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How do you revive a property as venerable as Gears of War, having prised it from the grip of the original developer and thrust it into the palms of a fledgling team? For starters, you act indie. "When I joined, I tried to bring with me an independent development mindset that I had from working at Epic, at Irrational and so forth," recalls Coalition studio head Rod Fergusson, the genial yet hard-nosed Gears veteran who, post-Bioshock Infinite, has something of a reputation for being able to wrestle difficult projects into a shippable state. "Microsoft's a large organisation, and there are a lot of benefits to being part of a large organisation, but one of the things is that you can sort of get lost in the process, the bureaucracy, and I didn't want that.
"I felt like we had to get into an entrepreneurial spirit," he continues. "To be successful in games I think you have to have a 'get shit done' attitude, so we actually started a 'get shit done' program, where team mates can nominate each other for getting shit done, with T-shirts and a monthly 'get shit done' hero. All this stuff is just a way of reinforcing the culture that I want to have, which is that you don't get caught up in red tape. How would you solve a problem if this was your business, if you were an entrepreneur or a start-up?"
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