Update 05/20/2020 : Well, mystery solved. Epic Games that this build is real, but it was not made with the intention of releasing a commercial version of Gears of War 3 for PS3. It was just one of their many internal tests with Unreal Engine 3, for which they used both Gears and Unreal Tournament.
Three years ago a supposed version of Gears of War 3 was discovered that worked on PS3. Curious to say the least, since as you all know, the saga has always been exclusive to Xbox and PC . Today, this build (or rather a different one, as we will see now) has been resurrected with much more force and more questions than before.
A user who calls himself PixelButts (Proto on his YouTube channel) has uploaded a new video of this mysterious Gears of War 3 for PS3 . In it we can see him playing the aforementioned version for more than eight hours, and yes, one of the first things we notice is that the button icons are still from Xbox 360. However, in Kotaku they say that the PixelButts himself has taught them first-hand how it runs through a PS3 dev kit.
As a curiosity, the game file is represented by an Unreal Tournament III icon that acts as a placeholder. Both games were developed by Epic and run on different versions of the same engine, which are Unreal Engine 3 and Unreal Engine 3.5 , also owned by the same company.
Origins full of mystery
But why make such a version in the first place? Not even PixelButts knows what the reason for its existence is. Apparently, it was leaked in 2011 during a data breach that affected several companies , including Epic.
That 2017 video that we discussed at the beginning was born from the source code of the original game, which some hackers obtained and used to make it work on a PS3. In other words, it wasn’t official. The version of now, on the other hand, has been compiled by Epic itself , according to PixelButts, and it works somewhat differently from the other.
The thing does not end there. Another source familiar with these events has explained to Kotaku that Epic did indeed compile various portions of Gears of War 3 for PS3 in March 2011 . The reason remains unclear. Was there any intention of bringing the saga to PS3? Perhaps. Recall that Microsoft did not take over the rights to the franchise until 2014, three years after this delivery. Before that it belonged to Epic.
Anyway, anything we say now is pure speculation . Maybe it was just an internal engine test and nothing more.
