10 Video Game Facts That Aren’t True
9. Gears Of War Invented The Cover Shooter
For about a decade it was difficult to move in the video game industry without bashing your shins on cover-based-shooters. Largely, this is down to the success of the Gears of War series. Its heavy, effective gameplay was anchored around the usage of cover.
Until that moment we’d had to try our best to awkwardly position ourselves around corners or crouch behind walls in games, but Gears of War made snapping into cover a core part of its experience.
So, if you were unhappy about how every action game for ten years had cover-based shooting then Gears of War shoulders that blame.
But it didn’t come up with the concept. It merely perfected it. The system it used was essentially working off of what Kill.Switch had done five years earlier, allowing players to move in and out of cover with the push of a button. Kill.Switch was not the first game to feature cover shooting, as it had already been done by the likes of Time Crisis and WinBack in 2000, but it was the first game that made it its central gameplay mechanic.
That's okay Gears, you’ll always have the honour of being the originator of the chainsaw-bayonet which, to be fair, is way cooler.