If you visit the official Gears of War 2 website, you will be greeted by the image shown above. While Epic thankfully decided to steer clear of any drawn out “ice reveal” publicity stunts (seriously, who does that?), it is believed that the image offers up a hidden clue to the games release date.

The image below reveals what appears to be the following digits on the dog tag: 033-116-117-126-071. Alone these numbers mean absolutely nothing, but 1up believes that the ASCII values translate into ESC-N-O-V-9. If true, it is very likely that the tag is hinting at an “escape” of some sort on November 9th, 2008.

The game has already been discussed as a November release, so despite the fact that this is only a rumor at this point, we wouldn’t be surprised at all if a November 9th release date ends up being confirmed by the Blaznatz himself at E3.

Thoroughly impressed by the 1up crew and their amazing detective work, we here at Ripten decided to do some digging around ourselves. After running the image through some very high end Photoshop “image enhancement” filters, we were able to reveal an additional hidden object hanging from the COG soldiers hand. Check it out below.

This confirms what we have suspected all along … everyone, even bad asses like Marcus Fenix, have a soft spot in their heart for the Cliffster.

Source: 1up

Tags: Cliffy-B, E3 08, Epic-Games, Gears-of-War-2

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1 Comment »

1. LC on July 9, 2008 12:04 am

   So cliff is officially flying his gay pride in public now? I suppose that explains gears of wars art direction and his recent comments about the next xbox controller being simpler with less buttons.

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