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Gears of War's Epic History

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the learning-things dept.

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.'"

4 of 26 comments (clear)

  1. It wasn't always called Gears of War.. by Channard · · Score: 5, Funny
    No, Epic went though several title changes before they decided upon one that sufficently captured the mood of the game. Also considered were:

    Wheelbarrow of Warfare

    Spanner of Shame

    Cogs of Despair

    Machete of Manslaughter

    Tweezers of Terror

    A Clockwork Horror

    Super Game 22

    1. Re:It wasn't always called Gears of War.. by rholliday · · Score: 2, Funny

      Sprocket of Sniping

      Drill of Demise

      Hammer of Hell

      Minute Hand of Doom


      This is kind of fun. :)

      --
      Xbox reviews.. We think they're funny.
  2. I miss Epic by Thansal · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The first couple paragraphs reminded me of all the great games that I used to play from epic and the other companies like them.

    we need more games like that.

    GameHippo is currently where I (LEGALY) get my fix for those types of games for anyone else getting the craving.

    --
    Do Or Do Not, There Is No Spoon, There Is Only Zuul. Everything in the above post is probably opinion.
  3. Correction by CyberVenom · · Score: 2, Informative
    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