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Gears of War is a core part of Xbox’s identity, but for a while, its original developer Epic Games had the third game in the series running on PlayStation 3. A Gears of War 3 prototype was used to test Unreal Engine 3 on the PS3 but was never made public. If you happen to own a debug PS3 though, now’s your chance to try Epic’s final run behind the series on the most unlikely of home consoles.
Digital archivist PixelButts uploaded the game to the Internet Archive to celebrate its tenth anniversary, leaving it currently available for anyone who still owns a DVD-ROM to burn the game onto a disc. The catch here is that getting your hands on a debug model PS3 isn’t exactly easy or cheap. Someone on eBay probably has one up for sale though, if you feel like doing some digging.
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Now Playing: History of Gears of War
Even on a rare console that has extra RAM, this version of Gears of War 3 isn’t exactly the best example of the game. Because it wasn’t properly optimized, Gears of War 3 regularly drops frames in its PS3 build and has a number of other graphical bugs to contend with. A PS3 emulator won’t help you either, as Kotaku noted that you won’t get any further than the game’s title screen.
PixelButts originally showed off this build in 2020, with Epic claiming at the time that it was 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”. If you’ve got all the hardware required to run Gears of War 3 on a PS3, pressing square to Vreem is going to make for an odd experience.
Gears of War studio The Coalition is now getting to grips with making games using Unreal Engine 5. The studio has multiple other games in development and has shifted its resources to next-gen development using the development tools. Gears 5 players can still try out the game’s multiplayer which is regularly updated with new content and has also dropped new accessibility options. Or if you’d prefer something more cerebral, Gears Tactics is one of the best Xbox Series X games to play right now.
