Part One:
As Told By Matthew Rex Downham

I like to consider myself a bit of a comedian. I’m no stranger to making people laugh, I enjoy it. Coupled with my never ending love for all things geek, I’ve got plenty of material to work with. I’ve done a few videos with friends that have made it on Joystiq and The New York Times, as well as plugs on other sites. When most of my creative team moved out of state, I longed for a way to keep making people laugh, without needing my crew here with me.

I’d been on Twitter for some time, and I’d always admired the “fake” Twitters that populated the network. @DarthVader, @Michael_Bay, and @DrTobiasFunke are some of my favorites. I decided I was going to make one, but who of? Some of my favorite fictional characters were already taken, so I thought about a couple of popular figures in the gaming industry that would have an interesting and hilarious “fake” life. My immediate thought was Cliff Bleszinski. He’s a charismatic, talented, and honestly funny guy that I’d always admired. I’d seen plenty of videos and pictures of him being touted as a self proclaimed “badass”; either by flexing his muscles, enthusiastically describing the features in Gears of War, or just being himself. I knew he was the one. He’d be a healthy mix of Brucie from GTAIV, and tons of other cliches and stereotypes.

Once I knew who I was going to exaggerate, I got a hold of my good friend Austin (@PowerLlama) to help. Essentially, he was my editor. I’d pitch him things, and he’d tell me whether it was funny, or just plain sucked. He came up with plenty of hysterical stuff himself too. Since we’re on different sides of the country, collaborating was difficult sometimes. I’d usually cover the morning tweet, and we’d both work throughout the day. Occasionally we’d video chat to discuss where “Cliffy’s Life” was going.

We went out of our way to make the most ridiculous tweets we could think of. Not only was our Cliffy the visionary who worked on the Gears of War franchise, he was the red bull obsessed guy who beat up the beta testers, hid easter eggs of his face in Gears 2, used terrible Gears related pickup lines, and worked out profusely in the employee cafeteria. He was constantly getting in trouble with his nemesis Mark Rein, for beating people up; and being an overall nuisance. Best of all: our Cliffy never actually worked.

Almost instantly, the followers jumped way beyond what we though we’d have. We had constant replies from users, and we even started getting followed and replied to by some developers and game industry-staples. Fake Cliffy developed back and forth relationships with people like Dan Amrich (one of the editors of the Official Xbox Magazine), Trixie (Xbox Live Community Manager), and even N’Gai Croal (Newsweek’s Video Game Blogger).

We were loving every second of it. Occasionally we’d post special photos and drawings that Cliffy did himself, including “concept art” for Gears 2. Our first post that sparked a bit of controversy was the “Naked Cliffy” Gears 2 ad. This was the first time Dana Cowley (Epic’s PR Goddess) had to publicly deny our legitimacy. I’ll admit, we did post some stuff that probably drove some people crazy, like telling them Gears 2 was breaking several 360′s at Epic, and would have to get patched on Day 1. People were convinced that we were real, no matter how ridiculous we were. A few followers even won some free stuff, including codes for exclusive weapons in Gears 2. We gave back to our fans! We called them “The Cult of Cliffy”.

Over time, we just kept going. We had no intention of stopping until we were asked. We’d heard from Dan Amrich that the real Cliff enjoyed us, and that was the most gratifying thing to come of the experience. We started as fans of the Cliffster, so to hear he enjoyed what we were doing made the whole thing worthwhile. We were mentioned on tons of websites, podcasts, YouTube videos, and more. As far as I know, a lot of the gaming journalists out there were fans. That elates us beyond words.

It wasn’t until our final tweet that we’d realized we crossed the line. We made a joke about what we knew was already a touchy subject, but we did it anyway. Not too long afterwards, the Twitter was gone. I woke up to do my morning tweet before work, and just as quickly as we made it, it was gone. My heart sunk. We always knew this day could come, but I expected some sort of warning first. Twitter had received some legal mumbo-jumbo from Epic’s legal staff, and had renamed the account “NOTCliffy_b“. Which instantly ruined the gig. We went back and forth with Twitter, but it seemed there was no fighting it, apparently we weren’t enough of a parody. The game developer who slaps employees, crashes Lamborghinis, does squats in the bathroom and punches his boss in the kidneys wasn’t enough of a parody. We learned later from Dana Cowley that she had nothing to do with the takedown; “It was very entertaining while it lasted” she told us.

We were shocked. We contacted a couple of publications as a last ditch effort, but beyond a news post at Kotaku and a couple of “NOOO!!!” Tweets from our followers, it seemed it was over. Austin and I both decided that being “revealed” as fake was the nail in the coffin. We would let our Cliffy rest, and bask in the glory he’d achieved.

At the end of it all, I am very happy with what we did. We made a lot of people laugh, and had a lot of people going. Hopefully the real Cliff really did like it. He’s a delightful man that I hope I can meet in person one day, if only to see how different he is from “our” Cliffy.

-MatthewRexDownham
@MatthewRex

Part Two:
As Told By Austin Tiberius Brown

I’m no writer, so this will be long-winded, and meander.

It started simply enough. Matt (@MatthewRex) wanted to make a fake Twitter account. We got laughs from @Michael_Bay. We thought to ourselves, “We can do that.” So we did. We didn’t know who to parody, but it didn’t take long to think of someone. A man who almost needs no parody. Epic Games’ own Cliff Bleszinski.

The choice was an easy one. We wanted to be the “Michael Bay” of videogames. How could we not? His own marketing campaign had placed him on a pedestal of machismo. Every image of himself seemed to project forth the advertising mantra he had set for Gears of War 2. Bigger, better, and more badass. Everything he did seemed to be only for better explosions, more gibs, and more visceral action.

And so, in October, it began.

Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? But how do you stick by that mantra? We had to build this character and stick to a canon. We could never break from character when we wrote. Ever. We didn’t want to give a hint as to if this could be anyone but a larger than life Cliff Bleszinski. Cliffy came out of the little things we could pick apart from Cliff Bleszinski. His changes in hairstyle over the years. How he changed from a kind of nerdy guy to a guy with a good amount of self confidence.

We started with no one. No followers. We ourselves didn’t want to be the first, like that would somehow give us away. So we searched twitter. Looked for anyone talking about Gears of War, Cliffy_B, or anything related. Every time someone replied to us, we would get more followers. And the more popluar the person, the more followers we gained per reply.

It was like a drug. It felt amazing that we were trying to be funny and had near instant validation. Every time we would tweet, someone would reply to us, and we’d gain more. We had journalists that I love reply to us. They thought we were funny. We had to figure out ways to market ourselves. Try to manipulate the twitter masses into replying to us and getting us more followers.

Fairly early on, we got a message. During Matt’s googling, he had found someone from Epic PR on Twitter, and we made the decision for “Cliffy” to follow her. Dana Cowley. The only message we have ever received from Epic was sent as a DM from her that said “How long are you going to keep this up?” We did not reply. We decided we would keep following her, in case Epic would like to get ahold of us at some point (they didn’t).

The writing process was pretty simple. For the most part, Matt would come up with the idea of the tweet, and I’d edit it. It was something I hadn’t really done before. It started out of necessity, trying to figure out how to fit long ideas into 140 characters. Taking out a word, adding a comma, changing a word. Whatever made the tweet funnier. Every once in a while, I would have a funny idea myself, but that wasn’t as often. And it generally took much prodding from Matt. Or it would come to me at random.

We grew and grew, steadily gaining more and more followers. Which seemed to make one person in particular unhappy. I’m not sure if this was his personal mission, or if he was directed from higher up, but Epic community manager @SixOkay wasn’t a fan. He would seemingly at random, and fairly often, declare that the real Cliff was not on twitter and that all other accounts are fake. And he would almost always make certain to not point out who that fake account might be. I guess he didn’t want us to have any more followers, so he wouldn’t link to us. Well he did once, but I think that was out of exasperation.

One thing that always amazed us was that no matter what we put, people would think we were real. I don’t think a lot of people did. But many of the people who replied to us definitely thought we were actually Cliffy B. This blows my mind. They didn’t think we were real in a “he’s poking fun of himself” kind of real, they thought we were real in a “you are a fucking douchebag- get over yourself.” replies to us kind of real. How could they think this after reading things like us eating steak marinated in red bull? Or our adversary Mark Rein yelling at us, and Cliffy slapping people. Or later on when we talked about how we can longer give high fives at at Epic studios, or how we won breakdancing competitions?

Eventually, we got the axe brought down us. Twitter got a message from Epic games, and changed our username. It hit us pretty hard. How were we NOT parody? I’m not too sure. And even without updating the account in over a month, we’re still gaining followers. Which makes me feel pretty great.

The worst part about losing Cliffy, was losing something that was really fun to do. Coming up with new posts, or just changing posts around was a creative challenge.

To the real Cliff: I hope we didn’t offend you, and we sure had fun pretending to be you. Thanks.

-Austin Brown
@PowerLlama