In his latest podcast, Major Nelson included a Q&A session with Mark Rein, recorded at the Canadian Community Party. During the session, the VP of Epic Games revealed that Gears of War played a key role in convincing Microsoft the Xbox 360 needed 512 MB of system memory instead of the 256 megs originally projected.
"The interesting thing is that story you all heard about us costing Microsoft a billion dollars… that’s actually true," Rein explained to a laughing crowd.
"So what happened was, my partner Tim Sweeney, we kept arguing and arguing like, 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, 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 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. So the day they made the decision, we were apparently the first developed 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 favor for a billion gamers'."
