CGSociety is profiling Kevin Lanning, who you may not know, but might definitely recognize his work on God of War for the Xbox 360.

It’s always awesome to read up on how people got involved in the video game industry, and can even be a jumping off point for you if you’re looking for ways to get in yourself.

“I was contacted by Floyd Bishop at Ice Pond Studios to do some character work on a ‘GI JOE’ commercial they were subcontracting for,” Lanning says in the CGSociety feature. “I had a blast working on that project. In my eyes, this was the first real production work that I had done.”

Aside from the profile, there is some really awesome artwork. Give it a look.

In his most recent podcast, Major Nelson, a well known XBox PR outlet, has said that Epic Games cost Microsoft a BILLION dollars. Apparently, Epic Games was single-handedly responsible for the decision to include a 512 MB RAM chip in the 360, rather than a (supposedly) proposed 256 MB chip. This was brought up in relation to the recent debate over Microsoft charging for the Gears of War Map Pack. You might remember, Epic Games felt that the map pack should have been provided for free, and Microsoft wanted to charge for it.

Maybe it’s just me, but if Microsoft is allowing a single developer to chart the course of their console development, they need to take a long, hard look at their development process. Now, if Epic said, “Hey Microsoft, we really need 512 MB of RAM in this console so that we can make some seriously great games that will help sell your XBox 360,” and Microsoft said, “Hey, sounds good to us,” then what’s the problem here? Microsoft benefits by more console sales and associated hardware, Epic gets to make Gears (which rocks) and reap the rewards from that.
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The crew over at XBox360fanboy.com has a great preview video of the recently released Gears of War Hidden Fronts Map Pack. Here’s the deal: Watch the video, and THEN decide if it’s worth 800 points.

The long-awaited Gears of War Hidden Fronts map pack will be available on XBox Live Marketplace tomorrow. The pack will cost 800 Microsoft Points. However, if you don’t feel like paying for them, you can wait until Sept. 3, and they’ll become free. This strange state of affairs is a compromise between Epic Games and Microsoft.

You may remember the hullabaloo that accompanied the announcement that this pack would not be free. The controversy was that Epic Games wanted the pack to be free, and Microsoft wanted players to pay for it. Epic vice president Mark Rein said, “Epic thinks the way to maximize the return on Gears of War is to give the maps away for free and Microsoft thinks the way to maximize the return on Gears of War is to sell the maps.”

It’s no surprise to me that Epic wanted to give the maps away, as they have a long history of supporting their communities. Maybe Microsoft could give that a try.

Variety is reporting that New Line Cinema has won the rights to bring Gears of War to the big screen. Stuart Beattie whose previous work includes the Pirates of the Caribbean movies and Collateral will pen the film adaptation. While I would be willing to fork out some money to see Gears on the big screen, it’s hard for me to get excited about these kinds of things. After all, Halo went bust and I can’t remember the last time I heard about the WoW movie.