Coalition boss Rod Fergusson on remaking Gears (and why it’s only the first one)

Back in 2006, the original Gears of War helped launch Xbox 360 and established itself as one of Microsoft's key first-party brands. So it seems fitting that the series is finally coming to Xbox One - both in the form of next year's Gears of War 4 and this year's remaster of that inaugural entry. In the latest issue of Official Xbox Magazine, Coalition studio head Rod Fergusson, talks about everything from backwards compatibility to choosing the first game over a full trilogy remaster.

How did it feel to announce the ultimate edition alongside backwards compatibility? aren’t you concerned that it renders your project a bit pointless?
Back compat’s great, we love it. But what we’ve done here is taken something people remember very fondly, and updated it with the stuff that they’ve come to expect from the Gears games after that. So, yes, you’ll be able to play the original, but this will be a different experience, and I think that the way it looks and plays is quite a bit different when you play them side by side.

Do you worry some old titles don’t make sense in the modern landscape?
I don’t think so, because I think there’s a nostalgia that people have for older games. I know I go back and still play original Xbox games on my giant brick because they were good experiences, and I like the way they play. are they different from modern games? Yes, but they scratch an itch that I can’t get with some of the new stuff, right? It’s funny, I was telling the guys about my son, who is 15 - I hooked up a Genesis and let him play Sonic, and he was freaked out by the fact that he only had three lives. He said: “Why can’t I just keep playing?”


We wanted to make sure we could make the best possible product, and doing three obviously takes a lot more effort and time. With Gears 4 coming, we wanted to make sure we could give the community something to play in the interim that gave them the sense that we understand and love the franchise as much as they do, and to do it at a high enough quality that it didn’t feel like we were just throwing something out to try to appease them. So with all that in mind, it made sense to focus on the first rather than try and do a whole suite of them. Because as each game goes along, they become exponentially bigger. to do all three of them would have been a huge task.