‘I felt like Orpheus’: how the designer of Gears of War bounced back from studio closure by producing Hadestown
‘It was utterly heartbreaking, to be honest, and it certainly didn’t help with my drinking.
‘It was utterly heartbreaking, to be honest, and it certainly didn’t help with my drinking. I’ll leave it at that.” 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.
“I retired from Epic and all of it, and I missed making neat stuff,” he says. “And my agent at the time was needling me: ‘Come on, you want to get back in, have your own studio? Look at what [Hideo] Kojima’s doing.’ And I was like: ‘OK, if Kojima can do it, so can I.’ Such hubris, right?”
LawBreakers melded low-gravity movement with cooldown abilities for its cast of heroes, and was well liked by critics. But it couldn’t compete with the defining hero shooter: Blizzard’s Overwatch. “Blizzard came along and just completely stomped pretty much everyone else, including us and Gearbox’s Battleborn,” says Bleszinski. “The amount of hero shooters that came and went is just ridiculous.”
As it turned out, Bleszinski didn’t much like being the boss of a struggling game studio. “You’re the one looking at the spreadsheet on your screen, and you’re seeing how much the company has in the bank versus the salaries everyone’s getting, and you’re not making money,” he says. “And then, as the CEO, you have to hide that from the company, act like everything’s great. You meet these employees’ significant others and their kids. They come to your house for crawfish boils, and you go out and get drunk with them.”
In the aftermath of LawBreakers, the studio scrambled desperately to survive. Fortnite, the battle royal from Bleszinski’s 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 “X-Treme Early Access”, which some critics judged to be half baked.
“Those who played it seemed to dig it,” Bleszinski says. “And then the hackers dug in.” Radical Heights was so barebones that it didn’t have cheat protection – a fact that hackers took advantage of to ruin the experience, with exploits such as aim assist and noclipping through walls.
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’t last. “Fortnite Battle Royale was just like: ‘Nope, we can’t be having any competitors, Ninja can’t be playing this’, says Bleszinski. “Then they grabbed all the streamers, and we were left holding the bag.”
Boss Key Productions shut down in the summer of 2018. “It ultimately broke me, and it made it even worse that the internet thought the entire thing was hilarious,” Bleszinski says. “I was just like: ‘You know what, I’m taking my ball and I’m going home.’”
. 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. “I’m a big Broadway fan,” says Bleszinski. “I was a drama nerd in high school.” Lifting his right arm, he reveals a tattoo that reads “comedy and tragedy’, in tribute to the dramatic genres first invented by the ancient Greeks.
Boniello told Bleszinski about a Broadway musical that he thought the Gears of War designer might be a good fit to produce. “I was like, you know what, stranger things have happened,” Bleszinski says. He read the story of Hadestown, an ambitious blend of two myths: Orpheus’s descent into the underworld to rescue Eurydice, and Hades’ entrapment of Persephone. He listened to an early recording, which was jazzy and folksy and altogether brilliant. “I was like: ‘They might really have something here.’”
Bleszinski signed up as a co-producer – 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.
As with an online game, initial reception can determine whether a musical runs for months, years or decades – and crucial last-minute tweaks can make all the difference. “It’s a miracle that a video game even ships,” Bleszinski says. “And when you look at Broadway, they do previews – it’s essentially an alpha or a beta where they modify or rearrange parts of the musical.”
Games and musicals have a lot in common, Bleszinski believes, as two forms that bring a number of arts and disciplines into harmony. “It all has to come together in this perfectly synced thing,” he says. “And you look at video games being the perfect balance of art and science.”
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.
In April 2019, Bleszinski was woken by a call from his former Epic boss, Mark Rein: “Oh my God, 14 Tonys! You’ve been nominated for 14 Tonys!” 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.
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. “See, someone’s got to tell the tale,” sings Hermes. “Whether or not it turns out well. Maybe it will turn out this time. It’s a sad song; we’re gonna sing it anyway.” It’s a call to continue fighting in the face of failure, and it resonated with Bleszinski.
“It felt like redemption,” he says of the musical’s success. “I felt like Orpheus, and I didn’t turn around.”
