Control Freak
My Epic Adventure Making Video Games
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5.0 • 10 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
The designer of Unreal and Gears of War offers an eye-opening personal account of the video game industry as it grew from niche hobby to hundred-billion-dollar enterprise.
Video games are dominating the planet. In 2020, they brought in $180 billion dollars globally—nearly $34 billion in the United States alone. So who are the brilliant designers who create these stunning virtual worlds? Cliff Bleszinski—or CliffyB as he is known to gamers—is one of the few who’ve reached mythical, rock star status. In Control Freak, he gives an unvarnished, all-access tour of the business.
Toiling away in his bedroom, Bleszinski created and shipped his first game before graduating high school, and at just seventeen joined a fledgling company called Epic Games. He describes the grueling hours, obscene amounts of Mountain Dew and obsessive focus necessary to achieve his singular creative visions. He details Epic’s rise to industry leader, thanks largely to his work on bestselling franchises Unreal and Gears of War (and, later, his input on a little game called Fortnite), as well as his own awkward ascent from shy, acne-riddled introvert to sports car-driving celebrity rubbing shoulders with Bill Gates. As he writes, “No one is weirder than a nerd with money.” While the book is laced with such self-deprecating humor, Bleszinski also bluntly addresses the challenges that have long-faced the gaming community, including sexism and a lack of representation among both designers and the characters they create.
Control Freak is a hilarious, thoughtful, and inspiring memoir. Even if you don’t play games, you’ll walk away from this book recognizing them as a true art form and appreciating the genius of their creators.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Video game development... always will be like real life—less about perfection and more about fixing your mistakes," asserts video game designer Bleszinski in his entertaining and candid debut. Not "cool enough for the cool kids and not nerdy enough for the nerds," Bleszinski became fascinated with video games during his 1980s adolescence, a passion that paid off when, at age 16, he created and sold his first game, The Palace of Deceit. A year later, his gift for combining imagination and intriguing gameplay landed him at Epic Games, where he worked for 20 years. During that tenure, Bleszinski's creations included the mega-profitable Unreal and Gears of War series. His account gets into the specifics of his design career, sharing glitches—as when the multiplayer version of Unreal failed when the game launched in 1998—and detailed discussions of plot developments. Along the way, Bleszinski shares anecdotes that are by turns humorous and heinous, from his father's discovery of his porn stash during high school to a damning recollection of kicking his first wife out of their home while she was still on crutches from surgery (a memory that leads him to admit he was "a callous, uncaring, selfish piece of shit"). Devoted gamers curious to know how the sausage gets made will find this warts-and-all tale fascinating.
