Gears of War

Gears of War is the first Original IP that Epic Games has developed since Unreal debuted in 1998. The game is rumored to be the mystic Unreal Warfare that Epic talked much about in the early builds of Unreal Engine 2. The game is mostly single player based, but was very popular online as well on the Xbox 360. It is also likely Epic's best selling game, selling more than 5 million copies in the first few months of it's shelf life. The game was released on November 11th, 2006 for the Xbox 360. It was also released on the PC on November 11th, 2007. A Mac version has been announced, but has not received a release date yet.

Demo
A demo was rumored for Gears of War early in the development cycle, but later on Mark Rein reported that there would be no demo due to it being impractical to spend time on one.

Release Details

 * November 11, 2006 - Xbox 360 - 1 DVD9
 * November 11, 2007 - PC - 1 DVD9

Reception
Overall reception to the game on the Xbox 360 was positive. The game received high 90% scores on most major game journalism sites. Points that were cited in reviews often revolved around the lack of many game bugs, a very robust and fun multiplayer mode and the easy to use controls.

Reaction to the game on PC is both good and bad. Many people seem to have performance problems, crashing problems and problems getting the game to run. Overall the release was marred by the use of the Games for Windows Live platform, which it still uses today.

Music
The music was written mostly by Kevin Riepl.

Weapons

 * Lancer
 * Locust Pistol
 * Shotgun
 * Hammer of Dawn

Characters

 * Marcus
 * Dom
 * Baird
 * Cole
 * General Raam

Races

 * Humans
 * Locust

Gametypes

 * I dunno

Singleplayer

 * Train Wreck

Multiplayer

 * I dunno

User Created Content
Sjoerd "Hourences" de Jong released a map called MP_SPIRE, or The Spire, on December 6, 2007.  The map is set in and around a large mansion on top of a rock spire in the middle of a sea of Immulsion.

The map can be downloaded here. A tutorial on how the map was made can be found here.

Trivia

 * The red logo of the skull inside a cog is called the "Crimson Omen". Its corresponding GamerPicture can be downloaded for free. As of December 2007 it is the most popular GamerPicture with around 79,000 users.