Cliff Bleszinski has a list.

He picks the paper off his desk during the tail end of our interview and waves it toward me when I ask him what went wrong. 

It’s a neatly typed, itemized accounting of the lowest moment in his life, and he’s ready to share.

Perhaps most famous for his work on the Unreal and Gears of War series of games, Bleszinski also found himself, in 2018, infamous for two other shooters: LawBreakers and Radical Heights. Both were products of Boss Key Productions, which Bleszinski co-founded in 2014: LawBreakers barely lasted a year, and Radical Heights barely a month.

The failures of the two games and the studio hit Bleszinski, 51, hard.

Looking back today, he shoulders most of the blame, saying that they suffered death by a thousand cuts, a thousand mistakes and bad decisions, fed — in part — by what he later came to realize was his alcoholism.

"I was a functioning alcoholic," he said. "Then I became a non-functioning alcoholic."

But the post-failure haze of drinking, sleeping, reading, and avoiding video games that on and off marked the past eight years led to a moment of clarity in a hospital bed this spring. Now four months sober, Bleszinski finds himself once more drawn to creating, and his first love: video games.

"It's been a journey," he said. "I don't want to be that person where my defining aspect is my alcoholism. I want to be that well-known, hopefully loved, successful game designer who is a great husband who also happens to be an alcoholic."

Missing The Camaraderie

"Since the age of 16, I have had my nose to the grindstone," Bleszinski said.

As a teenager, Bleszinski had already shipped multiple shareware games. But it was 1994’s Jazz Jackrabbit platformer, co-created with coder Arjan Brussee for Epic MegaGames, that turned him into a successful developer, allowing him to buy an apartment and car and start work on what would be Unreal.

Bleszinski spent the next 20 years at Epic Games, working on the Unreal shooter, and then becoming the lead designer on the first three Gears of War games. In 2012, Bleszinski decided he needed a break and left Epic for what would become a relatively short-lived retirement.

He said he spent his days traveling, doing the occasional speaking gig, spending time at a beach house with his wife, Lauren, and reading.

But by the end of 2013, Bleszinski was starting to feel the urge to get back into making games.

"I missed the camaraderie," he said. "I missed going into the studio and talking about what happened on Game of Thrones. I missed the shoulder surfing, making rounds, and looking over a programmer's shoulder at what they were doing. And then going out for dinner and drinks with members of the team."

He also had an idea.

Grand Opening, Grand Closing

"I wanted to make a cool arena shooter where players could run on the walls and invert gravity and things like that," he said. "I wanted to keep it in scope and simple, bust it out in a year and a half."

So Bleszinski went hunting for talent in the game industry to join him in a new studio, while his agent, Ophir Lupu, started looking for a publisher.

One of his first sit-downs was with Rod Fergusson. The two had worked together for seven years at Epic, becoming a formidable combination as they tackled the Gears of War games.

By Bleszinski's telling, his own ego blew up the chance to work with Fergusson again.

"I wanted it to be my studio; that was my ego creeping in," Bleszinski said, adding that Fergusson seemed open to the idea but wanted to co-found the studio. "In hindsight, I needed someone like Rod in my life to tell me no and to help guide the project."

Bleszinski also met with Brussee, who, after working on Jazz Jackrabbit, co-founded Guerrilla Games, where he was development director on the Killzone series. The two decided to co-found Boss Key Productions in 2014.

Shortly thereafter, Boss Key Productions signed a deal with Nexon to publish the game that was codenamed Project BlueStreak. The publisher gave the studio a chunk of money to get started, but also took 20 percent ownership of the company, Bleszinski said.

Over the course of the company's early months, Bleszinski and Brussee built up the team by bringing in leads for different departments and then filling in folks around them. Early on, that meant a team of 15 to 20, but that would later grow to about 75 people.

“Dan Nanni was brought on as the main designer, which I kind of bristled at because I wanted it to be my game,” Bleszinski said. “But I would end up having to be more CEO and less of the lead designer.”

Talking through those early days, Bleszinski rattled off the names of many of the employees, pointing out their talent and the work they did on what would become LawBreakers. Relatively early on, the studio had the game up on its feet with weapons, zones, and the gravity they could play with. But there was a problem.

"We hadn't really nailed any of that arena shooter gameplay that I'd gone for, and it was really becoming very apparent that this wasn't going to be the game we had to make," he said. "It needed more."

Months into development, Matt Fischman, a gameplay programmer, went to Bleszinski and said, "I think we need abilities."

There was a huge pushback from the team, Bleszinski said — not against the idea, but over who was going to run with it: Nanni’s designers or the gameplay programmers. Ultimately, it was the programmers who designed the characters' abilities.

"They would do these quick little videos to send to the team to introduce characters," Bleszinski said.

The addition started to bring much-needed depth to the game.

"The game was paper-thin up to that point, and then once we added abilities, it started to have a little bit of depth," he said. "I hadn't realized we were making a hero shooter at that point. I just saw it as characters with abilities."

That changed in November 2014, when the first trailer for Blizzard's own hero shooter, Overwatch, dropped.

"We were sitting in the Raleigh Times Bar and (Fischman) was watching the announcement trailer for (Overwatch)," Bleszinski said. "And he looks around at us, and he goes, 'We're f**ked.'"

But Bleszinski took it in stride, telling the team it gave them a chance to make a game that was different than what Overwatch was going to be. He saw it as counter-programming.

"I was like, 'Well, they're going to be bright and colorful, but we're going to be more like Call of Duty or Medal of Honor or Battlefield.'"

In March 2016, the team realized they wouldn't be able to keep up with the release rhythm necessary for a free-to-play game, so they announced that LawBreakers would be a paid title. Nexon, to Bleszinski's surprise, took the news in stride.

As the team approached the August 2017 launch, they had a number of alphas and betas. Too many, Bleszinski now believes. Because the betas were planned to help investigate bugs and balance issues, they often didn't have a lot of new features. The end result was that by the time the game did hit in August, the buzz had dwindled.

"It was coming up on its release, and players were like, 'I thought that came out already. Are they still working on that? What the hell?' That's not a good thing to have happening," Bleszinski said.

When the game launched, the team was in a room in the studio watching the live player counts.

"We had this chart on the screen, and we could see what our concurrent player count was," Bleszinski said, "and it was slowly climbing, slowly climbing, and then it just leveled off, and we were just like, 'sh*t.'"

The game never managed to find a significant audience despite reviewing well. To make matters worse, the low player count meant that matchmaking started failing, leading to long waits or an issue where new players were being dropped into matches with expert players. And once players saw the low player counts, even fewer were willing to try the game.

He called it a "snowball of failure," likening it to a party that no one wants to attend because no one's there. The team worked to release new modes and maps, but Bleszinski said it was too little, too late.

The studio announced in April 2018 that LawBreakers had failed to find enough of an audience to generate the funds needed to keep the game alive. Less than a week later, Boss Key Productions announced its next game.

Looking back now, Bleszinski says, “LawBreakers tripped so Concord could faceplant.”

The Boat Was Sinking

About five months before the studio announced it would stop development on LawBreakers, Zach Lowery, a senior animator on LawBreakers who would become Radical Heights’ creative director, started work on a new concept.

Radical Heights was envisioned as a free-to-play battle royale game soaked in an '80s aesthetic with a bizarre game-show twist. And it was fueled by fear of LawBreakers' potential failure.

"I think we knew the writing was on the wall for LawBreakers, so we were scrambling at that point," Bleszinski said. "I put in my share of feedback and worked on Radical Heights, but the majority of the responsibility for that game was Zach."

One of the driving notions behind the game, that chaos creates clips, wasn’t fully embraced, Bleszinski said. He points to the inclusion of gophers in the golf course section of the map. It was meant to be an homage to Caddyshack, but Bleszinski didn’t think it was wacky enough.

“That’s not like YouTube or Twitch exciting,” he said. “I was like, ‘Can somebody just please code a bike that you find in the game that has a stupid little alien in a little cart. And when you find it, it cues music, and the bike actually flies. As a wink to ET. Then you can fly around the map on the bike.’”

Bleszinski was convinced that a sort of memeable moment would have helped the game by pushing people to share it online in short clips.

“We didn’t embrace the wackiness, and that didn’t help,” he said.

Unfortunately, the rush to get the game out as LawBreakers was sinking led to another major issue: The "X-Treme Early Access" version of the game had no cheat protection, which opened the gates to a flood of game-breaking hackers.

But Bleszinski said the team didn't have much choice.

"We had to get something out there and try to build on it because we had the buckets and the boat was sinking," he said. "We were frantically trying to get the water out of the boat."

At the same time, Bleszinski was making the rounds pitching other games, including one that had players riding dragons as samurai fighting zombies. It was, for Bleszinski, the ultimate mash-up. He called it Dragonflies. He was shopping it around to major publishers, looking for $30 million to $40 million. But when co-founder Brussee decided to leave and rejoin Epic, the interest in backing the game dried up.

With Brussee out, Joe Halper shifted his attention from helping with production to planning the closing of the studio. On May 14, 2018, Bleszinski gathered his team for what would be the studio’s final meeting.

"I'll never forget that day when I had to stand in front of the company for an emergency meeting and tell them that all of this just isn't working," Bleszinski said. "It was one of the hardest days of my life."

Compounding that pain, his Australian Shepherd, Teddy, had not been doing well.

"As the studio was declining, he couldn't walk anymore," he said. "His back legs had given out. And so as my studio was limping along and slowly dying, my dog was doing the same thing.

"Not only did I lose my studio, I lost my dog that I loved."

Still today, that pain remains; a shrine to Teddy sits behind his work desk. Bleszinski returned to the studio one last time with Lauren after it had been shut down.

"I remember just looking at the backboard that we had for our livestreams," he said. "It had all of the characters, and I remember crying a little bit, tearing up, and just being so f**king angry."

Bleszinski says that when news of the closure went public, people "glommed onto it. The internet thought it was f**king hilarious."

The List

When I ask Bleszinski what he thinks went wrong, he reaches for that list.

The first, perhaps one of the biggest, mistakes ties into an issue Bleszinski says plagued the game's development: his ego, in this case, his ego and how it impacted his talk with Rod Fergusson.

"I could have used Rod, but I wanted it to be my show, and that was the first step of my ego creeping in right there, believing that people would, you know: if I built it as Cliff, people will come. I thought there was this brand loyalty from the people who knew who I was, but it turns out people are loyal to the game, but they're not necessarily loyal to the person."

Another important lesson, Bleszinski said, came out of one of the successes tied to the game: the ironclad deal his agent got him with Nexon. It turns out it was too much of a good thing. Or at least that's what Bleszinski thinks.

At one point Arjan Brussee told Bleszinski that maybe they should have gone with 2K or EA or Microsoft as publisher, and that the deal they landed — which included Boss Key retaining the rights to the IP — shouldn't have been so favorable to Boss Key.

The result, as Bleszinski sees it: Boss Key ended up with more ownership, but less support.

"When the deal is so good for one side, the other side isn't as incentivized," Bleszinski said. He recalls Owen Mahoney, Nexon's CEO at the time, essentially saying, “How did we sign this?”

“Once the company realizes that,” Bleszinski added, ”they're not going to make it the next big thing because they're really not going to see that much of the profit."

While Bleszinski lays the blame for the game's ultimate failure solidly at his own feet, he is most clearly annoyed about an early decision to bring LawBreakers to PC and PlayStation instead of PC and Xbox.

At the time, Bleszinski knew the studio wouldn't be able to bring LawBreakers to more than one console at launch, and it was Brussee who convinced him that the PlayStation was the right one to launch with.

"PlayStation had a larger install base, and that's where he wanted to have his best bets, as opposed to trying to bring over the fans of Gears," Bleszinski said. "They were loyal to me, Gears, and Xbox. It's that simple.

"That was another example of people I was surrounded by, as smart as they were, suggesting things, and I was just like, 'OK,' as opposed to being like, 'No, we should put it on Xbox and then PlayStation later.'”

The art style of LawBreakers is also on his list. He said the game “technically looked good,” but that it never had a distinct identity in the way that Borderlands and Overwatch did.

The characters,” he said, “were technically competent, but they weren’t exactly so memorable that people would want to cosplay as them.” 

Bleszinski believes his own attitude and, at times, crass nature also didn't help the game or the studio.

"It's taken me a long time to realize that if you're a creative, if you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything at all."

It also became a problem that he wanted to be friends with his developers. “I was too nice,” he said. He feels he never established authority as a CEO.

And as leader, he wasn’t as engaged as he should have been, ultimately working eight or nine hours a day, and going home while the rest of the team stuck around.

“The team seeing the leader not being there on the battlefield with them... was also a factor," he said. 

As the interview winds down, I ask Bleszinski if he thinks his alcoholism played a role in the studio's collapse.

"I think a little bit," he said. "It wasn't the factor, again it was death by 1,000 paper cuts. You know. But I wasn't looking forward to going to work. I was looking forward to the drink afterwards."

Dipping a Toe Back In 

Looking back at his storied career, from the perspective of a recovering alcoholic, Bleszinski now says his problems actually started back when he was working on Unreal Tournament.

A visiting Russian journalist gave Bleszinski a bottle of Stoli during an Unreal Tournament press visit around 2003. He took the bottle home.

“My ex-wife always went to bed before me and I’d often make quesadillas and go upstairs to hang out in the chat rooms, or post something on Something Awful,” he said. “I knew the moment when I opened the fridge and looked at the vodka, and decided to take a swig of it, that I was headed on this journey.”

"The Gears of War trilogy was largely developed hungover by me," he added. "I was, at that point, a functioning alcoholic."

Over the years, he said, his tolerance built up and he started to find that alcohol helped him sleep.

"In hindsight, it wasn't a good sleep," he said.

Bleszinski also notes that while his drinking problem was entirely his own fault, the game industry has, or at least had, a very heavy drinking culture.

"You go to your GDCs, you go to your E3s, you have three nights in a row of going to parties, or wine dinner with your partners and then you have hotel lobby bars," he said. "My tolerance was so high that other developers would have a few and I would get all of this confidential information and remember it. It was almost like my superpower for a while."

When he formed Boss Key Productions, he made sure the office was within walking distance of the local bar scene. He implemented "Thirsty Thursdays," where studio employees would get their first drink free. And at one point he started taking a car service to work so he didn't have to worry about driving home drunk.

But when the games failed and the studio collapsed, it became too much for Bleszinski.

"I basically got to the point where I didn't have anything to get out of bed for," he said.

He spent those days reading, hanging out with Lauren, and drinking — lots of drinking.

"Eventually, my body was like 'F**k you,' and I realized this is me hitting a wall and it's time to give this up after 25 years of partying," he said.

On March 23, 2026, Bleszinski woke up in a hospital after suffering a seizure tied to his drinking and spent a week undergoing tests and recovering. In the days and months since, he gave up drinking, went to an outpatient treatment facility, started seeing a therapist, and focused on his health.

Over the course of the interview, Bleszinski is upbeat, talking about his time spent on stage during open mic nights doing comedy; Lauren, whom he calls the love of his life; watching movies; reading books; the recent games he's played; and the new podcast he's launched called F13 (as in, "This keyboard goes to F13!") with Brian McGuinness.

He's in this new place, a place where he can look back at his life so far — the good and the bad — and see it was a journey that brought him to where he is now.

He’s happy with how his recovery is going. People tell him that he’s looking better, his face less bloated. (Bleszinski tells me he hates the picture used on his Wikipedia page.)

He's co-produced two Broadway shows, released a memoir, and published a comic, but it wasn't until recently, with his four-month sobriety, that he's starting to love games again and wants to get back to working on them.

And it’s that need to create that drives Bleszinski these days.

"At the end of the day, I want to create characters and worlds," he said. "I want to make stuff that people will cosplay as and get tattooed on their bodies."

He said he's starting to see game mechanics, weapons, and stories in the world around him, whether that's a hedge trimmer being used in his garden or the way fireflies move in his backyard.

He dipped his toe back in the world of game-making when he decided to consult on an asymmetric horror title called Soul Walker.

"So maybe I'll eventually get my full foot back in the business and hopefully not get pushed into the pool," Bleszinski said.

He’s coy about what a new game of his own might be, but he is clear it won’t be in the PvP space.

“Good luck to anyone in that space,” Bleszinski said. “I'm more of a fan of PvE these days. Horde mode saved Gears 2, and I believe that space is evergreen because players just want to hop online with friends and shoot some stuff, no frills, no questions asked.

“I’m nowhere near sharing anything specific (about a new game), beyond that, I can’t walk into a Home Depot without seeing a full arsenal at every turn,” he said. “There’s so much more than just chainsaws.”

Brian Crecente is a Contributing Writer for 80 Level. Check out more of his work and subscribe to his newsletter at his Substack website, GAME.

Keep up with Cliff by following him on Twitter/X.