Epic Games is a privately owned company and does not disclose its earnings. But on a Monday morning in late April, while standing in Epic’s parking lot, at Crossroads Corporate Park, in Cary, North Carolina, awaiting the arrival of Cliff Bleszinski, the company’s thirty-three-year-old design director, I realized that my surroundings were their own sort of Nasdaq. Ten feet away was a red Hummer H3. Nearby was a Lotus Elise, and next to it a pumpkin-orange Porsche. Many of the cars had personalized plates: “PS3CODER” (a reference to Sony’s PlayStation3), “EPICBOY,” “GRSOFWAR.”

Cliff Bleszinski at Epic Games’s offices. Photograph by Phil Toledano

The last is shorthand for Gears of War, a shooter game, which Epic released in November, 2006, for play on Microsoft’s Xbox 360 console. Gears of War was quickly recognized as the first game to provide the sensually overwhelming experience for which the console, launched a year earlier, had been designed. Gears won virtually every available industry award, and was the 360’s best-selling game for nearly a year; it has now sold five million copies. On November 7th, a sequel, Gears of War 2, will be released; its development, long rumored, was not confirmed until this past February, when, at the Game Developers’ Conference, in San Francisco, Bleszinski made the announcement after bursting through an onstage partition wielding a replica of one of Gears of War’s signature weapons—an assault rifle mounted with a chainsaw bayonet.

Despite the rapid growth of the video-game industry—last year, sales were higher than either box-office receipts or DVD sales—designers are largely invisible within the wider culture. But Bleszinski, who is known to his many fans and occasional detractors as CliffyB, tends to stand out among his colleagues. Heather Chaplin and Aaron Ruby’s “Smartbomb,” a book about the industry, recounts the peacockish outfits and hair styles he has showcased at industry expos over the years. In 2001, he affected the stylings of a twenty-first-century Tom Wolfe, with white snakeskin shoes and bleached hair. In 2002, he took to leather jackets and an early-Clooney Caesar cut. By 2003, he was wearing long fur-lined coats, his hair skater-punk red. In recent years, he let his hair grow shaggy, which gave him the mellow aura of a fourth Bee Gee.

Bleszinski drove into Epic’s parking lot in a red Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder, the top down despite an impending rainstorm. His current haircut is short and cowlicked, his bangs twirled up into a tiny moussed horn. He was wearing what in my high school would have been called “exchange-student jeans”—obviously expensive but slightly the wrong color and of a somehow non-American cut. Beneath a tight, fashionably out-of-style black nylon jacket was a T-shirt that read “TECHNOLOGY!” His sunglasses were of the oversized, county-sheriff variety, and each of his earlobes held a small, bright diamond earring. He could have been either a boyish Dolce & Gabbana model or a small-town weed dealer.

Bleszinski suggested that we go to a local diner. He professes an aversion to mornings, and to Monday mornings especially, but he seemed dauntingly alert. “This car’s like a wakeup call,” he said. “By the time I get to work, my heart’s pumping and I’m ready to crank.” Before we were even out of the parking lot, we were travelling at forty-five miles an hour. At a stoplight, Bleszinski exchanged waves with the driver of an adjacent red Ferrari—another Epic employee. When we hit a hundred miles per hour on a highway entrance ramp, Bleszinski announced, “Never got one ticket!” On the highway, he slowed to seventy-five. “One of my jobs in life,” Bleszinski said, cutting over to an exit, “is to make this look a little cooler.” By “this,” he meant his job.

Bleszinski’s brand of mild outrageousness—the “Cliffycam” on his blog page, which, some years ago, allowed visitors to observe him online while he worked; the photographs of him on his MySpace page alongside the splatter-film director Eli Roth and the porn stars Jenna Jameson and Ron Jeremy—qualifies him as exceptional in an industry that is, as he says, widely assumed to be a preserve inhabited by pale, withdrawn, molelike creatures. There is some truth to this stereotype: most game designers are not like CliffyB. But neither, really, is Bleszinski. The nickname, he told me, was bestowed on him by some “jock kid,” when he was a small, shy teen-ager, and was meant as a taunt. Bleszinski took the name and fashioned a tougher persona around it, but, after spending a little time with him, one has the sensation of watching someone observing himself. Video games are founded upon such complicated transference. Gamers are allowed, for a time, all manner of ontological assumptions. They can also terminate their assumed personalities whenever they wish, and, lately, Bleszinski has been asking game-industry journalists if they might not “sit on” the CliffyB moniker “for a while.”

Bleszinski was born in Boston, in 1975, eleven years to the day after the birth of his oldest brother, Greg. His father, whom Bleszinski describes as a “very stressed-out guy,” was an engineer for Polaroid. The Bleszinskis were a close family. His mother, Karyn, told me, “We always sat down at the dinner table together. That was always important to my husband and me.” One of Bleszinski’s earliest and strongest memories is the smell of popcorn spreading thickly throughout the house after he had gone to bed, which convinced him that his “parents were having a great time and throwing a party” without him. In truth, this was merely his father’s pre-bedtime ritual: over this nightly bowl of popcorn he would often melt an entire stick of butter. In 1990, when Bleszinski was fifteen, his forty-seven-year-old father died when an aortic aneurysm ruptured while he was golfing. Bleszinski still remembers what game he was playing when he learned of his father’s death: the Nintendo game Blaster Master. He never played it again.

“He took it very hard,” Karyn told me. She described Bleszinski as her “unique child,” noting that he was “the most difficult, but he was difficult because he was the most inquisitive. He’d take apart whatever you got for him.” After her husband’s death, Karyn moved the family to the Los Angeles suburbs, where she worked as a restaurant manager. In 1991, she bought a computer for her son. “I’m not that technical of a guy,” Bleszinski told me. “I started off programming my own games and doing the art for them, but I was a crappy coder and a crappier artist. But I didn’t want to let that stop me. I was going to kick and scream and claw my way into the business any way possible.” He thinks that it was perhaps only the death of his father that allowed him to do this. “If he hadn’t passed, he probably would have made me go to Northeastern and become an engineer,” he said.

In 1992, a year after Bleszinski had taught himself the rudiments of computer programming, he sent a game submission to Tim Sweeney, the twenty-two-year-old C.E.O. of Epic Megagames, who had recently dropped out of a mechanical-engineering program at the University of Maryland. (Epic’s original name, Sweeney told me, was “a big scam” to make it look legitimate. “When you’re this one single person in your parents’ garage trying to start a company, you want to look like you’re really big,” he said.) Sweeney still remembers Bleszinski’s submission, a P.C. game called Dare to Dream, in which a boy gets trapped, appropriately enough, inside his own dreamworld. “At that time,” Sweeney said, “we’d gotten sixty or seventy game submissions from different people and we went ahead with five of them, and Cliff was one of the best.” Once his game was in development, Bleszinski became more involved with the company. Sweeney said, “We’d have four or five different projects in development with different teams, and every time one started to reach completion we’d send it off to Cliff, and he’d write off his big list of what’s good about this game and what needs to be fixed. Cliff’s lists kept growing bigger and bigger.” Bleszinski was only seventeen. When I asked Sweeney if he had had any reservations about entrusting his company’s fate to a teen-ager whose driver’s-license lamination was still warm, Sweeney said, “That’s what the industry was like.”

Upon its release, Dare to Dream, in Bleszinski’s words, “bombed.” His second game for Epic, released a year later, featured what he calls a “Rambo rabbit” named Jazz, who carried a large gun and hunted frenetically for intergalactic treasure. Jazz Jackrabbit, which imported to a P.C. platform innovations previously exclusive to Sega and Nintendo consoles, made Bleszinski’s reputation. Epic had begun as a company churning out somewhat rechauffé fare—pinball simulators, clone-ish retreads, an uninspired but popular game known as Unreal Tournament. It was Bleszinski, in no small part, who filled Epic’s parking lot with sports cars.

At the diner, I asked Bleszinski which games had most influenced him. Super Mario Brothers, he said, “is where it really kicked into high gear.” Indeed, the first issue of Nintendo Power, published in 1988, listed the high scores of a handful of Super Mario devotees, the thirteen-year-old Bleszinski’s among them. “There’s something about the whole hidden element to Mario, where you jump and hit your head on a block and just out of nowhere secret things would appear,” Bleszinski said. “They made you feel like a kid in the woods.”

Issued in 1985, Super Mario Brothers was a game of summer-vacation-consuming scope and unprecedented inventiveness. It was among the first video games to suggest that it might contain a world. It was also hallucinogenically strange. Why did mushrooms make Mario grow larger? Why did flowers give Mario the ability to spit fire? Why did bashing Mario’s head against bricks sometimes produce coins? And why was Mario’s enemy, Bowser, a saurian, spiky-shelled turtle?

In film and literature, such surrealistic fantasy typically occurs at the outer edge of experimentalism, but early video games depended on symbols for the simple reason that the technological limitations of the time made realism impossible. Mario, for instance, wore a porkpie hat not for aesthetic reasons but because hair was too difficult to render. Bleszinski retains affection for many older games, but he says, “If you go back and play the majority of old games, they really aren’t very good.” He suspects that what made them seem so good at the time was the imaginative involvement of players: “You wanted to believe, you wanted to fill in the gaps.”

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Games like Gears of War, which offer literal representations of what the gamer “sees” and “does,” differ so profoundly from a game like Super Mario Brothers that they appear to share as many commonalities as a trilobite does with a Great Dane. The new games fill in all the gaps, and they have also done away with many of the symbolic prerequisites of video-game play, such as the number of “lives” a player has, the score, health bars, and so on. In Gears, there is no score. The player gets a single life; if it is forfeited, one must start again at the nearest passed checkpoint. The health bar is invisible; the only indication of one’s injury status is a gradually reddening icon, known as the Crimson Omen. Super Mario requires an ability to recognize patterns, considerable hand-eye coördination, and quick reflexes. Gears requires the ability to think tactically and make subtle judgments based on scant information, a constant awareness of multiple variables (ammunition stores, enemy weaknesses) as they change throughout the game, and the spatial sensitivity to control one’s movement through a space in which the “right” direction is not always apparent. Anyone who plays modern games such as Gears does not so much learn the rules as develop a kind of intuition for how the game operates. Often, there is no single way to accomplish a given task; improvisation is rewarded. Older games, like Super Mario, punish improvisation: you live or die according to their algebra alone.

Gears is largely the story of a soldier, Marcus Fenix, who, as the game begins, has been imprisoned for abandoning his comrades (who are known as COGs, or Gears) in order to save his father, who dies before Fenix can reach him. He is released because a fourteen-year war with a tunnel-using alien army known as the Locusts has depleted the human army’s ranks. This much we learn in the first two minutes of the game; the next ten hours or so are an ingeniously paced march through frequent and elaborately staged firefights with Locusts, Wretches, Dark Wretches, Corpsers, Boomers, three blind and terrifying Berserkers, and the vile General Raam. Along the way, players can treat themselves to the singular experience of using the chainsaw bayonets on their Lancer assault rifles to cut their enemies in half, during which the in-game camera is gleefully splashed with blood. (Gears is one of the most violent games ever made, but Bleszinski maintains that it contains “very much a laughable kind of violence,” like “watching a melon explode in a Gallagher show.” Still, one act of violence in Gears 2 is intimate and upsetting enough to have given one of the designers pause, until Bleszinski and others convinced him that the act grew out of a necessary dramatic trajectory.)

The story line and the narrative dilemmas of Gears are not very sophisticated. What is sophisticated about Gears is its mood. The world in which the action takes place is a kind of destroyed utopia; its architecture, weapons, and characters are chunky and oversized but, somehow, never cartoonish. Most video-game worlds, however well conceived, are essenceless. Gears felt dirty and inhabited, and everything from the mechanics of its gameplay to its elliptical backstory was forcefully conceived, giving it an experiential depth rare in the genre.