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Control Freak
- My Epic Adventure Making Video Games
- Narrated by: Kurt Kanazawa
- Length: 9 hrs and 24 mins
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Summary
The designer of Unreal and Gears of War offers an eye-opening personal account of the video-game industry as it grew from niche hobby to hundred-billion-dollar enterprise.
Video games are dominating the planet. In 2020, they brought in $180 billion dollars globally—nearly $34 billion in the United States alone. So who are the brilliant designers who create these stunning virtual worlds? Cliff Bleszinski—or CliffyB as he is known to gamers—is one of the few who’ve reached mythical, rock-star status. In Control Freak, he gives an unvarnished, all-access tour of the business.
Toiling away in his bedroom, Bleszinski created and shipped his first game before graduating high school and at just 17 joined a fledgling company called Epic Games. He describes the grueling hours, obscene amounts of Mountain Dew, and obsessive focus necessary to achieve his singular creative visions. He details Epic’s rise to industry leader, thanks largely to his work on best-selling franchises Unreal and Gears of War (and, later, his input on a little game called Fortnite), as well as his own awkward ascent from shy, acne-riddled introvert to sports-car-driving celebrity rubbing shoulders with Bill Gates. As he writes, “No one is weirder than a nerd with money.” While the book is laced with such self-deprecating humor, Bleszinski also bluntly addresses the challenges that have long-faced the gaming community, including sexism and a lack of representation among both designers and the characters they create.
Control Freak is a hilarious, thoughtful, and inspiring memoir. Even if you don’t play games, you’ll walk away from this book recognizing them as a true art form and appreciating the genius of their creators.
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- Zisis Paraskevaidis
- 29-01-23
Great in every way
A great listening for a great creator from a great narrator. Whoever was a gamer in the 90s-00s is a must read from jazz jackrabbit to gears to failures like radical heights , Cliffs journey is a hell of a ride , thank you.
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- Anonymous User
- 05-01-23
An Industry legend pulls back the mystery curtain on video game development.
Cliff blizinski, probably best known for his involvement with the development on huge fps franchises like unreal and unreal tournament gives a guided tour on the inner workings of the video game industry. Sharing his personal highs and lows, the struggles developers face with developing new game franchises and the inherent workload, frustrations and successes that follow.
This book is a wild tale of a rockstar video game designer coming to terms with his ambitions and how these affected his personal life and ultimately the hows and why’s of (maybe) the demise of bosskey, Cliffs own game development studio, which closed its doors in 2018.
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- Anonymous User
- 25-03-23
amazing
amazing insight into cliffy b & gears of war & so much more thankyou 🙏
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- Hedgehog
- 16-04-23
MEH!
feel he is taking a lot of the credit for the games he contributed to designing and not enough credit to the coders making it happen.
Was hoping for more insight into game design opposed to his self soul searching. also do people really say F*** Dude quite so often?? seems to be said in every interaction he has.
To sum up its not Masters of Doom.. and other than having a few lucky breaks with his FPS games i suspect it was the power of the Unreal game engine that made them popular. Tim Sweeney and the team that created and coded the Unreal game engine deserve the credit.
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- Anonymous User
- 26-03-24
Very flat stories in game design part
Expected to hear more about game design but it was more about his personal relationship he had with people
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