Although Cliff Bleszinski gets most of the press when it comes to the Epic Studios team responsible for bringing Gears of War 2 to Xbox 360s everywhere, Senior Producer Rod Fergusson was the proverbial man behind the curtain. Fergusson cut his teeth at Microsoft, where he helped to produce the Xbox version of Counter-strike and a little game called Gears of War. After Gears shipped, Fergusson decided to move to North Carolina to take a production position at Epic, where he's since been heading up the development of the highly anticipated Gears of War 2. We had a chance to sit down with Fergusson at the game's review event a few weeks ago, asking him about everything from the game's story to the new characters to its achievement system. Be sure to check back tomorrow for our multiplayer interview!



GameSpy: In a recent interview, Cliff [Bleszinski] said that Gears of War 2 would not be coming to the PC. Why did you decide to do that, especially considering that the first game came to the PC?
Rod Fergusson: It's just a matter of focus. One thing we really learned from Gears 1 was the amount of opportunity costs. You know, the time that we spent working on Gears for PC that could have been spent working on Gears of War 2. We're a small shop, and we need to maximize the efforts of our team. It just made more sense for us to focus our work on the Xbox 360 version.
GameSpy: Are you guys worried at all about backlash from people that played the first game on PC and were looking forward to playing Gears 2?
Rod Fergusson: I don't know. I mean, there's already been so forum buzz, and there's always some backlash no matter what your announcement is, but I think we're doing the right thing for the franchise.
GameSpy: The War Journal is a new thing, in that you can find tons of collectibles around the world. In the first game, all we really had to find were the COG tags, but it seems like you really ramped that up a lot. Did you add these new collectibles as a way to enhance the story? What about introducing new characters? We saw that some of the collectibles are from the same people.
Rod Fergusson: Yeah, somewhat. When we sat down with Josh Ortega to talk about the collectibles, one of the things that he was really keen on was telling a story in the collectibles. We didn't want to have 41 disparate objects, we wanted it to be something like there's one office memo and it refers to someone that wrote one of the other collectibles or something like that. John Harper [one of the characters in the collectibles] has five collectibles, and if you read them it actually tells the tale of the story of his life. We wanted to make sure that we had a narrative thread throughout and that there was at least another story being told through the collectibles.


One of the great things about Gears 1 was that people wanted more story and wanted to learn more about the world. We figured that this was the year for it with the game and the comic book and the novel. This is the year to learn about Gears, and we figured the collectibles would be a cool way to do that.
GameSpy: Let's talk about the Achievements. Who named them?
Rod Fergusson: [Laughs] Well, 90% of the Achievements were named by me.
GameSpy:: How about Dirty, Dirty Horde?
Rod Fergusson: [Laughs] Yep.
GameSpy: Free Baird?
Rod Fergusson: Well, actually, Free Baird was named by Microsoft, much like My Love for You is Like a Truck in the first Gears. But yeah, it was mostly me and a few other guys at Epic.

It's funny though, Cliff keeps giving me shit for my Princess Bride ones and stuff like that. He's like, "Why do we keep doing 80s movie references?" and I'm like, "Because I'm old!" [Laughs]

It's fun, I think it's an expression of our personalities as a team. I like the fact that we're able to play with that an have a sense of humor.