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Cost of (Gears of) War? One Billion Dollars - Xbox 360

25th October 2006, 2:49am
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 That's what Gears of War cost to make.

In an article on Computer and Video Games, Mark Rein, Vice President of Epic, makers of Gears of War, reveals:

'So what happened was, my partner Tim Sweeney, we kept arguing and we really wanted a hard drive in every single machine; that was something we really wanted but we realized that the 512 megs of RAM was way more important, cause otherwise you couldn't do this level of graphics if you had to both write your program and do your graphics in 256 megs. Nothing would really look that HD.

'So we argued and argued, and what Tim did is he actually sent a screenshot of what Gears of War would look like if we only had 256 megs of memory. So the day they made the decision, we were apparently the first developer they called; we were at Game Developers Conference, was it two years ago, and then I got a call from the chief financial officer of MGS and he said 'I just want you to know you cost me a billion dollars' and I said, 'we did a favour for a billion gamers'.'

So there you have it. Feel free to ad your own Dr. Evil voice as you say it.

Gears of War? One <i>Billion</i> Dollars.
by R J Gaffney » Author's Blog