More Hope For PC Gears of War // UPDATE

The upcoming issue of the PC Gamer magazine gives us even more hope that Epic's Gears of War action game will one day be released on the PC. As sighted by IGN, on page 28 of PC Gamer's Holiday 2006 issue (soon to be on store shelves) there is a photograph showing a display stand on the Microsoft campus, and Gears of War is also in it. That alone may not sound like much, but it turns out that the stand in question was full of upcoming PC games. So the natural question is - what would a Xbox 360 exclusive game do side by side with "games for Windows"?

And by the way, the article that included that photo discusses just that: high-profile games for Windows Vista, and Microsoft's efforts to support their operating system. Windows Vista went gold last week, and apparently it has already been cracked and made available for download - although Microsoft says the pirated version is "of limited value" for whoever is desperate enough to download it.

But getting back on topic, rumours about a PC version of Gears of War have been circulating since... forever, and there are sure to be more of them as we enter 2007. After all, the freshly-released Xbox 360 game is expected to hit 1 million in sales before Christmas this year, clearly making it one of Microsoft's top show-off games - the kind that they show-off in display stands on their campus, we figure.

An official announcement is still nowhere in sight, however, according to IGN:

"Microsoft could not confirm that Gears is in fact coming to PC and the company has no current plans for an announcement in the near future."

But that's alright, we got plenty of other exciting gaming stuff going on right about now.

UPDATE: And here is the incriminatory photo, with the Gears of War cover image slapped over a "Games for Windows" box.

(N.B. Archive text, links removed)