Free Extra Lives by Tom Bissell

This helped signal that Fenix was something few video-game characters had yet managed to be: disappointedly adult.
    When I asked about the melancholy at the core of
Gears
, Bleszinski said, “I was never geeky enough for the geeks and I was never cool enough for the cool people. I’ve always been in that weird purgatory.” That slight feeling of identity crisis apparently persisted. A few years ago, Bleszinski divorced his high school sweetheart. “I woke up one day, and had the two Labs, and the house in the suburbs, and I’m like, What the hell am I doing here?”
    Bleszinski admitted that much of
Gears
is, in its way, autobiographical. Its look and its aesthetic, for example, were influenced by his first trip to London, taken when he was in his late twenties.There he climbed to the top of St. Paul’s Cathedral and, with “a shitty little camera,” snapped a picture of a yolky sun setting over the Thames, the sky streaked with nursery blues and pinks. Bleszinski’s London photograph is one of the reasons that much of
Gears
takes place in twilight—a lighting condition prized by cinematographers but comparatively neglected in video games. Bleszinski asked his artists to create a “sci-fi” hybrid of London and Washington, DC, but advised them to keep the futuristic well balanced with the historical. The big flaw in most depictions of the future, he says, “is that they always forget to leave in the past. Everyone always assumes that the entire world would just explode and be rebuilt in this kind of super-futuristic style. I still see old cars from the ‘30s and ‘40s around, right next to things that look like they’re from the year 2000. It’s that mix that makes things interesting.”
    Gears
also contains what Bleszinski calls a “going home” narrative: “There’s a sublevel to
Gears
that so many people missed out on because it’s such a big testosterone-filled chainsaw-fest. Marcus Fenix goes back to his childhood home in the game. I dream about my house in Boston, basically every other night. It was up on a hill.” In
Gears of War
the fatherless Fenix’s manse is on a hill, too, and getting to its front door involves some of the most harried and ridiculously frantic fighting in the game. When I told Bleszinski that Fenix’s homecoming was one of my favorite levels in
Gears
, he asked if I knew where its title, “Imaginary Place,” had come from. I thought for a moment, attuned to the possibility of an altogether unexpected window into his imagination. Was it from Auden? No. It was a reference to a line from Zach Braff’s film
Garden State
, in which
family
is defined as “a group of people who miss the same imaginary place.” When you start to peel back the layers of the
Gears
world, Bleszinski told me, “there’s a lot of sadness there.” Indeed, the centaur tanks the COGs ride into battle in
Gears of War 2
greatly resemble the tanks from
Blaster Master
—the game Bleszinski was playing when he learned of his father’s death—which Bleszinski claimed not to have realized until someone else pointed it out to him.
    In addition to the prevailing mood of wistful savagery, the singularity of
Gears of War
resides in the “feel” of its game mechanics. (The procedures and rules of a game are what are meant, broadly speaking, by the term
game mechanics
. As the game designer Jesse Schell writes, “If you compare games to more linear entertainment experiences [books, movies, etc.], you will note that while linear experiences involve technology, story, and aesthetics, they do not involve mechanics, for it is mechanics that make a game a game.”) The importance of game-mechanic feel is something that Bleszinski has made his special focus and passion. “I’m looking for a fun core-loop of what you’re doing for thirty seconds over and over again,” he told me. “I want it to grab me quick and fast. I want it to have an interesting game mechanic, but I also want it to be a fascinating