. You don’t have to worry about this setup or that setup. Everyone’s gotta have the same controls. You know, it’s an even playing field. I mean, we’ll still make badass PC games, but it’s like I said before. You have to diversify. You gotta work in multiple spaces. Publishers should recognize that as well.

GI: What do you think of this whole Midway deal with them publishing your games instead of Atari?

Bleszinski: You know, Atari showed us a lot of love over the years, and they’ve helped us sell a whole lot of games that established our franchise back when they were GT Interactive. But now we’re at the point where Midway comes up to us and is like, “Look, we want to get in the PC space. We got a great deal for you, and you roll up at E3 with the next Unreal and you’re going to see it from LAX rolling up to the convention center.” Midway is going to get the huge banners. They’re going to get chicks dressed up as the characters, and treat us as, you know, I don’t think I’ve ever been happy with what we’ve had at E3 from any of our publishers, ever. Maybe it’s like that parent who never feels like it’s good enough for their kid, but everybody else’s layout just looks bigger and cooler than ours. So I think finally we’ll get to that point where…

GI: Yours is bigger than everyone else’s.

Bleszinski: Yeah, maybe it is a little comparison going on, you know? I don’t know, man.

GI: Do you think in the end it really matters who’s publishing it?

Bleszinski: Publishers have a lot more leverage than people like to think. You know, EA is just developing and publishing and totally kicking ass. It’s weird to be working with Midway now after working with Atari, man because growing up, you know, with these brands, you know, the Atari 2600. I have Mortal Kombat 2 in my house. I blew so much money on, like, I got my first speeding ticket barreling off to play MK3 before the arcade closed. Hardcore dork. But I think it matters because you get a publisher who will get your game in front of the users and they’ll spend the money to market it, and they’ll get it on MTV, and, you know, place the ads in the Best Buy circular. Make sure that the copies are there day one so people can get their hands on it. So you ask me if that matters? I say hell yeah. You need to have a good publishing partner, bottom line. Until stuff like Steam comes along.

GI: (laughs) You say that with a smile.

Bleszinski: I think it could be an idea that’s ahead of its time. Look at iTunes right? The music industry was panicking and suing people, and then all of the sudden Apple comes along and is like, “Yeah, you know you can do here and do it right.” It takes off and they’re all like, “S***. People are going to pay for music still? What do you mean?”

GI: Where do you think you would like to take Unreal that would be very different than it is right now?

Bleszinski: From my position I’m pretty busy working on a new franchise right now. And the amount of time I spend on Unreal is only a certain chunk of my day. You know, the guy who’s spearheading a lot of that stuff now is Steve Polge. I’m the one out there doing a lot of interviews, but Steve is as responsible, if not greatly more for the success of what Unreal is because he, you know, we have a good rapport about what I want to see in the game and what he wants to do.  He’ll run stuff by me and I’ll run stuff by him. Bottom line, if he doesn’t like my idea he’s not programming it (laughs).

GI: So speaking of your new franchise, anything you can tease our readers with?

Bleszinski: Um, it’s not Unreal. … We’re not really ready to announce much about it, but it’s… I like co-op.

GI: Co-op?

Bleszinski: That’s all I’m saying.

GI: Is it even in the first person shooter genre?

Bleszinski: Probably not. That’s all you get.

GI:  We’ve all seen something or other about the next gen platforms - capabilities, hardware, and that sort of thing. What kind of impact do you think that’s going to have on the PC space?

Bleszinski: I’m worried. You know, the PC space will be there, but if I shoot from the hip it’s like, a lot of that has to come from the OEMs. People have to buy a good computer and have a good nVidia card in it from the get go because the number of people who are going to go out and purchase a $300 card, slap it in their computer, I don’t, you know. Who does that these days?

GI: That was an awesome plug, by the way.

Bleszinski:  I mean, they’ve shown us a lot of love, man. And we’re showing them love. You know, I don’t think the PC’s going anywhere, but I think nVidia’s smart because they’re marketing nVidia as a brand, as a gaming platform brand, which is what absolutely needs to happen if the PC is going to survive. You know, it needs to be seen as its own gaming thing. You know, your average person buys a PC now for music, affairs, and pornography.

GI: Do you think that some of that blame could be laid on Microsoft’s shoulders?

Bleszinski: The Microsoft brand’s a tough one, man.

GI: I mean just as far as where PC gaming is at and where it’s going.

Bleszinski: Microsoft has done a lot of stuff to help promote, like, XP as its own platform. But I still think there’s a lot more that can be done. I mean, every time I meet the average layman who I talk to about what I do, and they’re like, “What do you do?” And I’m like, “Well, I make video games.” And they’re like, “Oh, PlayStation? Xbox?” And then for the longest time it was always, “No, PC.” And they’re like, “Oh, you loser.” There’s this like bad perception with it. And I love PC games, man. I operate under the fundamental belief that any time you have a device that’s built for work people will find a time and a way to blow off work on said device. It’s the same reason why every time I’m on a plane and I see a laptop and mother******* are playing solitaire on it. A $3,000 device that they use for what? A $3 deck of cards. It just kills me. I think the PC could definitely, you know, it’s a sink or swim situation. It’s going to require a lot of proper branding. Microsoft’s doing a lot of stuff with XP. NVidia’s towing the line so. It could go either way, man. Regardless, PC gamers are the most demanding, feedback oriented bunch of guys out there.

GI: (Laughs) What is the best way to characterize your relationship with fans?

Bleszinski: I had to change my license plate because it said “CLIFFY B” and I was starting to get some really weird, like… yeah.

GI: You’re always in the shadows. You know, you’re not an outspoken person. Very quiet, to yourself.

Bleszinski: I’m an introvert. I’m like Howard Hughes in his later years.

GI: So you’re obviously working on the Xbox. Are you working on anything currently for next generation?

Bleszinski: Well, Unreal Engine 3 is being promoted for licensing right now for next generation consoles. So one might infer…

GI: Xbox 2?

Bleszinski: All of the above. We are looking at leveraging our engine so that it is efficient on the majority of next generation systems, PC included. I gotta put the corporate face on, man. Engine licensing is a delicate thing. Ever since I was quoted in CGW as saying, “We’re going to take a dump on Doom… yeah. And then the other quote about the PSP with rubbing the balls on it. That was a win-win.

GI: Would you ever develop for a Nintendo console?

Bleszinski: We would if the opportunity presented itself.

GI: I mean, you’re always about blowing s*** up and like…

Bleszinski: I think Nintendo has a place. You know, Sony’s always said this. But it seems to me like Nintendo is more interested lately in doing like just weird stuff like they’re a think tank, you know? Like to try and push gaming forward in its own interesting and unique direction. They’ve got games like the bongo game, and that game that’s like pinball against an army. And it’s like, “Okay, congratulations. You’re different. You win.” It’s like the kid who gets a big tattoo on his forehead at school. It’s like, “Well, you’re different.” And I say this out of my heart because I dearly love Nintendo. My nickname in elementary school was Nintendo Boy. My name’s in the first issue of Nintendo Power.  

GI: Are you kidding me?

Bleszinski: Super Mario Bros. high score. 9,998,950. Polaroided the screen. Sent it in. Went to the Nintendo World Championships when I was 15. Came in second in Massachusetts. I totally ate it. It was like The Wizard.

GI: (laughs)

Bleszinski: For real. They had like the big TV up there and the kid just kicked my ass. I wiped out on Rad Racer. That’s what’s been motivating me ever since.

GI: What about portable design?

Bleszinski: Our cup runneth over, dude. Honestly. I mean, maybe. Who knows?

GI: You don’t have enough s*** going on as it is.

Bleszinski: You know, as much as I do want to rub my testicles on the PSP, we gotta develop our AAA, next generation, badass stuff. And it’s one of those things that if we got around to it, maybe.