While Gears of War has always been published by Microsoft, the IP wasn’t always owned by the company. Back when Gears of War was still under Epic Games, the title was used for internal testing purposes, leading to a version of Gears of War 3 for the PlayStation 3. Now, this PS3 version of the game is publicly available for the first time.

Up until 2014, Epic Games owned the Gears of War IP. During development of Gears of War 3, the company prototyped a version of it for the PlayStation 3 as part of a technical test in May 2011, footage of which can be seen below:

To celebrate the 10 year anniversary of this unreleased version of the game, PixelButts, a QA developer and archivist, uploaded the PS3 build of Gears of War 3 to Archive.org. Epic Games previously confirmed that this build of the game was real but was never intended for a release – Unreal Tournament was also used for testing purposes.

Unfortunately, you can’t just burn a disc and boost this up on a PlayStation 3, to actually play this build of Gears of War 3, you would need a PS3 Dev Kit.

KitGuru Says: While this build won’t be playable for many, it is still nice to see this particular piece of gaming history preserved. 

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