GDC 2010: Gears of War iPhone port more complicated than hitting a button

Over the last few months Gears of War developer Epic has been make some exciting overtures to iPhone. Not only did the developer show off its Unreal Engine 3 running on iPhone 3GS late last year, but after the announcement of the iPad Epic head Mark Rein was prominent amongst the device's champions.

If you were hoping this meant Gears of War on iPhone is imminent, however, prepare to be disappointed. Speaking at GDC, Epic senior console programmer Josh Adams laughed off the possibility.

“You can't expect to take Gears of Wear, hit a button and expect it to work on iPhone."

He went on to state explain that the Unreal Engine 3 engine, which currently hasn't powered any commercially available games, will be 3GS-only due to the necessity for OpenGL ES 2.0.

On the plus side, it seems UE3 will be very straightforward for iPhone game developers to use. Around 90 per cent of the engine's core code is unmodified, so it'll purportedly be just like developing in the standard Unreal editor.

No word yet on when the first UE3 games will be available, or what Epic has in store for iPad.