We gamers and our fellow pundits don’t value our video gaming visionaries all that much according to Epic’s Cliff Bleszinski.
Unlike the film industry he says where if you make a bad film then you go to ”movie jail” for a term, if you ”screw up once” in gaming no one likes you …ever again. Natural selection?
”I don’t think the industry values visionaries as much as it could. I really don’t,” said Bleszinski in an interview with Gamasutra.
”As sad as it is, you’re only as good as your last game, in many ways,” he explained. ”In Hollywood, at least, you get movie jail for like a year, and you’re out, and you get to try and make another good movie. In games, you screw up once, and no one ever wants to hear from you again. It’s pretty sad.”
Pointing to guys like Ken Levine (BioShock), Peter Molyneux (Fable II), Chris Taylor (Supreme Commander) or Hideo Kojima (Metal Gear Solid) he says ”we all need to celebrate these people,” is he right?
He even has a clever marketing spin to add saying that figure heads within an industry really help move things along.
”It absolutely is very much a team effort, and I’m nothing without the 100-plus people who worked on Gears,” he acknowledged, ”but if I can go out there and evangelize the game and help sell the vision of it, that’s a very useful thing, and we’re all able to put gas in our gas tanks as a result of it, right?”
Bleszinski, our loveable industry rascal at Epic Games is indeed right and we should celebrate our most creative and far-out visionaries.
The video games industry though isn’t like any other industry that has existed before in entertainment and media - it’s maturing and evolving at much different rates that old time cinema. Do we want our visionaries though to fall into the trappings of ‘celebrity’?
Fans can sometimes get a little ‘obsessive’…
