UNVEILING THE GENESIS: THE GRIPPING TALE OF GEARS OF WAR: E-DAY

Xbox had saved its most explosive showstopper for the end of their Summer Game Fest showcase, and it was just for us. The curtain had just closed on talk of the next generation of hardware, and the next line of franchises. But what on Earth was that? Just what was Gears of War: E-Day? It was the launch of humanity itself. More than any other game, Microsoft’s Gears of War series has weaponised humanity’s secret shame, the violence impressed on us by toxic masculinity. Now it was my turn to watch that violence explode. It was a warm night for sitting on a porch with a beer. My wife had fallen asleep and Christy had arrived. I asked her to guess the guesses. She said ‘June 19, 2006’. I asked her why. She said she wasn’t sure, but that it just felt right.

THE DAWN OF DESPAIR: A PEEK INTO EMERGENCE DAY

The Advent of Legends

The trailer begins with a montage of machismo and gore, sharing all the one-on-one fighting elements that the Gears series is known for – a Gears fighting off a grunt, suddenly the ground collapses out from under them and the camera shifts to a POV looking down into a fissure in the ground – a clear nod to the events on “E-Day”. The accompanying music swells, and the experience is completed by the elegiac notes of Gary Jules’s Mad World.

A Battle Against Fate

E-Day, or Emergence Day, is where the Gears story begins. It is the night that ushered the first human apocalypse, the night of the Locust Horde. The player is promised a narrative beginning: to see how it all started, from the perspective of Marcus Fenix. As the trailer rolls to the ominous tick of a bomb, and the city explodes in miniature, the story is set to become one of survival, friendship and triumph.

EMBEDDING THE ROOTS: EXPLORING THE ORIGIN STORY

Crafting the Chronicles

With Gears of War: E-Day, the developers open up the Gears universe to the series’ older fans and newcomers alike: they provide the most interesting insights into the characters and conflicts that have made the series a classic for years, and they weave them into the series’ storyfabric, while turning the early Marcus Fenix story into a treasure trove of implicit and explicit, emotional and narrative opportunities.

The Legacy of E-Day

Emergence Day is also not merely an in-world incident in Mass Effect’s fictional history — it’s a sign of rupture, of hardship, and of perseverance. It’s the shape of a life upended, of heroes forged in fire, and of the potential for history to be changed.