Cliff Bleszinski is a legendary name among Xbox fans, as this man was the lead designer behind the original Gears of War trilogy that helped put the Xbox 360 become a dominant force during the mid-to-late 2000s.
Yet, you don’t hear from him these days, as he left the video games industry after his game studio, Boss Key Productions, closed down in 2018 due to the company’s games Lawbreakers and Radical Heights failing to make enough profit.
However, in a recent interview with 80.Lv, Cliff Bleszinski has said that he wants to work on video games in a full-time capacity.
For our exclusive interview, @therealcliffyb arrived with a typed list: every mistake that killed Boss Key. The publishing deal that was too favorable. The wrong console. The co-founder he turned down. In his first in-depth interview in years, he reads it to us — and reveals… pic.twitter.com/PktR533xu0July 17, 2026
It’s a lengthy interview that provided interesting insights into Cliff Bleszinski’s life.
These include his early days shipping shareware games as a teenager before spending the next two decades working at Epic Games, reflecting on Boss Key Productions’ rise and fall, and his long-standing alcoholism that spiraled out of control after Boss Key Productions shut down.
In fact, the issue got so bad it caused Cliff Bleszinski to suffer a seizure and land him in the hospital this year in March. After such a traumatic event, Cliff Bleszinski hasn’t drunk alcohol since, and during this now four-month sobriety recovery journey, he eventually rediscovered his love for video games.
“At the end of the day, I want to create characters and worlds. I want to make stuff that people will cosplay as and get tattooed on their bodies.”
Cliff Bleszinski, 80.LV Interview
Cliff Bleszinski has already slowly gotten back into the video game industry in a part-time capacity, working as a consultant for an upcoming asymmetric horror game called Soul Walker, but he wishes to get into the business full-time eventually and “not get pushed into the pool”, as he puts it.
Now, Cliff didn’t mention what kind of game he’s planning to make, but he makes it clear it won’t be a PVP game again, as he states, “I’m more of a fan of PvE these days. Horde mode saved Gears 2, and I believe that space is evergreen because players just want to hop online with friends and shoot some stuff, no frills, no questions asked.”
He ends the talk with “I’m nowhere near sharing anything specific (about a new game), beyond that, I can’t walk into a Home Depot without seeing a full arsenal at every turn. There’s so much more than just chainsaws.”
Windows Central’s take
In some ways, I owe some of my happiest Xbox memories to Cliff Bleszinski, as I still remember gleefully charging into battle against the locust horde with my friends and family in the original Gears of War trilogy that he and his team created.
An experience which, by the way, I hope will be recaptured in the upcoming Gears of War: E-Day, as Gears 4 and 5 didn’t hit it for me. Although I admit I was blinded by jaded nostalgia for the older games and characters when Gears 4 and 5 came out, so I didn’t give them a proper chance (which I’ll need to fix at some point).
While I wouldn’t mind if Cliff came back to spearhead a spiritual successor to the original Gears of War trilogy, it’s ultimately up to him what he wants to make at the end of the day, particularly for the betterment of his own health.
Speaking of which, I’m happy to hear he beat his addiction, as, regardless of your opinions of the man, alcoholism is a slippery slope that can be nearly impossible to come back from if gone too far, and no one should suffer from it.
So I hope that the rest of his sobriety recovery journey goes well and wish him luck on his comeback to video game development.
But what do you think? Do you think Cliff Bleszinski will actually make a full-time comeback into game development? If he does, what do you think his game will be?
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