How Gears of War’s Mad World trailer changed video game marketing forever

The series’ return was heralded by a Tears for Fears song – an unexpected tone for its chainsaw-guns and gore. We revisit how a splintering marriage gave birth to gaming’s saddest shooter

At the Xbox Games Showcase this June, Microsoft debuted a trailer for the eighth game in the violent, grandiose and unexpectedly maudlin Gears of War series: a prequel. The sight of series heroes Marcus Fenix and Dom Santiago as younger men is “an emotional homecoming like no other”, as Microsoft’s Xbox blog put it. But the real tug at the heartstrings comes with the first notes of a slow, instrumental rendition of Tears for Fears’ Mad World. “As a 41-year-old man, that piano got me tearing up,” wrote one YouTube commenter.

It’s a throwback to the original, iconic Gears of War trailer from 2006, in which a lonesome Fenix picks through his ruined world to Gary Jules’ plaintive cover of the same song. And you can’t blame Microsoft for leaning on nostalgia. As Mad Men’s Don Draper once said, it’s delicate, but potent. Eighteen years on, that Gears of War trailer is still some of the most effective video game marketing ever. It really spoke to the melancholy heart that beats within this superficially macho game.