Gears of War designer Cliff Bleszinski says he's 'coming out of retirement to make video games'

Cliff “CliffyB” Bleszinski can’t get enough.

The designer of the Gears of War and Unreal video games said in a tweet that he is officially coming out of retirement to make video games. He told fans to stay tuned on his Twitter account over the next seven days. GamesBeat asked him for more details, but he told us to wait like everyone else.

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https://twitter.com/therealcliffyb/status/483650607211765761

Bleszinski was one of the earliest employees at Epic Games, the maker of the Unreal and Gears of War shooter series that have sold millions of copies. He retired from Epic in late 2012 after nearly two decades of making games, not long after China’s Tencent invested more than $330 million for a 40 percent stake the publisher. For Bleszinski and other longtime Epic employees, that sudden liquidity made them fabulously wealthy and gave them a chance to evaluate their careers. Bleszinski, who was a celebrity designer who frequently appeared in photo ops with the Gears of War chainsaw gun, decided it was time to move on.

He started development at age 17 with titles such as Jazz Jackrabbit and steadily moved on to Unreal and Gears of War. Each of those titles was progressively more realistic and complex, showing an increasing maturity in the craft of game design. Bleszinski reminisced about those days in a 2013 interview with GamesBeat editor-in-chief Dan “Shoe” Hsu.