CPU: What do you do job-wise on a daily basis?

CliffyB: I'm writing scripts. I'm writing action sequences. I'm creating characters. I'm creating creature ideas, working with the programmers on [what] the artificial intelligence is going to do. [I'm] maintaining the integrity of the Unreal universe and the Unreal franchise while creating new ones. And at the end of the day, [I'm] a play tester, picking up a game and feeling what feels good and giving my two cents on it.


CPU: So you're still a hands-on guy and not an early designer who sold out to wear a suit?

CliffyB: Well, there's a balance to be had there. If there's an hour that I'm spending picking up a 3D application and building a character, that's an hour I'm not spending thinking about what this character's motivation is going to be for killing the hero in scene four. So my hands may not be as dirty, per se, but I still share an office with two other people. I get in on play sessions with everybody, and I'm very much hands on in playing with the game and working with the programmers for what I want to see and directing our animatics. Sometimes I even write a bit of dialogue.


CPU: Tell us about the modding contest you're involved with.

CB: There's this whole concept of modding that happens with some of these computer games, especially Unreal Tournament. We ship the same tools that we use to make the game with the game. So people are able to get a platform when they buy the game, and this whole organic community wound up appearing on the Internet where people will make their own levels, their own environments, and then exchange them with one another, and this keeps them playing Unreal Tournament longer and longer, as opposed to playing, say, the competition's titles. We partnered with NVIDIA on this and said, "Hey, let's give out some cash and prizes for the best ones." Then whoever makes the best overall modification, not just a good-looking new arena but new characters and weapons and vehicles, we'll give them an engine license.

Engine licensing for us is a very important part of our business. Splinter Cell uses our technology. Some of the Harry Potter games use it. It costs somebody a good chunk of money to license from us. We decided that the winning team would get a free license that they can then leverage to a publisher in order to get their modification turned into a full retail product. This happened with the original release of Unreal contest with a mod called Tactical Ops. Atari packaged it up and put it on store shelves, and all the people [who] worked on it are now working in the gaming industry. So it's this incredibly organic cycle you don't see a lot of elsewhere in entertainment where the fans essentially wind up becoming the talent. Today's deathmatcher is tomorrow's Cliffy B., right? There's your big interview quote.


CPU: What do you want to accomplish in your gaming career?

CliffyB: I believe that we are going to be the most influential entertainment form of the next 100 to 200 years, more so than any other medium. It's cool to watch James Bond on the screen, but what's cooler than being James Bond? We['re] building up to the point where people can experience things that they can't in the real world. And that could be good or bad depending on who you talk to. If I want to drive a tank down the streets of Baghdad, I can do that in a game without any risk and fulfill that fantasy of mine. We're in the business of delivering the dream. Hollywood shows you the dream; we put you in it.


CPU: Is there a point when developers push that too far? I'm thinking of titles like Vice City.

CliffyB: The market will bear what the market will bear. The 10 million people who bought Vice City can't be wrong. If someone decides to make a game that is horribly brutal and violent and depicts disgusting acts that are out of context, nobody's going to want to buy it. I'm not big on naming names, and this is a very flammable topic, but if you look at the recent game Manhunt, it allows you to kill a person by putting a plastic bag over their head, which is quite the reprehensible act. The game wasn't any fun. The fact that you could kill someone like that didn't benefit the game at all. It was just violence for the sake of violence, and nobody liked it. The reviews weren't very kind, and it didn't sell anywhere near the numbers that Grand Theft Auto did.

Grand Theft Auto succeeded because it's an outstanding gaming experience that just happens to have a couple of seedy elements in there that are questionable. At the end of the day, though, it's the user deciding if he wants to drive these things and listen more to the devil on his shoulder than the angel. At no point in Vice City in order to complete the game are you required to pick up a prostitute and kill her. That's entirely a choice of the player. People use the Grand Theft Auto example that you're getting more points for killing more cops, but no: If you accidentally bump into a cop or shoot somebody in front of a cop, more police will come after you and try to stop you in order to make your game end. The game gets harder the more lawless you are, so it's in your best interests to not get the cops on your butt. Everyone always gets that one wrong, which kind of drives me crazy.


CPU: So when conservatives argue that the violence in games is eroding our cultural values and so on, do you agree? Can games have a negative cultural impact?

CB: Everything in moderation, I believe. If you're a person who only watches nasty horror movies or pornography all day long, then something's clearly not right with you. From our end, games are cowboys and Indians. We're the new Elvis, the new Dungeons & Dragons, the new Judas Priest. The previous generation that didn't grow up with video games sees them as this powerful cultural force, and it scares the hell out of them. They don't understand it. They don't actually play the games. So now your average gamer is about the age of 30. He's got one or two kids now and will be raising his kids on video games, teaching them what's good and what's bad, and the market will bear what it will bear. I think you'll see these fears alleviate as time goes on. We're the new "big bad" that parents look for in the way of a quick fix as to what made Billy go crazy, right? Well, people were going crazy long before video games.


CPU: Like you, I grew up on Space Invaders and Asteroids and D&D. With little to nothing in the way of engaging graphics, a lot of that adventure took place inside your head. Now, looking at the incredible, immersive visual experience we get with modern games, do you think we've disengaged the user's imagination at all from the gaming process?

CliffyB: Absolutely not. I think old games suck.


CPU: I think that's my big quote.

CliffyB: I mean, you can go back and play Ms. Pac-Man for 10 minutes, and it's boring. Nostalgia's a very dangerous thing. Old video games are great for nostalgia and the iconology of that pixelated look and the bloop-bloop-bloop sounds you hear integrated into rap music now. But let's face it: That stuff is nowhere near as engaging as the games you have now with full voice-over and an emotional response and the proper physics. A lot of critics act like graphics don't matter. Don't kid yourself. Graphics absolutely matter. We're now at the point where graphics don't suck. For the first 25 years, graphics sucked. Now, when a person comes up to you and smiles, it looks really believable. That's monumental. It's the most exciting time ever for the industry. People say that games now aren't innovative. I'm like, "What are you talking about?" I was recently playing through this horror game, Fatal Frame 2, and that just scared the pants off of me. When the character whispers in my ear, "It hurrrts..." it sounds believable in 5.1, and the ghost coming at me looks translucent and glowing, and I'm scared. You could never get that response in something like Sinistar where the digital voice was this robotic "AWW-AWW-AWW-AWW!" back in the '80s in the arcade next to the Orange Julius. We're totally in another level now, and I have no problem giving a knee-jerk reaction saying old games stink.


CPU: How can you improve on today's quality levels?

CliffyB: The term people like to use is "Shrek quality." The technology in Unreal Engine 3, which we're going to be showing at E3, is leap-frogging Half-Life 2. It's leap-frogging Doom. We're aiming for the next-generation consoles and the next-gen NVIDIA and ATI chips. We're planning on a roadmap for our technology for the next five years. You look at characters and see the ridges on their veins and the sweat on their brows, the pores when the light moves across it. The bricks look like you could stick your hands in them and climb up. When there's a monster chasing you down that hallway, it looks real. That's exciting stuff, as opposed to the old 1993 Doom pixelated, blocky monsters.


CPU: What's up next for gaming audio?

CliffyB: We want to do some things in the five-year plan. First off, it's all 5.1, yada yada, but also blending music dynamically within the context of what's going on—I'm not allowed to go into much detail here. But getting real A-list actors attached to things as opposed to Gary Coleman helps add a tremendous amount of value. The bottom line is the money's there now. A good actor can make a decent chunk of change. It's not just for B-list actors now.


CPU: Not to stray too far off topic, but I totally agreed with the assessment you gave on "Lost In Translation" in your blog.

CB: Yeah. It's an emotional sucker punch, that's what I call it. Sofia Coppola is just the queen of nuance now. It's the little things. It's the way characters look at each other. To bring this full circle, it's one of those things where in a game, we can now have a character that looks that way at another character. We're starting to understand pacing and storyboarding and the various emotional effects that film has been doing for 75 years. They have 50 years on us here, so we're in the process of catching up really quick.


CPU: Will gaming really be able to achieve those kinds of emotional punches soon?

CliffyB: Absolutely. Look at Half-Life 2. Until you see Unreal Engine 3, that's a contemporary example of where they have a female character where they spent hundreds of man-hours just on her eyes so that when she looks at you, you actually get that kind of feeling like this beautiful girl is gazing at you and giving you a quizzical look. The player ends up having an emotional investment in this character because she's a believable representation of [what] a human being is.


CPU: In a dynamic gaming environment, can you achieve the same depth of involvement that a viewer can in a movie?

CliffyB: Well, a good example might be Kill Bill. Throughout the game, there's got to be a good 10 hours of button mashing and doing something interesting, right? Interspersed with actual plot and narrative and cut scenes that make up the story line. A recent example of a game that really starts blending those elements well is 007: Everything or Nothing from EA. They have Pierce Brosnan's likeness and voice-over, Heidi Klum, and Shannon Elizabeth. The game really blends seamlessly from the movie elements to the game elements back and forth. We're all in the process of moving toward that.


CPU: As far as button mashing goes, is the keyboard going to remain the interface of choice in the years to come?

CliffyB: There's been some innovation. Look at what Sony's done with its EyeToy. It's like this little Web cam thing for your PlayStation that tracks your location and projects you onto the television screen with overlays, so it's almost like you're looking at a mirror. Then they start projecting things from the PlayStation onto the screen. There's one game I enjoy in which you stand in the right spot and these little digital ninjas come over from the side, and you have to wave your arms and kick, and the game can tell when you connect with them. There are games like Dance Dance Revolution where you're using your feet to move around. So there's been some work in these areas that will hopefully cascade forward into the next generation of PCs and consoles. And even in Unreal Tournament 2004, the special edition DVD comes with a headset for not only communicating with people online via real-time voice, but also ordering your AI buddies in the game verbally. So you can say, "Alpha, attack" and they go, "Roger, Red Leader," then go and do that.


CPU: Console vs. PC. If you look five years out, will the two platforms have merged?

CliffyB: Everybody's been talking about convergence for years, but at the same time there's still a fundamental difference between the sitting in the office experience in front of a 17-inch monitor and sitting on a sofa with a 10-foot interface. The next generation of consoles will pull some PC functionality into them and PCs will pull in some console functionality. It's just a matter of finding where the balance is between the two. The PC will be around forever because as long as you have a device that's initially built for work, people will find a way to play games and blow off work on that device.


CPU: Are there things about modern gamers' expectations that you find exciting or frustrating?

CliffyB: I think gamers are a little bit spoiled as far as length goes. If you go to your average movie, it's like $10 for an hour and a half to two hours. So it's $5 an hour. If you look at the gaming experience, you spend $40 or $50 a game and you get 100 hours. There's a ratio there that's out of balance. I would love for somebody out there, whether that's me or another company, to release a game for $19 that takes four hours to complete, but it's an amazing four hours, just incredible start to finish. Because right now our $50 games have amazing moments, but they take 20 hours, and of those 20, hours only a full hour of that is very, very interesting. The rest of it's just padding. If we can train gamers that less is more, if you have a more compact, memorable experience, you're going to be more likely to finish the experience and possibly even replay it. You get two, two and a half hours of content on a DVD for $24, right? If we can lower the price and shorten the experience, it will help us to reach more of a mass market.


CPU: But with skyrocketing game development costs, is that feasible?

CliffyB: I don't know. I can dream, can't I? But as a developer, you can come out with a sequel six months later utilizing similar assets. You could release more games in a more episodic manner. People have been talking about this for a while, but no one's had the juevos to accomplish it yet.


William Van Winkle began writing for computer magazines in 1996. He was first published in 1990, the same year he took his first job in computers. He and his family live outside Portland, Ore.