Black Tusk started with a team of approximately 20 full-time staff in 2012 as the project began preproduction, adding staff to grow to almost 100 by the end of 2013. That’s when the Microsoft Studios mothership presented it with a unique scenario and a difficult choice. We could continue working on the IP we were working on," Crump says. "Or we had the opportunity to take on Gears of War." "We went around the table and everybody was in favor of going for Gears of War."
"The next breath," Crump adds, "was 'oh, by the way, Rod Fergusson will be taking on leading the studio.' Everyone was pretty excited about that too. And then Rod showed up on Monday. It was all downhill from there."
Rod Fergusson had been considering his own future. Less than a year after shipping Gears of War 3 in September of 2011 as executive producer, and after helping Polish developer People Can Fly jump-start production on Gears of War: Judgment, Fergusson saw the writing on the wall as Chinese multimedia conglomerate Tencent bought a 40 percent stake in Epic Games for more than 300 million dollars. "They weren't going in a direction I wanted to go," Fergusson says, "and in my position as director of production I wasn't in a position I wanted to have anymore. With Tencent's involvement, it was very clear they were moving toward a free-to-play model. I wanted to do AAA big games on covers of magazines that people talk about, and sitting around working on patch after patch was not something I felt very excited about. So I told Mike Capps [then-president of Epic Games] 'I'm out.'"
2K games were afraid they wouldn't be able to ship infinite in time so Rod went and saved their ass
Then 2K tried to convince Rod to stay
They said instead of leaving completely why not stay with 2K and just take control of another studio.
"After six months, it was pretty clear that I was not in line with some of the leadership at 2K," Fergusson says. He says that management believed he wasn't changing enough about the IP. "We were not going to be able to make the best things going forward. Philosophically, we were just out of line."
Rod: I did nine and a half years at Microsoft and seven and a half years at Epic," he says. "I don't change jobs. I go in and stay there, and in the last three years I've said 'I quit' three times."
Fergusson says he thought about starting his own studio after leaving 2K, and called a friend at Microsoft to ask if they'd be interested in in joining him. His timing was serendipitous. "He says, 'What? Did you just quit 2K? We're buying Gears. If you're available, that changes a bunch of stuff,'" Fergusson says. "I said 'yeah, I'm available. If you get Gears, I'm in.'"
Crump says. "Of course there are going to be skeptics out there: 'These guys are gonna fail. It’s Microsoft; they’ll just squeeze this thing for money.' Having somebody come on board who’s so well known to the Gears community helped a lot to establish us as a studio that will treat the franchise the way the fans want it to be treated and take it seriously."
Within a week of Rod’s arrival we were mobilizing the entire studio to start preproduction on Ultimate Edition.
Fergusson says. "The first week was 'go play the three games and get familiar with Gears of War.' We even did stuff like trivia at the end of meetings. There were t-shirts that said this character or that weapon, just to play with it a little bit and show that part of the culture is around knowing about what you’re building
