Northeastern and become an engineer.”
In 1992, a year after Bleszinski had taught himself the rudiments of computer programming, he sent a game submission to Tim Sweeney, the twenty-two-year-old CEO of Epic MegaGames, who had recently dropped out of a mechanical-engineering program at the University of Maryland. (Epic’s original name, Sweeney told me, was “a big scam” to make it look legitimate. “When you’re this one single person in your parents’ garage trying to start a company, you want to look like you’re really big.”) Sweeney fondly recalled Bleszinski’s submission, a PC game called
Dare to Dream
, in which a boy gets trapped, appropriately enough, inside his own dreamworld. “At that time,” Sweeney said, “we’d gotten sixty or seventy game submissions from different people and we went ahead with five of them, and Cliff was one of the best.” Once his game was in development, Bleszinski becamemore involved with the company. Sweeney said, “We’d have four or five different projects in development with different teams, and every time one started to reach completion we’d send it off to Cliff, and he’d write off his big list of what’s good about this game and what needs to be fixed. Cliff’s lists kept growing bigger and bigger.” Bleszinski was only seventeen. When I asked Sweeney if he had had any reservations about entrusting his company’s fate to a teenager whose driver’s-license lamination was still warm, Sweeney said, “That’s what the industry was like.”
Upon its release,
Dare to Dream
, in Bleszinski’s words, “bombed.” His second game for Epic, released a year later, featured what he calls a “Rambo rabbit” named Jazz, who carried a large gun and hunted frenetically for intergalactic treasure.
Jazz Jackrabbit
, which imported to a PC platform a type of gameplay previously exclusive to Sega and Nintendo consoles, made Bleszinski’s reputation. Epic had begun as a company churning out somewhat réchauffé fare—pinball simulators, clone-ish retreads, but also a popular shooter known as
Unreal Tournament
, the updated and augmented engine of which has since been adopted by hundreds of games. It was Bleszinski, along with the Unreal Engine, that helped to fill Epic’s parking lot with sports cars.
At the diner I asked Bleszinski which games had most influenced him.
Super Mario Bros.
, he said, “is where it really kicked into high gear.” Indeed, the first issue of
Nintendo Power
, published in 1988, listed the high scores of a handful of
Super Mario
devotees, the thirteen-year-old Bleszinski’s among them. “There’s something about the whole hidden element to
Mario,”
Bleszinski said, “where you jump and hit your head on a block and just out of nowhere secret things would appear. They made you feel like a kid in the woods finding god knows what.”
Released in 1985,
Super Mario Bros
. was a game of summer-vacation-consumingscope and unprecedented inventiveness. It was among the first video games to suggest that it might contain a world. It was also hallucinogenically strange. Why did mushrooms make Mario grow larger? Why did flowers give Mario the ability to spit fire? Why did bashing Mario’s head against bricks sometimes produce coins? And why was Mario’s enemy, Bowser, a saurian, spiky-shelled turtle?
In film and literature, such surrealistic fantasy typically occurs at the outer edge of experimentalism, but early video games depended on symbols for the simple reason that the technological limitations of the time made realism impossible. Mario, for instance, wore a porkpie hat not for aesthetic reasons but because hair was too difficult to render. Bleszinski retains affection for many older games, but he says, “If you go back and play the majority of old games, they really aren’t very good.” He suspects that what made them seem so good at the time was the imaginative involvement of players: “You wanted to believe, you wanted to fill in
In 1992, a year after Bleszinski had taught himself the rudiments of computer programming, he sent a game submission to Tim Sweeney, the twenty-two-year-old CEO of Epic MegaGames, who had recently dropped out of a mechanical-engineering program at the University of Maryland. (Epic’s original name, Sweeney told me, was “a big scam” to make it look legitimate. “When you’re this one single person in your parents’ garage trying to start a company, you want to look like you’re really big.”) Sweeney fondly recalled Bleszinski’s submission, a PC game called
Dare to Dream
, in which a boy gets trapped, appropriately enough, inside his own dreamworld. “At that time,” Sweeney said, “we’d gotten sixty or seventy game submissions from different people and we went ahead with five of them, and Cliff was one of the best.” Once his game was in development, Bleszinski becamemore involved with the company. Sweeney said, “We’d have four or five different projects in development with different teams, and every time one started to reach completion we’d send it off to Cliff, and he’d write off his big list of what’s good about this game and what needs to be fixed. Cliff’s lists kept growing bigger and bigger.” Bleszinski was only seventeen. When I asked Sweeney if he had had any reservations about entrusting his company’s fate to a teenager whose driver’s-license lamination was still warm, Sweeney said, “That’s what the industry was like.”
Upon its release,
Dare to Dream
, in Bleszinski’s words, “bombed.” His second game for Epic, released a year later, featured what he calls a “Rambo rabbit” named Jazz, who carried a large gun and hunted frenetically for intergalactic treasure.
Jazz Jackrabbit
, which imported to a PC platform a type of gameplay previously exclusive to Sega and Nintendo consoles, made Bleszinski’s reputation. Epic had begun as a company churning out somewhat réchauffé fare—pinball simulators, clone-ish retreads, but also a popular shooter known as
Unreal Tournament
, the updated and augmented engine of which has since been adopted by hundreds of games. It was Bleszinski, along with the Unreal Engine, that helped to fill Epic’s parking lot with sports cars.
At the diner I asked Bleszinski which games had most influenced him.
Super Mario Bros.
, he said, “is where it really kicked into high gear.” Indeed, the first issue of
Nintendo Power
, published in 1988, listed the high scores of a handful of
Super Mario
devotees, the thirteen-year-old Bleszinski’s among them. “There’s something about the whole hidden element to
Mario,”
Bleszinski said, “where you jump and hit your head on a block and just out of nowhere secret things would appear. They made you feel like a kid in the woods finding god knows what.”
Released in 1985,
Super Mario Bros
. was a game of summer-vacation-consumingscope and unprecedented inventiveness. It was among the first video games to suggest that it might contain a world. It was also hallucinogenically strange. Why did mushrooms make Mario grow larger? Why did flowers give Mario the ability to spit fire? Why did bashing Mario’s head against bricks sometimes produce coins? And why was Mario’s enemy, Bowser, a saurian, spiky-shelled turtle?
In film and literature, such surrealistic fantasy typically occurs at the outer edge of experimentalism, but early video games depended on symbols for the simple reason that the technological limitations of the time made realism impossible. Mario, for instance, wore a porkpie hat not for aesthetic reasons but because hair was too difficult to render. Bleszinski retains affection for many older games, but he says, “If you go back and play the majority of old games, they really aren’t very good.” He suspects that what made them seem so good at the time was the imaginative involvement of players: “You wanted to believe, you wanted to fill in
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