Epic Games’ original Gears of War title wasn’t just a balls-to-the-wall action game like the series eventually became. The 2006 third-person shooter was heavily inspired by horror films, and the unique features of the in-development Unreal Engine 3 actually allowed the team to create a cinematic, terrifying game.
Speaking to FRVR, art director Jerry O’Flaherty explained that Gears of War was not only designed to sell copies, but also designed to sell the Unreal Engine 3 toolset to other studios. Of course, both goals were achieved with the game engine becoming the most-used engine during the Xbox 360 generation.
“We were selling the technology, so there was an understanding in the studio that this was a technology that we’re licensing, so it needs to look f**king great,” O’Flaherty said. “So there was an art-centric nature to some of the decisions that allowed us to push in ways that maybe wouldn’t have happened had it just been a game, but because it was trying to sell the technology it was a constant push for how do we make this look better, how do we make this more dramatic, how do we make this look different.”
“It felt it was horror with monsters and then it quickly became a monster game.”
Gears of War art director Jerry O’Flaherty on the series’ evolution
O’Flaherty explains the original game was Epic’s Alien, whereas latter entries would be Aliens. (In fact, it wouldn’t be unfair to say Gears was Xbox’s Alien, while Halo was Xbox’s Aliens.) The game was designed around horror from the ground up with the game’s reduced colour palette—which many other games decided to copy—being paramount to that feeling of dread.
“Very early on we knew we wanted to push cinematic content,” the art director explained. “We were doing it from even before Gears was properly in development we were having to make videos to show Peter Moore and there was this constant little back channel feeding of stuff we were working on. It was horror. It was a horror game, and horror is going to be a reduced palette, it’s going to be a lot of dark.”
When asked if they were happy with the direction of the upcoming prequel, Gears of War: E-Day, which returns to the horror focus of the original game as the Locust emerges from the ground for the first time, O’Flaherty agreed that it looked like a very faithful take on what the original game was trying to accomplish.
“Agreed. It felt like… a franchise is gonna do what people do. I just felt like the first one had more of a horror [theme]. It felt it was horror with monsters and then it quickly became a monster game, which is fine, people fricking love 2, 3, 4, but it was a little bit of a smaller, more isolationist nature to that horror game,” he explained.
“If Gears 1 was Alien, the rest of the franchise was Aliens,” he continued. “It was a lot more, you know, there was a hiding of the bad guy, there was just the tension and the horror that you were pulling out of every location, and I loved that… I loved the horror aspect of what we did in the first one.”
Very little is known about Gears of War: E-Day, but it does seem like a fantastic return to form after the still-great-but-different Gears of War 4 and Gears 5. It’s been a very long time since the Locust were scary, but this upcoming prequel looks like it might have the sauce needed to make the disgusting creatures as scary to new players as they were to OG fans almost 20 years ago.
