Control Freak cover art

Control Freak

My Epic Adventure Making Video Games

 Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends December 16, 2025 11:59pm GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

Control Freak

By: Cliff Bleszinski
Narrated by: Kurt Kanazawa
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends December 16, 2025 11:59pm GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

Only £0.99 a month for the first 3 months. Pay £0.99 for the first 3 months, and £8.99/month thereafter. Renews automatically. Terms apply. Start my membership

About this listen

 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 seventeen 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 bestselling 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. Entertainment & Celebrities Celebrity Video Game Game Funny Witty War Epic Games

Listeners also enjoyed...

 Sid Meier's Memoir! cover art
Doom Guy cover art
Disrupting the Game cover art
Blood, Sweat, and Pixels cover art
Press Reset cover art
The Ultimate History of Video Games, Volume 1 cover art
Gears of War: Aspho Fields cover art
Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings cover art
Masters of Doom cover art
Once upon Atari cover art
The Dream Architects cover art
Prepare to Meet Thy Doom cover art
A Movie Making Nerd cover art
Think Like a Game Designer: The Step-by-Step Guide to Unlocking Your Creative Potential cover art
Long Live Mortal Kombat, Round 1 cover art
Shoe Dog cover art
All stars
Most relevant
amazing insight into cliffy b & gears of war & so much more thankyou 🙏

amazing

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
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.

An Industry legend pulls back the mystery curtain on video game development.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
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.

Great in every way

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
captivating, thoroughly enjoyed the life of Cliff .was quite sad at the end.lets you see what is like to be financially successful.

really enjoyed

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
As a huge fan of the Gears Of War series I enjoyed the background into the making of the series as well as an insight into one of the most recognisable names in the gaming space, the honesty throughout was greatly appreciated as it wasn't just a biography of how perfect and great his life was the genuine ups and downs where interesting to learn about.

My only gripe with the audio book is that a book about "the Gears Of War guy" should at least get the names of characters from the series correct, on more than one occasion where main characters important to the series referred to as incorrect names as well as unusual pronunciation of other common words and phrases and this just bothered me and took me out of the book for a few seconds each time.

A really cool insight

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews