At the Xbox Games Showcase this June, Microsoft debuted a trailer for the eighth game in the violent, grandiose and unexpectedly maudlin Gears of War series: a prequel. The sight of 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 Tears for Fears’ Mad World. “As a 41-year-old man, that piano got me tearing up,” wrote one YouTube commenter.
It’s a throwback to the original, iconic Gears of War trailer from 2006, in which a lonesome Fenix picks through his ruined world to Gary Jules’ plaintive cover of the same song. And you can’t blame Microsoft for leaning on nostalgia. As Mad Men’s Don Draper once said, it’s delicate, but potent. Eighteen years on, that Gears of War trailer is still some of the most effective video game marketing ever. It really spoke to the melancholy heart that beats within this superficially macho game.
In 2006, Cliff Bleszinski was a 31-year-old game designer at North Carolina’s Epic Games, making a shooter about a fraternal bond of Herculean soldiers who vivisect aliens with chainsaws mounted on assault rifles. “I just wanted to see a gun with a chainsaw on it,” he explained in a Microsoft-produced promotional film aired on MTV. “That sounds like a chocolate-and-peanut-butter situation to me.”
Playtesters at Microsoft, the game’s publisher, had registered concerns that the chainsaw produced “a gratuitous amount of blood”. This was one year into the life of Microsoft’s Xbox 360 console, and in the absence of a new Halo, Gears was the one big exclusive lined up for the holiday season. It had to be a system-seller, 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 says to me today. You can understand Microsoft’s worry: does a person see a gratuitous amount of blood in a game trailer, turn to their partner and say, “Look how cool this is”?
“[The] contention about the saw is that it’s a little over-the-top gory,” a Microsoft executive said in the MTV film. Gears’ producer replied: “That’s exactly the kind of branding we were going for, I thought.”
Epic got its way: Bleszinski demonstrated the in-game rifle chainsaw live on stage at E3, to a rave response. That weapon might have defined Gears forever if not for two things. The first is that Bleszinski was sad.
Before Jules’ Mad World was the Gears song, it was on repeat in Bleszinski’s Dodge Viper. As he laboured on Gears and dreamed of virtual bloodshed, he languished in the death throes of a failing marriage. At night he tooled around North Carolina in his sports car, with Mad World and Evanescence’s My Immortal on a mix CD. Once, a friend in the passenger seat – as Bleszinski recalled in his 2022 memoir – jabbed at the dashboard until it spat the disc out. “This is sad shit,” he said. “We need to get you help.”
Perhaps improbably, Gears was the help he needed. “I believe sometimes the best work comes out of tortured artists and sadness,” Bleszinski says. Gears is still his signature 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 his unhappy marriage became, grandiosely, 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 pocketbook. For the sake of the Xbox 360’s future, Gears needed to be a hit – and would it have been, had the marketing rested solely on gore? We will never know. ““We knew that to become a true system seller, which was the reason for investing in Gears of War at the scale we did, we needed to showcase the beauty and richness of the story universe as well as featuring the combat,” says Peter Kingsley, then a manager in Xbox’s product marketing team. “[We] chose to do things differently and break with the conventional marketing model that was the norm at the time.” The trailer – really, a tone piece – featured neither dialogue nor combat, and was dialled-in completely to the undercurrent of sadness flowing through Bleszinski into his work. The vibe was not “chocolate-and-peanut-butter” but, as writer Tom Bissell would later phrase it, “disappointedly adult”.
By coincidence, 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.” Paired with that song, Gears was not just a brainless chainsaw game. It was sad shit.
“That was a watershed moment,” says Brett Hocker, a creative director at the agency Hammer Creative. “Gears was doing some real world-building and storytelling. It really started making [games] feel like an event. It started making the industry as a whole feel elevated.”
The trailer projected a seriousness not necessarily evident from the MTV promo, in which the developers rode scooters and shot Nerf guns, flashed Nikes and Lamborghinis, and joked about an employee being “a walking HR violation.” You have to wonder about Microsoft’s overall strategy, commissioning both the sombre Mad World spot and this thing where Bleszinski locked lips with his new girlfriend on the office couch, their respective T-shirts bearing the legends “Your Retarded” and “Everyone Loves a Drunk Girl”. In his memoir, Bleszinski recalls Gears contract writer Susan O’Connor telling him she was living the life of a 12-year-old boy. It was grandiosity mixed with immaturity. Needless to say, the latest E-Day trailer does not call back to 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 well, so does marketing. If it is cynical for a commercial to call on nostalgia for another commercial, well, who cares? That 41-year-old YouTube commenter wasn’t the only one moved by it. “I’m with you man. Right there,” wrote another. “44 here, but same.” “40 here, and same.” “49, and me too.” But when Bleszinski hears the song today, he is not back in tears in the Dodge Viper. Instead, he thinks of how far he has come. “I just think warmly and fondly over the fact that I was a phoenix who rose from the ashes of a crappy marriage.”
The real chocolate-and-peanut-butter of Gears of War is not the chainsaw and the gun. It’s the chainsaw and the melancholy – the 12-year-old boy and the disappointed adult, in precarious balance. When Microsoft sneaks Mad World into the E-Day trailer it hopes the audience will travel back in time to when Gears had this formula just right.
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