In an interesting revelation, it turns out that that the concept for the Gears of War games had been sitting on Epic’s shelf since 2002 with a considerable amount of content carrying over to the current generation trilogy.
Gears of War was once titled Unreal Warfare way back when. What some readers may fail to notice was that Epic also came up with Unreal Tournament, which was an immensely popular multiplayer title back in its day and that Unreal Warfare was a different take
on what the Unreal Engine was capable of.
Everything from the apocalyptic setting to the character designs, from the sci-fi theme to the grim tone had been collecting dust on the shelf before Epic decided they might as well try and make the concept a reality now that technology had grown and developed
to a stage where they could turn their vision of the game a reality.
In essence the game’s concepts were pretty much what they are now, “a multiplayer military shooter with vehicles.” It turns out that the Unreal Engine 3 just could not allow the developers to create the game they wanted in terms of quality and what they
had in mind.
However, sticking to Epic’s “We don’t throw anything away” motto, the developers decided to keep the game with plans of using it later.
Jim Brown, a designer at Epic said, “If it gets done and is good, we’ll find a way to use it.” And so they did, with the Gears of War series going on to become the Xbox 360’s premier third-person shooter and one its most iconic franchises.
The series sales are second to the Halo series when it comes to Xbox exclusives and the series has garnered a vast fan following.
As for any changes that were brought into the final version of the game, well, it turns out that the original story pit the COGs against a robotic alien race instead of the Locust, as well as a few other changes.
After this revelation one has to wonder if Epic has anything else locked away in a shelf and if they plan on releasing that anytime soon.
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