In the late nineties the video game industry was mired in a starry eyed fascination with a few high-profile game developers who had been elevated into a kind of geek stardom. There was talk of Ferraris and rockets and exorbitant spending at short-lived companies with poor oversight. There was a pantheon of “game gods” populated by people with names like John Carmack, Warren Spector, Tom Hall, Sid Meier, Will Wright, Richard Garriot, American McGee, Chris Roberts and others. And, of course, the poster boy for the late nineties excess of the video game industry: John Romero.

The rise and fall of Ion Storm, which actually released several games of note beyond the calamity that was Daikatana, is the cautionary tale that proves that Design is not, in fact, Law. The farcical comedy of Ion Storm heralded the twilight of the cult of personality, and these once powerful figures in gaming either learned to integrate into the growing corporate structure of development, or pressed on with visions that largely twisted toward dead-ends and obscurity. And so, it seemed for a long time that in the aftermath of the end of the millennium the business of video games became very much more traditional, that the team was elevated above the personality and when the revolution came the John Romeros of the world had been the first against the wall.

Or so I had believed until the pantheon of gaming’s gods was populated anew.

In just the past few years, the pendulum has begun to swing back toward a fixation on the individual as new names step forward into the long-empty spotlight to design, develop and pontificate. I’m not precisely certain what dynamic has been in play to stimulate interest in names above teams again, but we have more personalities in game development than we’ve seen in a decade.

These gaming thinkers like Gabe Newell, David Jaffe, Ken Levine, Denis Dyack and Raph Koster represent a smattering of the growing list of “names” in the industry whose thoughts and products fill news and blog posts with strong and often confrontational ideas about the state of video games. But, perhaps no one is more reliably visible, no single effigy so like the game gods of old, than Cliff Bleszinski, or as he’s more informally known: Cliffy B.

To be fair, Cliffy B is not actually something he goes around calling himself anymore, but like having the nickname Chubby or Piddles in high-school, this is not a thing from which one should expect to easily extricate themselves. Cliffy is the John Romero of the new millennium, only far more successful and with less hair; a highly visible star of gaming with equal parts youthful grin and confident swagger. Often seen these days sporting edgy t-shirts, the hint of arm-ink and a full scale replica gun/chainsaw with which he will happily pretend to bisect people for PR shots, Bleszinski can usually be found at the intersection of video games and television cameras ready to flash a winning grin.

B is old school. He’s got the credits on big-name franchises, and the marketing sense to make it seem incredibly cool to give him money. And he’s got the pedigree as the Lead Designer of Epic Games, itself the company created by Tim Sweeney, the Hades to Carmack’s Zeus, another of the old-school gods sporting Lamborghinis and big budgets. And, if my tone smacks of a slanted bias toward some kind of jealousy as I type away in the basement of a split-level in the suburbs of a Midwestern wanna-be city, then I’d say you’re probably on to something.

You watch guys like Cliffy, and you buy into that rock-star persona, because somehow all the vacuous trappings just work for him in a way they never would for you. You want to call him a sell-out, but the fact is he’s working on Gears of War 2 and it’s going to sell a bazillion copies. You want to call him a fake with his internet t-shirts, spiky hair and casual affectations, but you know in that dark place that you’re looking at his tattoo and wondering how much more awesome you’d look sporting that ink. You know in your heart of hearts that working in the game industry is an occasionally soul-crushing, often tedious and largely unrewarding job, but he makes you believe that it’s the thing you do between Hollywood parties and ménage-a-trois. This isn’t jealousy, my friends. This is good old-fashioned, seven deadly sins, biblical envy, with a lightly toasted crust of covetousness.

But, here’s the thing. He’s also a relic, an anomaly. If you look at the other big names in gaming of late, so very few of them have that retro-nineties feel of Bleszinski. Even for all of David Jaffe’s bluster, the guy is full of ideas about gaming that don’t just make sense in that artificial ‘it’s all about the art, man!’ kind of way. He knows this is a business and the end result is to make a good game that makes money for its investors. What you see in the new pantheon of gods is a lot of really interesting thinkers who get that this isn’t the same industry that it was ten and fifteen years ago. It makes sense considering that last generation’s flash and bluster guys burned themselves out, often quite publicly, while the ones that remain relevant a decade later are guys like Wright, Meier and Spector – the thinkers. And, that’s who the new generation has modeled themselves after.

Better still, in this era of blogs, which have replaced the .plan files of old in the gaming zeitgeist, big thoughts are fodder for gaming enthusiast sites which devour the musings of designers willing to project those thoughts into the digital ether. For lack of a better term, ours is the age of the pontificating windbag. So, we have elevated those who think the big thoughts about gaming mostly above those who buy expensive European cars and flashy office space. From the ex-Microsoft employee who has taken the first steps to becoming the primary publisher of digitally distributed PC games to the creative director of Star Wars Galaxies who somehow parlayed that into a speaking engagements on how MMOs should be made, our new gods are a lot more like us than the last batch, only smarter. They seem like guys who might have a mortgage, environmentally conscious cars and a day job where they happen to make video games. Damn good ones a lot of the time.

It actually gives me some comfort to see gaming’s idols kind of grow up. The grandfathers of the industry, who themselves continue to pound out some intriguing projects, have settled out of the excess and gotten accountants and MBAs to run the business while they go about the business of making games. It’s comforting because it reminds me that, despite our occasionally cynical grousing, the industry does still prize individual talent.

As for Cliff, I think there always needs to be that playboy to smile at the camera between blockbusters. It’s a good fuel for motivation if not a good paradigm for the industry itself. This is a youthful industry and without the Cliffy Bs of the world it threatens to become stodgy and ponderous. Just so long as they are the exception and not the rule, I like the dash of Tabasco sauce in the games industry omelet.