Cliff Bleszinski's comeback started at Radio City Music Hall
He left video games and found Broadway. Then Broadway helped him find his way back.
Last week, I sat down virtually with Cliff Bleszinski to chat about why his studio went under back in 2018.
I’ve been writing these post-mortems with founders and studio heads for 80 Level for more than a year now. I’ve always loved getting people to reflect more deeply on pivotal moments in their lives.
This series of monthly-or-so stories has allowed me to do just that.
What I thought would be an hour or so interview with Bleszinski turned into a nearly three-hour conversation. Our chat delved into not only the issues that LawBreakers and Radical Heights faced when they were released, and the collapse of Boss Key Productions, but also deep insight into the developer, probably best known for his work on Unreal Tournament and Gears of War.
The long interview was likely in part due to the fact that Bleszinski and I have known each other for more than twenty years. I’ve chatted and hung out with him while covering the Unreal Tournament games, Gears of War, Bulletstorm, and of course LawBreakers and Radical Heights.
When I wrote about the evolution of Epic Games in 2016, the story led with a moment from Bleszinski’s 2012 wedding.
So we had a lot of catching up to do, but more importantly, Bleszinski is at a moment in his life where he’s made some important realizations about himself and the industry he worked in.
You can read about his struggles with alcoholism, the moment of clarity that led to his sobriety, and why he thinks he was one of the big problems with Boss Key Productions, and what he’s playing next in my story over on 80 Level.
But there are also some things that didn’t make the cut. (I turned in a story nearly twice as long as it was supposed to be. That won’t surprise anyone who knows me.)
One thing I breezed over in the story was how Bleszinski, famous for his work in video games, came out of retirement not to make another game, but to get involved in a musical.
The collapse of Boss Key sent Bleszinski into a spiral that lasted, on and off, for years — he goes deep on it in the 80 Level story. It was in that state that Broadway found him.
“The irony is that the person who roped me into that is a guy named Alex Boniello,” Bleszinski said. “He actually played Connor Murphy in Dear Evan Hansen.”
If you’re not familiar, Dear Evan Hansen is a musical — later a book and a film — about a high school senior with social anxiety who sort of accidentally puts himself at the center of a school tragedy.
There’s a song in it, “You Will Be Found,” that reached Bleszinski at his lowest.
“That really resonated with me at that point,” he said, “because I really did feel broken and on the ground.
“And then, ironically, the person who played Connor Murphy on Broadway hit me up and was like, ‘Hey, they’re looking for some fresh producing blood to get involved with Broadway. And there’s this upcoming show called Hadestown.’”
Bleszinski said he listened to the soundtrack for the musical and loved it because it set the mythology of Orpheus and Eurydice and Hades and Persephone to a “jazzy New Orleans vibe.”
“So I wound up getting involved and ended up being there at the Tonys at Radio City Music Hall with (my wife) Lauren, to see it win eight Tonys,” he said. “It was one of those kind of almost comeback stories. I just put money into it and helped promote it, so I wasn’t exactly creatively involved, but to be a small part of something like that and to have a little victory, it was huge for me.”
After co-producing Hadestown, he was involved in the revival of Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune and then went on to co-write, with Alex de Campi, a six-issue sci-fi comic called Scrapper.
Bleszinski also said that during those years after the breakup of Boss Key Productions, his retirement from video games extended to playing them, at least for a while.
It wasn’t until relatively recently, Bleszinski said, that he got back to the point of enjoying video games again.
“I think it was about a year and a half or so ago where I started playing games again,” he said. “It actually started with my Switch.”
He said his mother-in-law was declining from stage-4 lung cancer and he and Lauren would travel back and forth to New Orleans to spend time with her.
He started playing games to pass the time.
He mentions Shovel Knight, Celeste, Hotline Miami, and Trees Hate You (which he says he both loves and is “another conversation”). He said he beat Mouse P.I., and played West of Loathing. And recently finished Pragmata, which he called fantastic.
“The stupid little hacking system added so much depth to the game,” he said.
But the game he’s most excited about now is the one he mentioned when we started our call, and again near the end of it. The one, he told me, he was giving up time to play to talk to me: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
“Oh my god, it’s so good,” he said. “This is just cutting into my Expedition 33 time.”
You can, and should, read the full interview with Bleszinski over on 80 Level.
Elsewhere
