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.'"

Comments

It wasn't always called Gears of War..

[Channard]

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