[2][8] Though Dare to Dream did not achieve a great success,[8] it led Bleszinski to work on Jazz Jackrabbit, a platformer co-developed by demoscene coder Arjan Brussee.

In addition to his work on the Unreal series, Bleszinski served as creative consultant on Rune,[13] and as lead designer on the first three installments of the Gears of War franchise, which has sold over 22 million copies and earned over one billion in revenue as of January 2014.

[15] As Bleszinski explained in a speech at GDC 2007 entitled "Designing Gears of War: Iteration Wins," the game started out as another first-person shooter in the Unreal universe.

[21] On June 30, 2014, Cliff announced on Twitter that he was "coming out of retirement to make video games again" and would be unveiling his next project in the next week.

[22] The new game, a free-to-play, PC-focused arena shooter code-named BlueStreak, would be published by Nexon and developed by his new studio, Boss Key Productions, which he co-founded with Brussee the same year.

[29] His memoir, Control Freak: My Epic Adventure Making Video Games, was published in November 2022 by Simon & Schuster.

[30] In April 2023, Bleszinski announced that he was writing a comic book series titled Scrapper in collaboration with Alex De Campi, with illustrations by Sandy Jarrell.

[36] In 1988, at 13, Cliff appeared in the first issue of Nintendo Power for earning the high score of 9,999,950 in Super Mario Bros..[2][37] Regarding the achievement, he commented in a 2017 interview with Rolling Stone "that was probably one of the moments when I realized, deep-down and subconsciously, I wanted to be a 'name' in this business of video games.

[39] In 1998, Bleszinski rose to fame in the Internet when he held a contest inviting visitors of his website to scan their cats on flatbed scanners and submit the photos for judging.

[2] On April 12, 2010, he appeared on NBC's Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, where he showed the debut trailer for Gears of War 3 and cited Space Invaders as the game that initially inspired him.