Former Epic Games design director Cliff Bleszinski retired from the company in October in order to take a break. Now, however, he’s eager to “work on something new and fresh and sort of redefine my legacy”.
“I had been working with [Epic] since I was 17-years-old. It’s time for a fresh start,” said Bleszinski. “I’ll start a new studio maybe at some point – it’s not a matter of ‘if’, it’s a matter of when and with who.”
“I started to get a little bit bored and then my phone started ringing a lot. I started meeting with a lot of people, a lot of developers and publishers… just to see what could possibly happen, of which I can tell you nothing right now,” he explained, noting Ubisoft was one of the more interested. “I felt like Liam Neeson in Taken. I called the number, talked to them, and we ended up meeting up and it was cool, but it was like the covert ops moment that was really amazing.”
Bleszinski noted that his goals will be to “pan for gold, while also having faith in the process” while remaining aware of the risks for ‘celebrity’-helmed studios. “I think when you look at Romero and when he did Ion Storm, I think it worked against him as much as for him,” Bleszinski said. “If you look at Curt Schilling and his studio [38 Studios]… You have to be careful when you have a certain amount of cult of personality. You can use it and leverage it to some extent, but you have to be careful not to believe your own crap, honestly.”
“And surrounding yourself with people who will question yourself at the right times… you don’t want to surround yourself with a lot of ‘yes men’ essentially,” he noted.
Source: G4
