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CliffyB And The Making of Gears of War (by Dean Takahashi):
http://blogs.mercurynews.com/aei/2006/11/cliffyb_and_the.html
http://blogs.mercurynews.com/aei/2006/11/cliffyb_and_the.html
The first time I met Cliff “CliffyB” Blezinski, he was wearing his flashy white suit with gold jewelry. Mark Rein, vice president at Epic Games, where they both worked, laughed at him in the press room at the Game Developers Conference.
“You look like a pimp,” Rein said. “You’re my Ho,” CliffyB shot back.
He’s got a lip on him, that CliffyB. Back then, he was the lead game designer at Epic Games and we were talking about the “Unreal” franchise.
Since then, he has moved on to bigger accomplishments. He has 2,788 friends on his MySpace page. It’s his hobby, he says.
“Surfing the Net and accepting friend invites,” he said. “That’s what I do instead of smoking.”
And he’s also the designer of “Gears of War,” the new blockbuster for the Xbox 360 which formally debuts today. I spoke with CliffyB a couple of weeks ago and have been playing with his finished product for the past few days.
“It feels great,” CliffyB said regarding the impending release of GoW. “We are going around the dark side of the moon. I feel like a Dad outside the delivery room. This is the biggest game I’ve worked on. The one I’m most proud of.”
(Fyi, much of this post is taken from my Xbox 360 Uncloaked book as well as my own subsequent interview with CliffyB).
GoW is indeed the biggest title to come out of Epic. As chronicled in my own book and in “Smart Bomb” by Heather Chaplin and Aaron Ruby, Microsoft and Epic came together out of common interests a few years back. CliffyB was feeling trapped by the success of the Unreal franchise. And Microsoft, realizing that the delays of Halo 2 meant that there would be no Halo 3 for the Xbox 360 launch, needed a good game.
At the Dice Summit in Las Vegas, CliffyB approached Ed Fries, then the head of Microsoft Game Studios, and said, “Going to make me the Halo of Xbox 2.” Fries said, “I just might give you that chance.”
CliffyB was one of those kids who got hazed in high school and was making games at age 17. He had sent his games on floppy disks in Ziploc bags. He hooked up with Tim Sweeney, a programmer who in 1991 had started what was then called Epic MegaGames in Rockville, Md. Sweeney had made a game called “ZZT,” a text-based adventure game that came with its own kit for modifying the game. Mark Rein joined as head of marketing, and James Schmalz joined to assist Sweeney with programming.
They worked on games such as “Epic Pinball,” “Jill of the Jungle,” and “Jazz Jack Rabbit.” That helped fund Sweeney’s tour de force in graphics, “Unreal.” The game took four years to make, but when it debuted in 1998, it was a big hit that sold a million units. The game exploited the newest 3-D graphics cards on computers and helped establish Sweeney as a leading thinker on 3-D alongside id Software’s John Carmack, the lead programmer on “Doom.” After Unreal, a series of sequels followed, making CliffyB wonder if he was ever going to get that chance to work on an original game.
By 2003, Epic, now based in Raleigh, N.C., was working on a new graphics engine. It could depict intricate textures for monstrous creatures that were properly lit as if they were under real light sources such as swinging lanterns. Jim Veevaert, a Microsoft business development manager, saw the demo at the Game Developers Conference in 2003 and was blown away. That’s when I saw it too, and I only knew at the time it was the basis for a future Unreal game.
Veevaert pressed Mark Rein for details, saying, “I know it’s a game.” Rein said it had a working title of “Unreal Warfare,” and Veevaert said he wanted to sign it up as a title for the upcoming Xbox 360, which was still more than two years away from launch. Epic business chief Jay Wilbur and Mark Rein negotiated to free the property from a publisher that Epic had already signed.
CliffyB wanted to expand beyond Unreal and do games similar to the horror games he fancied such as “Silent Hill” and “Resident Evil,” where fear prevailed.
“Remember that phrase about how ‘the only thing we have to fear is fear itself?” he said. “I say, ‘Fear, it sells.’” CliffyB had had a game in mind since high school. He called it “Over Fiend,” a horror game where a character lost his wife to demons in a post-modern city. For a time, “Unreal Warfare” was put on ice while the team finished “Unreal Tournament 2004.” CliffyB wanted to get away from the shooters that had no story. When Capcom’s “Resident Evil 4” surfaced with a second-person view, he thought, “That’s really the way to go” for characters that would look outstanding.
Epic commenced on the work, dubbed “Project Warfare.” It would slow the pace down compared to a typical shooter game. The character would partially obscure the player’s view of the scene. CliffyB thought back to the chaos that followed 9/11. He was struck that a surprise attack could bring down something so grand. He thought of the ruins of a cathedral and of the last scene of the film “The Planet of the Apes,” where Charleston Heston discovers the fallen Statue of Liberty. He recalled the hysteria about Anthrax and people going to buy duct tape to protect themselves against terrorist chemical warfare attacks. The theme of “destroyed beauty” occurred to him and it mixed with his demons from “Over Fiend.” CliffyB wanted to call it “Apex War,” after a small suburban town near Raleigh, N.C. He thought of the ruined cities of Europe in World War II, where soldiers had to hide under cover and take pot shots rather than run through the streets with guns blazing. “What if you had enemies that take cover?” he wondered. “They’re smart and they think about what they’re going to do.”
This time, CliffyB wanted the enemies to come from underground. The shadow and lighting features of Sweeney’s graphics engine could render the pale, vaguely humanoid race to fit CliffyB’s imagination. CliffyB liked “Halo,” which featured smart enemies. CliffyB wanted a console experience and was frustrated with the PC. To make the break from the PC, the team saw that they should create a new brand beyond Unreal.
The phrase that stuck with him was “the gears of war lubricated with the blood of soldiers.” It conjured the image he had in mind. He did a search on the name “Gears of War” and found that an anime comic fan owned it. Epic bought the rights to the name. It was one of dozens that the company filed as possible trademark names for the game.
CliffyB figured that with Halo 2 running late, Microsoft would need a game to launch its next console, and that game would have to be “bad ass.” He got impatient to move forward with it. The demo at the GDC was the groundwork for Tim Sweeney’s new graphics engine, now dubbed Unreal Engine 3. It would feature “high dynamic range,” which meant that the graphics would accommodate bright sections and dark shadows within the same picture frame. That would enable effects such as rays of sunlight piercing through dark clouds.
d.h. wenn er es gegen 1600uhr aufgegeben hat, dann bekomm ichs ziemlich definitiv erst am freitag.
