Gears of War on its way to PC, carnage ensues

Written by Wil Harris

February 15, 2007 | 12:07

Tags: #gears-of-war #mark-rein

Companies: #epic

Epic co-founder Mark Rein has confirmed to the gaming world that his company's super-popular Xbox 360 hit, Gears of Wars, will be making its way to the PC.

Eventually.

Gears has always been touted as an Xbox 360 exclusive, and its brand cachet and graphical awesomeness has seen it sell over two million copies in the short time its been on sale. Epic's position has always been that it would say 360 only. Until now.

Talking to TeamXbox, Rein had the following to say:

"People ask me, “Are you going to do it on PC?” Yeah, eventually…I don’t think that’s any great secret that we would like to do it on PC, but for now it’s a 360 game. Eventually we’ll get around to a PC version. I just don’t know when.

That’s worked successfully for Halo. Halo was a big seller on PC long after it kind of peaked on the original Xbox, and they’re doing the same thing now with Halo 2. We work at the pleasure of a publisher who thinks both of those are their platforms, so I think it’s ultimately inevitable, and obviously we’re a PC company.

The big challenge is to make a game that was designed solely for the console…to take advantage of every last little corner of that console, to fill every little crack and run as many threads as we could and do as much to exploit the power of that machine, and make it run well on enough PCs to be worth releasing. That’s a challenge. UT will help us there, because Unreal Tournament 3 will be kind of our vanguard PC product, and it’s helping us get optimization on the PC. So it’s just a matter of, now, can we make Gears run on enough PCs that it’s worth selling…or do we have to wait in five years until everyone has a PC that can run it?"


So it seems like the team isn't convinced that it will be worth releasing on the PC right now, since 90% of people won't have a rig swish enough to play it. That's a good point - the kind of money you'd need to spend on a graphics card to play Gears of War at a decent resolution would actually buy you an Xbox 360, which is kind of insane.

It's worth noting that Unreal Tournament 3, the other title under development at Epic with the Unreal Engine 3, has now been pushed back to the 'second half' of 2007, meaning we'll likely see it for Christmas. Anybody else thing that Epic is so under the kosh finishing up UT3 that the guys there are far too busy to bother with Gears on the PC until that's out the door?

Have you played through Gears of War? Would you like to see it on the PC? Let us know over in the forums.
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