Gears cost MS a billion dollars
They just had to have the RAM.
Gears of War may have cost ten million dollars to develop, but Epic Games VP Mark Rein has been heard joking that it cost Microsoft around one billion.
Speaking at a community event in Canada, reported by TeamXbox, Rein is heard explaining that he and Tim Sweeney, Epic's technology guru, lobbied Microsoft incredibly hard to get 512MB of RAM included in Xbox 360 instead of just 256MB.
"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," Rein told a crowded Q&A session.
"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'."
Then Xbox 360 came out and everyone lived happily ever after.
Gears of War is due out in Europe on 17th November.
