liff Bleszinski, AKA Cliffy B, is riding high these days. His Gears of War is not only a huge success in the marketplace, but it’s also garnering its share of critical nods, too, with eight awards at Thursday’s AIAS awards. We caught up with Cliffy B and he gave us the dirt on Gears, the Wii and the sweet smell of success.

Game Informer: How does it feel, coming out of last night?

Cliffy B: If feels amazing. Do you remember when Hillary Swank won her Academy Award for best actress for Boys Don’t Cry? I remember seeing it in Vanity Fair or Entertainment Weekly, they had a thing where they showed up in her hotel room and kind of caught her in bed with the afterglow. When I was waking up this morning after receiving this award, it confirmed all of my suspicions about everything we were putting into Gears—from the kind of game it is, the pacing, to the style to making the ultimate assumption about what gamers want and what kind of game we wanted to play. It’s an incredible validation.

GI: Who were the first people that you called after the awards?

B: I called my girlfriend. I called my mom this morning, and I called my brother. My brother has been an amazing support system. I had to give props to my mom last night.

GI: You always have to give props to your mom.

B: Yeah. She bought my first computer, she did her own thing enough so that I could go off and do my own thing. She’s getting remarried and has a new boyfriend and just ignored me for a year, which allowed me to make my own game, basically. It’s funny how everything comes full circle.

GI: It’s been a long road, making the game. How long had the game actually been in development, and could you have ever envisioned being in the company that you’re in now--winning not only console game of the year, but game of the year?

B: The game was in development about two years, but the idea had been kicking around for about five. To see the game come into fruition is incredibly rewarding, but to put things into perspective, to look at who we were up against—the irony that we were up against Zelda in so many of these categories—I picked up on that when we were in E3, the fact that we were being compared to Zelda for best in show this past year, and I was like, “How did I get here?” Zelda was for me that one game—well, there were several—from Space Invaders right to Mario, but it really hit with Zelda when I was younger. Saving up every dollar from my paper route to buy the damned thing, and remembering the smell of the instruction booklet and finding secrets in the game, which I believed for some reason the designers didn’t mean for me to find, because they were secrets. They don’t want me to find them. I had this whole thing in my head about that. And then to have that come full circle and be compared to those brands, those billion-dollar brands, with something that we cooked up just blows my f____ing mind. It’s amazing.

GI: Being in Nintendo Power as a kid, and then beating the latest Zelda, which most would say is the best Zelda in the series.

B: It’s full circle for me, as far as what everything is. To be frank, though, as far as games I’ve played and enjoyed, I actually enjoyed Okami a bit more than Zelda. Okami grabbed me more. I don’t know what it was—there’s something about being a wolf from the get-go, the art style, the painting, that I just found to be very surreal and enjoyable.

GI: What did you think about not being able to go against that?

B: What, Zelda against Okami?

GI: No, because Okami wasn’t included into the awards, because Capcom isn’t part of the AIAS.

B: I don’t really want to speak to that controversy, because that’s somebody else’s battle to fight. But I have a tremendous amount of respect for Capcom—you look at the influence Resident Evil had on Gears of War, it’s pretty obvious. Lost Planet is a great game. They are just a stellar, stellar studio. I’ve been a fan of them since Mega Man and Street Fighter. It would have been nice to have had them in the categories, as well. As much as I loved Okami, the fact that it has 15 minutes of unskippable text in the beginning makes me want to cry. It just kills me.

GI: Do you guys get bonuses because of awards, or is it sales based?

B: We have our own internal bonus system that’s very fair and rewarding to our employees, depending on how well Epic does. When Epic does well, people do well.

GI: Does this cement your role in Epic as the Gears guy now?

B: I like to think of myself as the fun guy. (Laughs) You know, coming off back in the day with Unreal and Unreal Tournament and whatnot and then doing Gears and everything. Steve Polge is spearheading Unreal Tournament 3, and he’s doing an excellent job with it. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to play it a couple of times a week and give him my two cents and give some suggestions of how things might proceed in different areas and little nudges and ideas and whatnot. Epic has an environment that kind of allows for that kind of thing, and it benefits everybody ultimately.

GI: You didn’t really answer the question though.

B: Yeah, I’m probably known as the Gears guy, yeah.

GI: Is that scary that you might just be—you know Balki will always be Balki.

B: I believe that my resume holds up enough for people knowing that I did Jazz Jackrabbit back in the day to doing Unreal and Unreal Tournament to doing Gears. I think I’ve shown that I’m a fairly versatile person as far as being a game designer from first to third person, single player to multiplayer and even platform action. I’m not afraid of it at all. You know what, if in the next five years I’m pegged as a shooter guy still, then that’s fine by me. Shooters are an easy genre to understand. You point, you shoot and you attack your enemy, and the things that we can do to evolve that genre, from Unreal Tournament to introducing double kill and monster kill system and all of that, the alternate firing of the weapons and whatnot, as well as with Gears with active reload and the best cover system to date. I think I’m perfectly fine with being in that position.

GI: You haven’t quit since release, with updates, fixing bugs and things like that. You guys always release updates, and there’s one coming up. Is there anything you can say about what’s on the horizon with updates?

B: Lots of little fixes and tweaks, honestly. It’s one of those things where we don’t want to mess with the winning formula of what Gears is too much. Anytime you release a game that can be played by multiple people online, you go from testing it with hundreds to testing it with hundreds of thousands to potentially millions. You can never catch every single little hole there. If you look at all the little updates in World of Warcraft, it’s unbelievable. Just nudges and tweaks, basically.

GI: What about map packs for multiplayer?

B: We released two levels about a month ago, and that was available for free, thanks to our wonderful sponsors at the Discovery Channel. And we’re considering other content at this time. Maps and whatnot are a total no-brainer.

GI: Is it a fine line to decide when to cut off the free content, because all consoles now have downloadable content. Is it hard to decide when to cut off that free content and move toward a sequel?

B: There’s a threshold there, where if you’re going to do a sequel with any megasuccessful game, you want people to have a little bit of a chance to miss a product, to have a little bit of that nostalgia built. So, I think there’s a threshold there—what that threshold is for each game is up to the designer, it’s up to the business people and everyone involved. I think there’s value to be had in cutting it off at a certain point and saying, “OK, that’s it for now.”

GI: Well, even look at Halo 2, they’re going to be releasing another downloadable pack…

B: Is there another one coming out? Wow. Nonstop, right? Like I said, I think it’s up to each individual business, as far as finding out where that threshold is for them. If they want to keep releasing maps and whatnot right before Halo 3 hits, that’s their strategy and more power to them.

GI: Obviously, a sequel hasn’t been announced. It’s been hinted at, talked about, then denied, then talked about, then it’s a trilogy, it’s a quadrilogy--I’m waiting for the eight-disc set. It’s obviously a no-brainer, the game’s a smash success, because it’s sold millions and it keeps still selling. Some would say that Gears is the first new Halo for the 360. Now that the game engine’s done, hypothetically, how fast do you think you could turn out a sequel?

B: We haven’t really talked about anything we’re working on outside of Unreal Tournament III right now. If we were to do a sequel, it’s one of those situations where we’d want to make it the biggest and best game possible, and I think the fact that we have shipped a game with that technology only makes it easier for us, stitching everything together with Unreal Engine. Because we shipped Gears on 360, shipping Unreal Tournament III on 360 will be easier, and any potential future product, whatever that may be. It should be a little easier to ship.