He could have been a fixer.

He could have been the one-man A-Team of game development, traveling from studio to studio to solve problems and launch games.

But given the choice, Rod Fergusson turned his back on the never-ending march from alpha to retail and instead returned to his home, to Gears of War.

It's like walking into a damp cave. The Figueroa's lobby is a throw-back to the Morocco of 1942's Casablanca. It's cool, dark and unusually empty. Later in the week the hotel's cavernous, tiled lobby will be filled with tipsy developers, journalists and marketers, overflow from the popular pool bar. But this afternoon no one is around, the games industry is busy, either at a major E3 press event, or heading to one. It's just Fergusson and I.

Fergusson is all smiles when we meet, a bearded happy face. He seems genuinely delighted about this new role with an old franchise. They way he describes it, the job offer was like reuniting with an old friend. We sit down on a wood slat bench in the lobby and chat about Fergusson's journey from Epic's Gears of War to Black Tusk's upcoming take on the same franchise.

The Gears of War Epic

Launched in 2006, Gears of War was seen by some as a sort of antidote to typical military shooters. It was a shooter with personality, a smart game that blended cinematic angles with storytelling and gritty, gruesome firefights.

The third-person shooter was driven by a story about the fight to save humanity both literally and metaphorically. The series was a monster hit, selling more than 22 million copies and earning more than a billion dollars. It was the product of a team of talented game makers at Epic Games that included Cliff Bleszinski and Fergusson, who was the executive producer.

Fergusson left Epic in August 2012, about a year after Gears of War 3 shipped. The timing lined up almost perfectly with China's Tencent Holdings purchasing nearly half of the company. The purchase kicked off a slew of high-profile departures including Fergusson, Bleszinski and Epic president Mike Capps. It also brought with it a fundamental shift at the studio to making a different sort of game, some felt.

Fergusson went straight to Irrational Games, where he helped ship BioShock Infinite and cemented his name as a sort of a fixer or finisher, a person who could help pull everything together, fix the problems and ship a game. After shipping Infinite, Fergusson announced he was joining 2K Games to lead a new studio on an unannounced project, and then a few months later announced another move: a homecoming of sorts to Microsoft's Black Tusk Studios to pick up the Gears of War helm once more.

All said, Fergusson spent a bit less than two and a half years not working on Gears of War between leaving the game with Epic and returning to it with Black Tusk.

Why leave in the first place, I asked Fergusson — was it that he wanted a change of pace after working on a game for so long?

"No it was the exact opposite," he said. "It was the fact that Epic was done working on Gears ... I saw on the horizon with Tencent's involvement and what was happening within the company that they were changing direction in a pretty fundamental way in terms of the free-to-play and all those sorts of things, and it's not something I was interested in. I like AAA, big-narrative, big-story, big-impact games, so that's why I immediately went to BioShock Infinite because it was like, 'OK, here's this AAA story game. Maybe I can learn some new techniques.'

"Irrational is a story-comes-first, game-comes-second kind of place and Epic's a very much game-first, story-second kind of place. So it was like, 'Oh I'll pick up some techniques working with a powerful creative like Ken; there'll be things I learn from that.' And I did, and it was great as an experience to put on my resume. And in terms of just my life skills, it was a great experience to go through."

Working at Irrational, Fergusson said, taught him a lot about storytelling in games and how to think about the story.

"Part of it too is just, you work so long with the same team, it's one of the questions, how much can you effect change in another place," he said. "And that was something that Irrational helped me see that was like, 'Oh I can walk in and this project is in dire need of help and be able to help turn it around and deliver on time.' It was like, 'Oh, I'm able to do that again, and it's not just because I'm surrounded with a select set of lieutenants. I'm able to do it as well.'"

When the opportunity arose to return to the Gears of War franchise, Fergusson didn't hesitate. His time at Irrational taught him that while he loved finishing games, he loved being with his family more. And being in a constant state of "push" would eventually be too much, he said.

"After doing nine months away from home and being up in Boston and stuff, and I just realized something," he said. "Closing is my favorite part of a project. That time from beta to shipping, if I could be in that phase all the time, I'd be in that phase all the time. I love that, but the idea of just being away from family, and it's usually a pretty hard push all the time, and I actually had offers to do that. To go and like, 'Hey, this project, what you just did, do it again.' And I was like, 'I can't kind of do that.'

"So, once I found out that Black Tusk had Gears, it was a no-brainer. This literally is my dream job. If I were to sit down, if you were to say, 'Here's a piece of paper; write the perfect job description for yourself,' and I literally would be writing what I'm doing today. It's just crazy."

Expanding the mythos of Gears

Black Tusk isn't starting from scratch with Gears of War. Of course, the studio has all of the fiction and lore established for the first four games. But on top of that, they've got Fergusson and the ideas he was playing around with when he was at Epic.

"I brought with me the work I had done on it before, so that's a starting point for us, thinking about what we could do," he said. "There's definitely a lot of information that I had, what we'd been working on, what Gears could become when I was still at Epic. There's no reason to restart from scratch, so let's just talk about the things I've already been thinking about."

Fergusson declined to talk details, but said that for him, a return to the franchise means bringing the games back to what made Gears of War, Gears of War.

Over time with the same group of developers, in the hands of the same studio, the game started to stray from its core, Fergusson said.

"Regardless of how good the franchise is or how successful you are, I think people in the development team will tend to get tired or just want to express something differently," he said. "And so I think there was a little bit of frustration of 'we're doing more Gears.' I imagine if you were to talk to Infinity Ward or those types of people, regardless of how much success they have, people want to branch out and do something different. And so, that was something that I think was really great about Black Tusk, because there's such an energy about Gears, about getting to do Gears and just being able to embrace it.

"So, for me, it's about staying true to Gears as opposed to how can we just fundamentally change it just to change it creatively. So it's more about just hearkening back to what is the core essence of Gears."

Fergusson sees a lot of potential in the deliberate gaps of the franchise's backstory left by Epic Games.

"I think there's a lot people that feel like they don't know about our world, and we purposely did that," he said. "It's a mixture of purposely leaving stuff out because we wanted mystery, and there's just some stuff we just didn't want to or need to explain in the game.

"That's what I like about Gears of War games is, it tends to be a very constricted moment in time for the characters. It's like an episode of 24 to me. We're not 'let's go talk about three years in the life of this character.' It's about what happens over this two-day period, and so there's things. There's lots of stuff, backstory from the E Day, Pendulum Wars all the way to Gears 3, there's a lot of room in there. But I don't know if that's the place to go. I think there's lots of other places to go as well."

And in terms of those pillars — things like the cover system, the quick reload, the combat — those likely won't be messed with much by Black Tusk, at least not initially.

"With Black Tusk, we have to show that we have a legitimate claim to this IP and be able to show we know how to do it right before we do it differently," he said. "So I think there's a combination. It's about finding the right things to change. And there are some things that even though people try to copy us, we don't think they've nailed. I think the cover system, there's a feel to a Gears of War game that I've yet to find in another game where it feels the same. Whether it's the fluidity, the weight, the heaviness to the characters, the way that it feels like to be in cover, the roadie run character, those sorts of things.

"So there's things that I think are uniquely Gears that you just have to double down on, and then there's things we go, 'Hey, is there a way to be more contemporary with other mechanics that have maybe found their way into the genre that you have to take notice of?'"

Black Tusk: 150 strong

When he started at Black Tusk, Fergusson already had a fairly large team to work with. That's because the studio was already working on another game, he said.

The current team of about 150 is made up of a mix of senior talent from a cross-section of the industry, including people from EA's Radical and Black Box, from Crytek and a mix from all over the world.

"We have a really strong team," he said. "It's built up. I was able to slip in and actually start. On day one we were productive."

What about bringing the old Gears team back together, trying to reunite the band?

"I'd love to have the band back together," he said. "Anybody at Epic who wants to come to Vancouver, I'll welcome them with open arms.

"There's something about having that Gears culture, that idea of what it took to make Gears. And it gets ingrained in you, it's intuitive after a while, but that's not to say you can't train up another team."

While he's greeting Gears developers with open arms, he knows of at least one who won't take him up on that offer.

Bleszinski, he says, is clearly done with the franchise.

"I think the moment he left Epic he made it pretty clear he was done with Gears," he said. "And he's earned it."

The team at Black Tusk may not include a lot of Gears' veterans, but they did their best to immerse themselves in the game. There was a lot of Gears being played, a lot of reverse engineering and deconstruction going on when Fergusson arrived at Black Tusk. The new team wanted to figure out how the old team made Gears flow.

Since arriving Fergusson has been giving briefings on the branding, philosophies, pillars and "commandments" of the game. He's also brought in some Epic people, like senior designer Jim Brown, to spend a few days talking about things like what it means to design levels for the game.

Since selling the franchise to Microsoft, Epic has been very supportive of Black Tusk, Fergusson said.

"I think they're really happy that Gears is back with me," he said. "I can make sure our baby gets taken care of.

"And then we have the relationship with the engine as well. They want the engine to do well and they want the game to do well."

Home

When Microsoft decided to purchase the Gears of War franchise and rededicate an entire studio to its management, it was clear that it wasn't for a single game.

Fergusson says this is a long-term commitment.

"I think it needs a little bit of freshening up," he said. "I think you have to make something current, so I think there's things that we have to do there. But I think there's no reason why Gears needs to be short-lived at all. I think it's about being true to the franchise and paying it the respect it deserves so it can have that longevity. You have to invest in it, you have to believe in it and you have to treat it properly, and then yeah, I think it has legs to live on, for sure."

He's so convinced that this is a long-term job that Fergusson is moving his family from North Carolina to Vancouver. Prior to the post-E3 move, Fergusson spent four months commuting, hopping on flights seven hours each way every other Monday and then returning home the same way every other Friday.

"I love Vancouver," he said. "It's a beautiful city. I love the energy in that city."