Gears of War: The Epic Journey

“You don’t make it, actually.”

“Huh?” answers a confused Rob Robbins. The 21-year-old compsci student has just completed an eight-hour drive from Atlanta, Georgia, to Raleigh, North Carolina, home of Gears of War developer Epic Games. He’s nervous, he’s running on no sleep, and at the moment, he’s decked out in the full body armor of doomed Delta member Carmine. And now, moments before the squad’s public debut, Epic Games Vice President Mark Rein has stopped him in the company’s lobby to tell him he’s a dead man walking.

“You don’t make it,” Mark repeats with a skeptical laugh.

The irony is, Rob did make it. Over the last four months, as a member of Nightmare Armor Studios, Rob helped create the Gears armor and weapons that he and the NAS crew are currently wearing. With a little help from Mark Rein and OXM, a pilgrimage was arranged: a road trip from Atlanta to Raleigh, culminating in Delta Squad landing on the development team’s doorstep. Now that the moment is finally here and the smoke grenades have been spiked for the team’s big entrance, only one question remains: Will four months of hard labor and fanboy love be good enough?

FORGING AHEAD
It’s 5:30 on a chilly April morning when the NAS crew loads up for the road. Excitement for the trip means nobody got much sleep. Loaded up with low-octane fuel and high-octane energy drinks, the three-car caravan heads north before the sun has a chance to rise.

This is a team excursion in every way. The Nightmare crew is nothing if not diverse: Caleb Hunter left his assistant-manager post at GameStop to sculpt armor full-time. Clint Moss specializes in detailing each prototype to hold up under close fanboy scrutiny. Christina Johnson, a former Marine Humvee mechanic, brings real-world military knowledge to the crew. Christina’s brother Tony is either quiet or simply exhausted from balancing school, a job at a steel plant, and off-hours studio work. Rob Robbins is the youngest — a studio apprentice in the old artisan tradition who does whatever’s necessary to bring a project to completion. Filmmaker and friend Lionel Zafar is along to help chronicle the ride. (He also provided many of the photos for this article.)

Some of Nightmare Armor Studios: Rob, Sid, Tony, and Caleb.

But the man at the wheel is Sid Garrand. Garrand has been many things over the course of his 32 years — skate rat, punk rocker, club bouncer, oil painter, amateur wrestler, and motorcycle-accident road burger — but discovering a latent talent for sculpture five years ago earned him his latest title: fictional arms dealer. It’s an appropriate career for the great-grandson of John Garrand, who designed the M1 Garand semi-automatic rifle that served the U.S. infantry during World War II. Sturdily built and festooned with tattoos, Sid is half successful businessman, half over-grown kid making the toys he personally wants to play with. As Sid puts it, “At the end of the day, it’s just costumes — but this is my life.”

Sid’s life revolves around Nightmare’s modest studio, which dominates the backyard of his suburban home. Combine the bohemian charm of an artist’s loft, the classified intrigue of an Area 51 bunker, and the eccentricity of a mad scientist’s laboratory, then sprinkle liberally with resin chips and Rubbermaid containers. Add in paint fumes, and you have to wonder where the reality ends and the hallucination begins. And, in a sitcom-worthy twist, most of the artists live together under one roof. It’s practically a cosplay commune.

A sampling of helmets NAS has created over the years

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