How that twenty-year-old Gears of War teaser still grabs my attention

There’s a moment I keep circling back to.

You’re in a room full of noise, everyone talking over each other, and then you notice there's one kid alone, sitting in a corner, speaking barely above a whisper. And somehow, that’s the voice you end up focusing on.

That’s what the original Gears of War teaser did back in 2006.

The whole industry was in ‘bigger, louder, flashier’ mode, and then along comes this short, almost fragile trailer set to the Donnie Darko-era ‘Mad World’ cover by Gary Jules. A lone soldier. A ruined city. No shouting, no hype. Just a mood that landed harder than all the big-budget noise around it.

It didn’t push itself into your face.

It didn’t have to.

It said what it needed to say quietly, and that was enough.

Cleaning up the old blog, and the memories it drags up

I’ve been spending a ton of time cleaning up the old blog lately. It feels a bit like going back to your childhood bedroom after years away, the one you never really finished packing up. You start off thinking you’re just organizing things, and then you stumble on an old ticket stub, or a mixtape, or a photo you barely remember taking. And suddenly you’re sitting on the edge of the bed, just… remembering. I know it stinks of a Hallmark Holiday special. And yet,...

That’s sort of what happened here.

I was trying to fix a broken link in a post from 2007 (the one where I talked about why I bought an Xbox 360) and the whole feeling of that moment came back. The excitement, the sense of possibility, the impact of that “Mad World” trailer. I wasn’t looking for nostalgia, but it found me anyway.

Somewhere in that cleanup session, I ended up coming across a Guardian article from 2024 about Gears of War: E-Day. It had been out for a year, but it was the first time I saw it.

The piece digs into why E-Day (developed by The Coalition Studio) feels so familiar: it’s pulling the series back toward the tone of that first trailer. Not the bombastic, action-heavy marketing that took over later, but the quieter, darker mood the franchise started with. It sets Marcus and Dom at the very beginning, before the myth, before the armor, before everything went off the rails.

Cliff Bleszinski, Gears game creator/designer, is mentioned in the article too, not as the returning creator but as someone looking at the series from a distance. His comments help frame how much the tone of early Gears still resonates, even without him in the developer chair. You also get a real sense of how his personal life shaped the way Gears was developed and marketed.

The Coalition’s approach comes across as careful, almost restrained. No big reinvention. No new identity crisis. Just a deliberate step back toward the emotional core that made the franchise stand out in the first place.

And, yes, they bring back the “Mad World” connection; not as a gimmick, but as a hint at the game’s emotional center.