‘I felt like Orpheus’: How the Gears of War designer returned from studio closure by producing Hadestown | games

‘ITo be honest, it was absolutely heartbreaking, and it certainly didn’t help that I was drinking. I’ll leave it at that.” Cliff Bleszinski recalls the launch of LawBreakers, a first-person shooter that he released in 2017. It was his first project as CEO of his studio, Boss Key Productions. Before that, he was the creative figure behind the hugely successful sci-fi game series, Gears of War, when he was known to millions of gamers as CliffyB.

“I was retired from Epic and all that, and I missed making cool stuff,” he says. “And my agent at the time was pestering me, saying, ‘Come on, do you want to come back and get your own studio? Look at what.’ [Hideo] Kojima does. And I thought to myself: Well, if Kojima can do it, so can I. Such arrogance, isn’t it?

LawBreakers combined low-gravity action with the cooldown abilities of its cast of heroes, to critical acclaim. But it can’t compete with the iconic hero shooter: Blizzard’s Overwatch. “A massive blizzard came and wiped out almost everyone, including us and Gearbox’s Battleborn,” Bleszinski says. “The number of champion shooters who have come and gone is ridiculous.”

As it turned out, Bleszinski didn’t like being head of a struggling game studio. “You’re the one looking at the spreadsheet on your screen, seeing how much the company has in the bank versus the salaries everyone else is getting, and you’re not making money,” he says. “And then, as the CEO, you have to hide it from the company, and act like everything is fine. You meet the people who are important to these employees and their children. They come to your house for a lobster boil, and you go out and drink wine with them.”

In the wake of LawBreakers, the studio struggled hard to survive. Fortnite, the battle royale game from Bleszinski’s former employers Epic, has been on the rise. Boss Key released his own 1980s take on the genre, Radical Heights, in “X-Treme Early Access” status, which some critics considered half-baked.

“Those who played it seemed to dig it,” Bleszinski says. “And then the intruders dug in.” Radical Heights was so barebones that it had no cheat protection – a fact that hackers exploited to ruin the experience, with exploits such as aim-assisting and not penetrating walls.

When Fortnite’s servers were down for emergency maintenance, streamer Ninja turned to Radical Heights, bringing tens of thousands of viewers with him. But the reinforcement did not last. “Fortnite Battle Royale was like, ‘No, we can’t have any competitors, ninjas can’t play this,'” Bleszinski says. “Then they took all the signs, and left us holding the bag.”

Boss Key Productions closed in the summer of 2018. “It ultimately broke me, and it made it worse that the internet thought the whole thing was funny,” Bleszinski says. “I was like, ‘You know what, I’m going to take my ball and go home.'”

. He then struck up a social media friendship with Alex Bonello, the actor who played Connor Murphy in the Tony Award-winning musical Dear Evan Hansen. “I’m a big Broadway fan,” Bleszinski says. “I was a drama nerd in high school.” He raises his right arm, revealing a tattoo that reads “Comedy and Tragedy,” a 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 for the production. “I was like, ‘You know, weird things have happened,'” Bleszinski says. He read the Hadestown story, an ambitious combination of two myths: Orpheus’s descent into the underworld to rescue Eurydice, and Hades’ entrapment by Persephone. He listened to an early recording, which was jazzy and folk and absolutely brilliant. “I was like: ‘Maybe they really have something here.’”

Bleszinski signed on as co-producer—a hands-off role in which he was both financier and encourager, using the money and audience he had built in development to ensure Hadestown was as successful as possible once it reached Broadway.

As with an online game, initial reception can determine whether a musical lasts for months, years, or decades — and crucial last-minute adjustments can make a big difference. “It’s a miracle that a video game got released,” Bleszinski says. “And when you look at Broadway, they do previews — it’s basically an alpha or beta version where they tweak or rearrange parts of the musical.”

Bleszinski believes that games and musicals have a lot in common, as two forms that bring a number of arts and disciplines together in harmony. “Everything has to come together in this completely synchronized thing,” he says. “Video games are viewed as the perfect balance between art and science.”

If Hadestown fails, the similarities to the fate of Lawbreakers and Radical Heights will only exacerbate the loss. However, the musical not only survived its initial run on Broadway, but was acclaimed for it. In a Broadway landscape dominated by film adaptations, Hadestown stood out as strikingly original.

In April 2019, Bleszinski woke up to a phone call from his former boss at Epic, Mark Rehn: “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 look at Eurydice as she rises from the underworld, and is plunged back into darkness, as per the deal the pair made. “Look, someone’s got to tell the tale,” Hermes sings. “Whether it goes well or not. Maybe it will end this time. It’s a sad song; we’ll sing it anyway.” It’s a call to keep fighting in the face of failure, and it resonated with Bleszinski.

“I felt redeemed,” he says of the musical’s success. “I felt like Orpheus, and I didn’t hold back.”