One of the most highly anticipated games this holiday season (and probably the most anticipated game on Xbox 360) is Epic Games' Gears of War. Interestingly, Epic and their shooter may have had a pretty big impact on Microsoft's decision about how much memory to include in their next-gen console. According to Larry Hryb's (a.k.a. Major Nelson) latest podcast, which featured a recorded Q&A session with Epic Games vice president Mark Rein during a Canadian community event, the often outspoken Epic executive revealed that Gears may have been the game that pushed Microsoft in the direction of 512 MB of RAM instead of just 256 MB. "The interesting thing is that story you all heard about us costing Microsoft a billion dollars—that's actually true," Rein said. "So what happened was, my partner Tim Sweeney, we had been arguing and arguing and arguing, and we really wanted a hard drive in every single machine; that was something we really wanted but we realized that the 512 megs of RAM was way more important—[be]cause otherwise you couldn't do this level of graphics if you had to both write your program and do your graphics in 256 megs. Nothing would really look that HD." "So we argued, and argued, and argued and what Tim did is he actually sent [MS] a screenshot of what Gears of War would look like if we could only have 256 megs of memory. [crowd laughs] So the day they made the decision, we were apparently the first developer they called, and we were at the Game Developers Conference—was it two years ago?—and then I got a call from the Chief Financial Officer of MGS and he says [Rein deepens voice] 'I just want you to know you cost me a billion dollars' [crowd laughs] and I said, 'No, we did a favor for a billion gamers.' [crowd cheers]" Rein also talked a bit about why he enjoys working on the 360 so much. "The power of the Xbox 360 is that you have six identical CPU chips, so if you know how to get power out of one of those chips, then theoretically you know how to get power out of all six. So you have a lot of resources at your disposal," he said. 
View: Original Article @ GameDaily BIZ
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