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Bleszinski looks like "small-town weed dealer," says New Yorker

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Cliff's only gone and made it. The Epic starlet's been profiled in the New Yorker, in an article describing his appearance as resembling "a boyish Dolce & Gabbana model or a small-town weed dealer."

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Bleszinski’s brand of mild outrageousness—the “Cliffycam” on his blog page, which, some years ago, allowed visitors to observe him online while he worked; the photographs of him on his MySpace page alongside the splatter-film director Eli Roth and the porn stars Jenna Jameson and Ron Jeremy—qualifies him as exceptional in an industry that is, as he says, widely assumed to be a preserve inhabited by pale, withdrawn, molelike creatures. There is some truth to this stereotype: most game designers are not like CliffyB. But neither, really, is Bleszinski. The nickname, he told me, was bestowed on him by some “jock kid,” when he was a small, shy teen-ager, and was meant as a taunt. Bleszinski took the name and fashioned a tougher persona around it, but, after spending a little time with him, one has the sensation of watching someone observing himself. Video games are founded upon such complicated transference. Gamers are allowed, for a time, all manner of ontological assumptions. They can also terminate their assumed personalities whenever they wish, and, lately, Bleszinski has been asking game-industry journalists if they might not “sit on” the CliffyB moniker “for a while.”

It'll all end in tears. Smack, hookers, a billion on red, eating sandwiches from bins and a penniless death. Obviously. Full thing's through the link.

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