Here’s Gears of War 3 running on a PlayStation 3, I crap thee not

Gears of War, the game franchise that pretty much sold a million billion Xbox 360 consoles and paved the way for an entire era of cover-based shooters featuring the beefiest of boys as they tore through cannon fodder meatbags. While it has had a consistent presence on PC, Gears of War is to Xbox what God of War is to Sony: The same damn acronym but locked to that console.

What if I told you, that for a brief moment in time Gears of War was running on a PlayStation? Not just via some digital trickery or a blasphemous fusion of warring console hardware, but as a legitimate port of a game that would have sent diehard supporters of the Church of VREEM into convulsions were they to witness this heresy.

In 2011, Epic Games actually did make a PlayStation 3 version of Gears of War 3, with footage of this build being unearthed by former hacker PixelButts. Heh. “As far as I know I’m also the only person with a working build of this particular data as well,” PixelButts wrote in his YouTube upload today. ”I don’t know why it exists, I don’t know why it was made. All I can do is speculate.”

So what’s the deal? According to Epic Games and Kotaku, the studio never planned to port Gears of War to PlayStation 3. Not because they were afraid of keyboard warriors hammering out the nastiest of tweets, but rather because the studio was simply testing the Unreal Engine 3 on the Sony platform:

This footage is a byproduct of Epic’s internal Unreal Engine 3 testing process, which utilized both Gears and Unreal Tournament, and was never part of any actual product work for PlayStation 3.

Y'all need to ask Tim Sweeney. It may have been a test for the engine or something but I doubt it.

— Cliff Bleszinski (@therealcliffyb) May 19, 2020

And there you go, case closed. Although I’m still trying to imagine a world where you push circle to VREEEM, an idea which I simply cannot wrap my head around. For any Microsoft diehards worrying that Gears 6 could be a PlayStation 5 launch title, fret not! Epic sold the franchise to Microsoft back in the dark ages of 2014, setting up their own Gears-focused studio The Coalition and giving them the keys to the series. Two games and one fantastic spin-off later, and I think they’ve done a swell job that has further cemented the Gears legacy in the Xbox hall of fame.

Last Updated: May 20, 2020