At a community event in Canada recently, Epic games revealed how they convinced Microsoft to upgrade the Xbox 360 to run Gears of War by increasing the amount of RAM in the console from 256MB to 512MB.

Epic Games vice president, Mark Rein, told gamers in a Q&A session that, "What happened was, my partner Tim Sweeney, we kept arguing and we really wanted a hard drive in every single machine; that was something we really wanted but we realized that the 512 megs of RAM was way more important, cause otherwise you couldn't do this level of graphics if you had to both write your program and do your graphics in 256 megs. Nothing would really look that HD.”

"So the day they made the decision, we were apparently the first developer they called; we were at Game Developers Conference, was it two years ago, and then I got a call from the chief financial officer of MGS and he said 'I just want you to know you cost me a billion dollars' and I said, 'we did a favour for a billion gamers'."

From what we've seen so far of Gears Of War it's looking as though the investment may well pay off, but is it really down to just Epic Games that the Xbox 360 was upgraded? Microsoft have yet to comment on Epic's huge boast.