The Gears of War games are amongst one of the most beloved console shooters in recent history, and it's still paying dividends. Nearly a year ago to the day, it was announced by Epic Games that it had managed to port Gears of War 3 to the PlayStation 3 despite it being an Xbox exclusive title. Sadly, the company did not show any intentions of actually releasing it to the public. However, one dedicated user has managed to make it available online by uploading it to the Internet Archive.

A Twitter user by the name of PixelButts posted a couple of days ago saying that, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the release of Epic's Gears of War 3, they were releasing the PS3 build to archive.org, effectively making it available for people to download and play. In the tweet, PixelButts, who identifies themselves as an archivist, says they don't plan to take any questions or provide tech support for those do decide to download it, though.

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It's also worth mentioning that it's not as simple as downloading it to a working PlayStation 3. The archived page itself says that a normal PS3 is not enough to run the game. Players must have additional memory from a PlayStation development kit, or devkit. There are instructions on the page on how to get Gear 3 running on a PlayStation which, if followed, should allow anyone to play it. It seems to necessitate some degree of advanced knowledge and, according to the information, a keyboard is required in order to "load maps and game modes."

It sounds a little complicated, but it seems as though the archivist has gone out of their way to provide a functioning copy of Gears of War 3 that works on Sony's now-outdated console, something which Epic Games did not go ahead and do. In fact, Epic denied that this was an unreleased port, saying that it was simply a "byproduct" of the Unreal Engine 3 testing process.

Whatever the case may be, it seems that there is a workaround for fans of the series to finally play Gears of War 3 on their old PlayStation machine. With a recent announcement that Xbox Live Gold subscribers will be able to play the likes of Gears 5 for free for the next couple of days, it's arguably not beyond the realms of possibility that more people will be tempted by the PS3 port now that the franchise is in the news again.

Gears of War 3 is available now for the Xbox 360.

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Source: Kotaku, Internet Archive