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.'"

Ho hum...

[__aaclcg7560]

Let me know when the Nintendo Wii version is coming out.

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[Palshife]

Yeah, though it may actually be fun to play.

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[donscarletti]

Yeah, though it may actually be fun to play.

I hear that a lot about the Wii. But consoles are fun if they have a good variety of fun games. I have never in my life played a game by Epic that was not fun. I have spent more time playing ZZT than any other game I can think about and nothing by epic in the fifteen years since has ever lowered my opinions of them. I'm not saying Nintendo isn't as good as Epic, Mario 3 and 64 drained much of my life as did the donkey kong country games and goldeneye by its su

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[7Prime]

I miss Clover :(

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[krakelohm]

I do believe that the Wii actually has more developers at this point then the gamecube ever did. I was looking around and this was the first thing I could find to really support that http://www.joystiq.com/2006/04/24/whos-really-goin g-to-support-the-revolution/ [joystiq.com]

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[Raenex]

Beefy console specs are not for the user, they are for the developer, to allow the developer to achieve what they want in the title.

Most developers/publishers want to sell as many titles as possible. That's the bottom line. Sony is notorious for giving developers crappy dev kits, and yet the developers put up with it. XBox was more powerful than PS2, and yet developers didn't abondon the PS2.

As far as being "beefy" enough, I imagine the Wii is at least as powerful as the old Xbox. Play some of t

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[donscarletti]

I think your somehow confused into thinking that power is all about resolution. Your probably thinking about having more stream processors, which can give you more pixels but is also useful for giving you more complex shaders (for some really cool looking effects). But graphics is only a small part, having some computational grunt is nice for making more compex games and allowing a greater detail of environmental simulation, having more memory is good for having larger, more detailed game worlds and bigger

Short-sighted to be a platform fanboi

[jchenx]

I think it's very short-sighted to be a platform fanboi, who thinks that the only good games are on their platform. So you've never had fun on an older platform before? Or that good games don't exist because they're on an MS/Sony/Nintendo/Sega console?

The Wii isn't even out yet, and still many Nintendo fanbois are hyping it to death, as if games will only ever be good on the Wii.

The truth is, there are great, fun games on all the major platforms. Honestly, anyone who is a platform fanboi is a gaming "noob".

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[Beefysworld]

Brand name fanboi-ism will always get in the way of a decent opinion. There would be very few people around who have had enough exposure to all the different consoles / systems have to offer a decent, relatively unbiased opinion on a certain system.

In terms of the Wii, it's got one of the more obvious drawcards that the other two next-gen systems don't have in the Wii-mote. Nintendo are using that as the major driving force for the console, and for good reason - it is what makes it stand out from the c

No thanks!

[@madeus]

I'm certainly going to get a Wii - it's cheap and the controler has high novelty value - but I would want to play a game like Gears of War on it (at any price point). Given it's not able to do high definition (and the graphics appear to be better than but not all that far off GC quality), a game with a much detail as GoW is going to look nasty on my 50" HDTV Plasma, in just the same way that quite a few old origional X-Box games do. They would have to really take the polygon count down right down too, to th

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[Thansal]

I will flat out state I am a nintendo fanboy (I spent about 3 hours online to get to play the Wii last weekend).

For those that don't know:
You can go to the Nintendo World Store at Rockafeler center in NYC to play the Wii (opened last weekend, they have 12 consoles, no redsteel or Zelda sadly)

I got to watch alot of games (including a WWII game I didn't catch the name of) as well as play Exite Truck.

some random notes:
1) The graphics are actualy rather good. They probably are not as good as a 360 on a 50" pla

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

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[rholliday]

Sprocket of Sniping

Drill of Demise

Hammer of Hell

Minute Hand of Doom


This is kind of fun. :)

Don't worry

[KDR_11k]

It'll be five minutes until somebody writes an alternative Gears of War name generator.

I miss Epic

[Thansal]

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

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[Sparr0]

GameHippo seems like a neat idea, but their coverage seems too spotty to rely on. How can any free game site that doesnt have Battle for Wesnoth [wesnoth.org] on its list, and has a years-outdated description of Neverball [icculus.org], be taken seriously?

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[Thansal]

they can't

For the most part they are only good for finding relatively new games, they rarely will update older games.

If anyone else knows of good freeware pages, please let me know. However gamehippo is the clossest thing I have found to being good.

(and thanks for the link, I love finding new games :P)

is it really out yet

[lubricated]

Seams like this game had some serious distribution difficulties. Anyone know if it made if out of Memphis yet?

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[Asmor]

I just picked it up about an hour ago... The gamestop I went to had dozens of copies.

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 [3drealms.com] and purchase here [3drealms.com]

Storied

[Pluvius]

Storied history. Unless there are some incriminating pictures of CliffyB involved somewhere.

Rob