\u2018It was utterly heartbreaking, to be honest, and it certainly didn\u2019t help with my drinking. I\u2019ll leave it at that.\u201d Cliff Bleszinski is recalling the launch of LawBreakers, the arena first-person shooter he put out in 2017. It had been his first project as the CEO of his own studio, Boss Key Productions. Before that, he was the creative figurehead behind hugely successful sci-fi shooter series, Gears of War, when he was known to millions of gamers as CliffyB.<\/p>\n
\u201cI retired from Epic and all of it, and I missed making neat stuff,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd my agent at the time was needling me: \u2018Come on, you want to get back in, have your own studio? Look at what [Hideo] Kojima\u2019s doing.\u2019 And I was like: \u2018OK, if Kojima can do it, so can I.\u2019 Such hubris, right?\u201d<\/p>\n
LawBreakers melded low-gravity movement with cooldown abilities for its cast of heroes, and was well liked by critics. But it couldn\u2019t compete with the defining hero shooter: Blizzard\u2019s Overwatch. \u201cBlizzard came along and just completely stomped pretty much everyone else, including us and Gearbox\u2019s Battleborn,\u201d says Bleszinski. \u201cThe amount of hero shooters that came and went is just ridiculous.\u201d<\/p>\n
Liked by the critics \u2026 LawBreakers. Photograph: Boss Key Productions<\/p>\n
As it turned out, Bleszinski didn\u2019t much like being the boss of a struggling game studio. \u201cYou\u2019re the one looking at the spreadsheet on your screen, and you\u2019re seeing how much the company has in the bank versus the salaries everyone\u2019s getting, and you\u2019re not making money,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd then, as the CEO, you have to hide that from the company, act like everything\u2019s great. You meet these employees\u2019 significant others and their kids. They come to your house for crawfish boils, and you go out and get drunk with them.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the aftermath of LawBreakers, the studio scrambled desperately to survive. Fortnite, the battle royale from Bleszinski\u2019s former employers at Epic, was then in the ascendance. And Boss Key launched its own 80s themed take on the genre, Radical Heights, in a state of \u201cX-Treme Early Access\u201d, which some critics judged to be half baked.<\/p>\n
\u201cThose who played it seemed to dig it,\u201d Bleszinski says. \u201cAnd then the hackers dug in.\u201d Radical Heights was so barebones that it didn\u2019t have cheat protection \u2013 a fact that hackers took advantage of to ruin the experience, with exploits such as aim assist and noclipping through walls.<\/p>\n
Barebones \u2026 Radical Heights game. Photograph: Boss Key Productions<\/p>\n
When Fortnite servers were down for emergency maintenance, superstar streamer Ninja had switched over to Radical Heights, bringing tens of thousands of viewers with him. But the boost didn\u2019t last. \u201cFortnite Battle Royale was just like: \u2018Nope, we can\u2019t be having any competitors, Ninja can\u2019t be playing this\u2019, says Bleszinski. \u201cThen they grabbed all the streamers, and we were left holding the bag.\u201d<\/p>\n
Boss Key Productions shut down in the summer of 2018. \u201cIt ultimately broke me, and it made it even worse that the internet thought the entire thing was hilarious,\u201d Bleszinski says. \u201cI was just like: \u2018You know what, I\u2019m taking my ball and I\u2019m going home.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Then he struck up a social media friendship with Alex Boniello, the actor who played Connor Murphy in the Tony award-winning musical Dear Evan Hansen. \u201cI\u2019m a big Broadway fan,\u201d says Bleszinski. \u201cI was a drama nerd in high school.\u201d Lifting his right arm, he reveals a tattoo that reads \u201ccomedy and tragedy\u2019, in tribute to the dramatic genres first invented by the ancient Greeks.<\/p>\n
Boniello told Bleszinski about a Broadway musical that he thought the Gears of War designer might be a good fit to produce. \u201cI was like, you know what, stranger things have happened,\u201d Bleszinski says. He read the story of Hadestown, an ambitious blend of two myths: Orpheus\u2019s descent into the underworld to rescue Eurydice, and Hades\u2019 entrapment of Persephone. He listened to an early recording, which was jazzy and folksy and altogether brilliant. \u201cI was like: \u2018They might really have something here.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Bleszinski signed up as a co-producer \u2013 a hands-off role in which he was funder and cheerleader, using the money and audience he had built up in game development to ensure Hadestown made as big a splash as possible once it hit Broadway.<\/p>\n
As with an online game, initial reception can determine whether a musical runs for months, years or decades \u2013 and crucial last-minute tweaks can make all the difference. \u201cIt\u2019s a miracle that a video game even ships,\u201d Bleszinski says. \u201cAnd when you look at Broadway, they do previews \u2013 it\u2019s essentially an alpha or a beta where they modify or rearrange parts of the musical.\u201d<\/p>\n
Games and musicals have a lot in common, Bleszinski believes, as two forms that bring a number of arts and disciplines into harmony. \u201cIt all has to come together in this perfectly synced thing,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd you look at video games being the perfect balance of art and science.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tweak time \u2026 Eva Noblezada (Eurydice, centre) and Reeve Carney (Orpheus, right) in the Broadway press preview of Hadestown at the Walter Kerr Theatre, New York, March 2019. Photograph: Walter McBride\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
If Hadestown had failed, the parallels with the fate of LawBreakers and Radical Heights would have only compounded the loss. Yet the musical not only survived its initial Broadway run, but was acclaimed for it. In a Broadway landscape dominated by movie adaptations, Hadestown stood out as strikingly original.<\/p>\n
In April 2019, Bleszinski was woken by a call from his former Epic boss, Mark Rein: \u201cOh my God, 14 Tonys! You\u2019ve been nominated for 14 Tonys!\u201d Bleszinski and his wife attended the ceremony at Radio City Music Hall in New York, where Hadestown was the most awarded musical of the season.<\/p>\n
In the final moments of Hadestown, Orpheus turns to glimpse Eurydice as they rise from the underworld, and she is plunged back into darkness, in accordance with the deal the pair have made. \u201cSee, someone\u2019s got to tell the tale,\u201d sings Hermes. \u201cWhether or not it turns out well. Maybe it will turn out this time. It\u2019s a sad song; we\u2019re gonna sing it anyway.\u201d It\u2019s a call to continue fighting in the face of failure, and it resonated with Bleszinski.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt felt like redemption,\u201d he says of the musical\u2019s success. \u201cI felt like Orpheus, and I didn\u2019t turn around.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u2018It was utterly heartbreaking, to be honest, and it certainly didn\u2019t help with my drinking. I\u2019ll leave it…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":666044,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-666043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=666043"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666043\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/666044"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=666043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=666043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=666043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}