Epic Games Vice-President Mark Rein likes to talk to people, and when he does, things often slip out. This was exactly the case during his recent appearance on Spike TV’s Game Head with Geoff Keighley. In speaking about the somewhat surprising announcement that Gears of War would be coming to Windows much faster than anyone expected (and to XP as well), Rein also slipped in an even bigger surprise: Gears is coming to Macs as well, and so is Unreal Tournament 3:

In the interview, after Keighley asked Rein if he had any misgivings about Epic’s decision to bring that game to Sony’s PlayStation 3, a competing platform, Rein emphasized Epic’s position as an independent developer of game technology. The company first showed Unreal Engine 3 running a PlayStation 3 development console in 2005, long before the console was available to the public.

Rein then added, “Don’t forget, we’re also doing Macintosh.”

“Gears of War is coming to the Mac?” asked Keighley.

“Yes, Gears is going to come to the Mac and so is UT,” said Rein, referring to Unreal Tournament 3.

This is interesting on a few levels. First, one of the sort of journalism memes going around since Gears was hinted at for PC is that though the game might not be solely on the 360, it was still “exclusive to Microsoft platforms”, which is pretty obviously not the case. Second, I think the migration of Gears to Mac could well speak to Epic’s battles with Microsoft about the right to give away content, as well as Live for Windows and its growing pains. Third, Microsoft’s hold on Gears as publisher and partial rights holder is not as tight as a lot of people thought. It does sort of add a bit of credence to the theories floating around about Gears of War side stories popping up on other consoles. Well Microsoft? What’s your move? I hope it involves the words “free content” and “open platform”.

-Aegies