Epic Denies Claims Of Gears Demo (Again) News

Way back in the heady days of summer, in August to be precise, Epic Games' Vice President Mark Rein commented that a demo for the studio's Gears of War would be unlikely before the game hit stores in November.

Though the matter seemed to be closed at the time, a dog tag on a header image of Xbox.com UK with "Gears of War Demo" written on it, appeared on the site before it's 24 hour downtime earlier today. So is a demo going to be coming out after all? After all, it's an official Xbox site including the words "Gears of War Demo"...surely 2 plus 2 equals 4, right?

Well, not if you're Mark Rein, who has set the record straight for a second time on the Epic Forums, stating that:

"Just saw the dog tag image with the "Microsoft points". It just isn't true. There is no demo coming out before the game ships and I have no idea if we'll do one after the game ships or not. Right now there are no plans to do one as I said earlier in this thread. I have asked Microsoft to take that image down."

So will they, won't they? There's no doubt that Gears of War is being marketed as the biggest title of Christmas 2006, so the balance of making sure that a demo would entice or harm further sales is key for Epic and Microsoft alike.

In the mean time, Xbox.com and Xbox Live are both down until 8am BST tomorrow (Wednesday) morning, so we can't check to see whether Rein's request for an image change has worked until then.

We'll have more news shortly...