Eight full hours of footage running Gears of War 3 on the PS3 surfaced yesterday online. The project confused much of the internet, including the person who did the upload.
Gears of War 3 was a creation of Epic Games as an exclusive for the Xbox 360 in 2011. Since then, the game received official ports to Xbox One and PC too. According to claims on Kotaku, the game was a supposed tech test build for the Unreal Engine.
The initial upload did not know why such a code existed for the game. Microsoft bought the franchise from Epic Games in 2014, three years after the game’s release.
Code for Gears 3 came from 2011 Epic Games data breach
The entire exclusivity model stands in stark contrast of the game working on PS3. Information from Kotaku says that the footage comes from the 2011 security breach at Epic.
During this year, different companies were the victim of various hacker groups. The biggest loser in 2011 was Sony, with a breach of over 77 million user accounts and a network outage.
A Twitter account named Pixelbutts uploaded the leaked footage from Epic Games. According to him, his team needed a ton of time to run the game on the hardware. They fixed much of the game’s build data, especially due to the game’s system requirement.
Apparently, the leaked code did not have proper optimization. The game, for example, needed too much RAM that no market-ready PS3 can run it. The only kit that can run the game was PS3’s original dev kit.
The game also needed a keyboard as the menus were unfinished and the game does not run on emulation. Even with all the work, the Gears of War 3 barely runs, with bad framerates in many areas. The game also has Xbox 360 button prompts, making many people question its legitimacy.
Footage comes from engine testing process, according to Epic rep
In a response tweet, Epic Games former design director Cliff Bleszinski believed it was fake. Bleszinski then forwarded fans to current director Tim Sweeney, who he believed knew about the issue.
https://twitter.com/therealcliffyb/status/1262798827913961473
Pixelbutts further legitimized his uploaded footage by letting the game boot from a PS3 dashboard. None of the hackers or uploaders knew the use for the code until Epic Games cleared the situation.
“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,” according to an Epic rep in a response.
No matter the intent, the mere idea of Gears of War 3 running on the PS3 is bizarre, at best.
Featured image courtesy of Proto/Youtube Screenshots