Gears of War's Epic History

GameDaily has up a piece looking at the history of Gears of War , which was released this past Tuesday. The game's history is also the tale of developer Epic Games, which grew from a garage group to one of the biggest names in FPS titles. Beyond that, though, "'Gears has a sordid history,' said [Epic Founder Tim] Sweeney. 'Initially, we planned to take the Unreal franchise in a more large-scale combat direction, more like Battlefield 1942. So we began this project called Unreal Warfare and spent a few years developing that. We realized we wanted the real focus to be on a single-player game with realistic combat. Around the same time, we were developing Unreal Tournament 2003 with Digital Extremes. We took the efforts from Unreal Warfare — it had a lot of the early ideas of Gears of War — and merged that into the Unreal 2003 project. From that you saw the Unreal game take on the large-scale combat — the Onslaught style of game.'"

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Correction

[CyberVenom]

TFA states:

At the time, Sweeney's big competitor was Apogee Software, which created shareware hits like Castle Wolfenstein and Commander Keen.

Not quite true; although Apogee published Wolfenstein 3D and Commander Keen, id was the company that created those titles. Also from Apogee in the early days were: Supernova, Crystal Caves, Paganitsu, Secret Agent, Monster Bash, Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure, and of course, the original Duke Nukem.

Their old collection of shareware titles is still available for download here and purchase here