Free Extra Lives by Tom Bissell Page B

with Epic described the company as having a “band dynamic.” Staff turnover is low, and many of Epic’s most senior employees have been friends for more than a decade. This does not seem a very long time until one sits in on an Epic meeting and realizes that anyone over the age of thirty-five achieves the temporal stature of Methuselah. Epic’s recent growth is regarded with wary gratitude by many of its employees, though some miss the old days, when, as Sweeney put it, “we were just a bunch of kids who had some cool ideas and were doing neat things.”
    When surrounded by his colleagues and discussing the gravities of gameplay, Bleszinski discarded his self-consciously laid-back manner, and the precision of his gaming mind quickly became apparent. A colleague told me that Bleszinski’s “huge strength is his basic ability to just get it—pick something up and give you a one-minute usability report.”
    It is unusual for any game company to allow an outsider access to its meetings, for fear of a game’s features being prematurely disclosed. While discussing
Gears 2
’s new “crowd” system, which allows an unprecedented number of individually functioning enemies to flock across the battle space, Bleszinski mentioned how excited he was to open fire upon them with
Gears 2
’s mortar. Within minutes, I was pulled aside by a Microsoft representative and informed that the mortar’s existence would not be confirmed until later in the summer and could I please refrain from mentioning it to anyone. (That I had once been allowed to sit in on classified intel meetings while embedded with the Marine Corps in Iraq did not, at Epic, carry much weight.) The gaming media is largely made up of obsessive enthusiasts, and the carefully planned release of information tantalizes them with the promise of insider knowledge. The game industry is more or less leakproof and possesses a strange kind of innocence: It guards its secrets as guilelessly as a boy might hide from his mother—but not from his brother and sister—the extraterrestrial living in his bedroom.
    I was warned, before attending a play-through of one of
Gears 2
’s unfinished levels, that it was still “janky.” Although the level was fully voice-acted, it was only partially scored, and many sound effects had yet to be added. Some of the virtual lighting was not yet functional, and the onscreen Fenix flickered. From time to time, the game crashed altogether. Nonetheless, we watched Dave Nash, the level’s lead designer, guide Fenix through what looked to be an enthusiastically mortared office building. Ahead, in the shadows, numerous monsters scrambled—the goose-bumpy
Gears
warning that a violent engagement was somewhere ahead. By the third iteration of this, Bleszinski was shaking his head: “Enough monster foreplay.” When Fenix and a comrade had to walk a bomb to a door in need of obliteration, Bleszinski said that they should be moving “10 to 15 percent faster.” When the play-throughwas complete, he said that too much of the level involved going into one room to hit a switch that activated a door in another. The otherwise superlative
Grand Theft Auto
series is particularly afflicted with this mouse-coaxed-through-a-maze problem, and Bleszinski’s only complaint about the
GTA
games, which he admires, is that they can sometimes “feel like work.” This emphasis on making players aware of why they were choosing certain paths without being reminded that their choice was essentially illusory made me think of the “vivid and continuous dream” that John Gardner once spoke of concerning fiction.
    In a discussion of another level of the game, known as “Hospital,” Bleszinski, sitting by himself on a long couch, wondered if, in the online multiplayer version of the level, a hospital sprinkler system could be used to extinguish the pilot light of an opponent’s flamethrower. “Wouldn’t that be cool?” he asked. A similar moment resulted in one