TOAt the Xbox Games Showcase in June, Microsoft previewed the eighth game in the violent, grandiose, and unexpectedly maudlin series Gears of War: A Prequel. Seeing series heroes Marcus Fenix and Dom Santiago as younger men is “an emotional homecoming like no other,” as Microsoft’s Xbox blog put it. But the real tug at the heartstrings comes with the first notes of a slow, instrumental rendition of Mad World by Tears for Fears. “As a 41-year-old man, that piano made me cry,” he wrote. a YouTube commentator.
It’s a throwback to the iconic original Gears of War trailer from 2006, in which a lone Fenix tours his ruined world to Gary Jules’ plaintive version of the same song. And you can’t blame Microsoft for relying on nostalgia. Like Don Draper from Mad Men once saidIt is delicate, but powerful. Eighteen years later, the Gears of War trailer remains some of the most effective video game marketing of all time. It really spoke to the melancholic heart that beats within this superficially macho game.
In 2006, Cliff Bleszinski was a 31-year-old game designer at Epic Games in North Carolina making a shooter about a brotherly bond of Herculean soldiers who vivisect aliens with chainsaws mounted on assault rifles. “I just wanted to see a gun with a chainsaw,” he explained in a promotional film produced by Microsoft and broadcast on MTV. “That sounds like a chocolate and peanut butter situation to me.”
Experts at Microsoft, the game’s publisher, had expressed concern that the chainsaw produced “a gratuitous amount of blood.” This was a year in the life of Microsoft’s Xbox 360 console and, in the absence of a new Halo, Gears was the big exclusive scheduled for the holiday season. I had to be a systems salesman, and not every game can do that. “You need a game that a person can point out to their spouse, like, ‘Look how cool this is, look at these features,’” Bleszinski tells me today. You can understand Microsoft’s concern: Does a person see an unnecessary amount of blood in a game trailer, turn to their partner and say, “Look how cool this is”?
“(The) argument about the saw is that it’s a little over the top and gory,” a Microsoft executive said in the MTV film. The Gears producer responded: “I thought that’s exactly the kind of brand we were looking for.”
Epic got its way: Bleszinski demonstrated the game’s rifle chainsaw live on stage at E3, to an enthusiastic response. That weapon could have defined Gears forever if it weren’t for two things. The first is that Bleszinski was sad.
Before the crazy world of Jules was the Gears song, was repeated in Bleszinski’s Dodge Viper. While working on Gears and dreamed of virtual bloodshed, languished in the agony of a failed marriage. At night he drove around North Carolina in his sports car, playing Evanescent’s Mad World and My Immortal on a mix CD. Once, a friend in the passenger seat – as Bleszinski recalled in his 2022 memoirs – he hit the backboard until he spit out the puck. “This is sad shit,” he said. “We need to get him help.”
Perhaps improbably, Gears was the help he needed. “I think sometimes the best work comes from tortured artists and sadness,” Bleszinski says. Gears remains his emblematic work and its violent masculinity coexists with melancholy. His impression of a London built on Viking and Roman ruins inspired the “destroyed beauty” of Gears’ post-apocalyptic landscapes; his longing for his own lost father was reflected in Marcus Fenix; the desperation of their unhappy marriage became, grandly, the desperation of humanity’s struggle for survival. (Bleszinski’s then-wife was transmuted, uncharitably, into a female monster called the Berserker. “There’s a reason why the Berserker is angry and blind,” Bleszinski says.)
The second thing was that Microsoft opened its pocket. For the sake of the Xbox 360’s future, Gears needed to be a hit, and would it have been if the marketing had been based solely on blood? We will never know. “We knew that to become a true systems seller, which was why we invested in Gears of War at the scale we did, we needed to show the beauty and richness of the story universe, as well as highlight the combat” says Peter. Kingsley, then manager of Xbox’s product marketing team. “(We) decided to do things differently and break away from the conventional marketing model that was the norm at the time.” The trailer (actually a pivotal piece) featured neither dialogue nor combat, and was completely attuned to the undercurrent of sadness that flows through Bleszinski in his work. The atmosphere was not “chocolate and peanut butter” but, as writer Tom Bissell would later put it“disappointingly adult.”
Coincidentally, the trailer was set to Gary Jules’ Mad World, Bleszinski’s song. It blew his mind. “I never asked them to use it,” he says. “Somehow it came through.” Along with that song, Gears wasn’t just a mindless chainsaw game. Was sad shit.
“That was a defining moment,” says Brett Hocker, creative director at agency Hammer Creative. “Gears was building a real world and telling stories. It really started to make (the games) feel like an event. It started to make the industry as a whole feel elevated.”
The trailer projected a seriousness that wasn’t necessarily evident in the MTV promo, in which developers rode scooters and shot Nerf guns, showed off Nikes and Lamborghinis, and joked about one employee being “a walking HR rape.” You have to wonder about Microsoft’s overall strategy, commissioning both the grim Mad World ad and this one in which Bleszinski makes out with his new girlfriend on the office couch, wearing their respective T-shirts reading “You Retard” and “Everyone loves drunks.” Girl.” In his memoir, Bleszinski recalls that Gears’ hired writer, Susan O’Connor, told him that he was living the life of a 12-year-old boy. It was grandiosity mixed with immaturity. Needless to say, the latest trailer for the E-Day does not call again those vibes. Nostalgia is delicate and some things are best left in the past.
To paraphrase Don Draper again, art is a time machine: it takes us wherever we want to go. And when it’s done right, so does marketing. If it’s cynical for a commercial to tap into nostalgia for another commercial, well, who cares? That 41-year-old YouTube commenter wasn’t the only one who was moved. “I’m with you man. Right there,” wrote another. “44 here, but the same.” “40 here, and the same.” “49, and me too.” But when Bleszinski hears the song today, he doesn’t cry again in the Dodge Viper. Instead, think about how far he’s come. “I just think warmly and fondly of the fact that I was a phoenix that rose from the ashes of a shitty marriage.”
The real peanut butter and chocolate of Gears of War isn’t the chainsaw and gun. It is the chainsaw and melancholy: the 12-year-old child and the disappointed adult, in precarious balance. When Microsoft introduces Mad World in the E-Day trailer, it hopes the audience will travel back in time to when Gears had this perfect formula.
