“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

RESEARCH, PEACHES, AND EXPLOSIVES
A few hours into the road trip, as the smaller towns of northern Georgia fill the rearview mirror, conversation turns to the studio’s first big break. The Master Chief armor they’d created for themselves in 2004 came to the attention of Bungie and Microsoft, who quickly commissioned the production of 50 full-sized suits at over four grand a pop. Suddenly, Sid and company had more work than they could handle. “We dropped everything, and worked day and night to make it happen,” Sid recalls. Since then, NAS has carefully balanced paying gigs with the independent armor projects that the crew proudly wears to Atlanta’s own DragonCon, which Sid affectionately describes as a “sci-fi, horror, Mardi Gras tornado.”

When Sid and his crew go digging for projects, they don’t have to look very far. Everyone at Nightmare Armor Studios shares a love for science-fiction films, comics, novels, and, above all, videogames. Gears of War’s compelling gameplay might’ve sparked their interest, but the game’s brutal realism and visual richness appealed to them artistically — “the closer you took, the more you see,” as Sid puts it. Concept art was studied, screenshots were pinned up, and of course, hundreds of hours of Xbox Live “research breaks” were logged; from there, it fell to the sculptors to re-create the details out of blocks of high-density foam.

But to compose lifelike, wearable armor, something has to die. For NAS, it’s the original sculptures, which are sometimes destroyed as they give birth to a mold (see sidebar). The casts made from that mold — sanded, detailed, and painted — offer the real payoff, because then you can see the armor mounted on someone’s body, and watch an imaginary character start to emerge into the real world. Still, Sid’s got something special planned for the original Gears weapon prototypes: they’re being granted second lives as part of a polished gift for everyone at Epic. All the NAS team has to do is get there to deliver it.

Welcome to the south!

After about four hours of driving, South Carolina greets the crew with an enormous water tower painted like a peach — or, more accurately, a giant asscrack. Thankfully, the state highway also offers a string of fireworks stands, so the crew picks up a few smoke grenades amid garish packaging boasting vaguely naughty selling points like “quad banger” and “maximum burst.” The smoke will make for a more dramatic entrance, but it might be a late one: The big reveal at Epic Games is planned for 2 p.m., the convoy is still nearly four hours away, and Delta Squad needs 45 minutes to get suited up once they arrive. It’s time to put the pedal to the floor.

Tony smokes where no man has smoked before. Dane immortalizes the moment.

GHOST RECON
Cliff Bleszinski, lead designer of Gears of War, knows something is up — he just can’t figure out what it is. It’s 1:15 p.m. and the fleet has finally rolled into Raleigh; the team hastily loads the cargo containers into a conference room, which will serve as an ad hoc barracks, but Cliffy recognizes a frazzled editor from OXM, and other Epic employees comment on the number of strangers scurrying through the lobby. Everyone’s suspicious.

Thankfully, Mark Rein managed to keep today’s visit a secret, but he can’t do it for much longer. He keeps poking his head into the conference room, telling everyone to hurry up with amicable impatience. As the layers of padding and armor go on piece by piece, each artist becomes a particular member of Delta Squad, weapons in hand. Caleb dyed his hair blonde to play Baird; Rob’s Carmine helmet is detailed with dripping blood. It’s gruesomely appropriate and gorgeously grungy.

Caleb, Clint, and Sid suit up.

Unlike the shiny Spartan armor, the gritty Gears outfits demanded a rougher approach. So the Nightmare artists turned on their creations, inflicting purposeful damage like bullet scars and pockmarks in the name of realism. Blood and rust dine on the Lancer’s chainsaw bayonet, while scorched oil stains the Boltok pistol. The weapons feel as good as they look; the Lancer in particular has the lightweight heft of an all-purpose death machine from the future. Holding a “real” COG rifle conveys a strange mix of emotions: power, joy, and no small amount of fear. Even fake chainsaw teeth look and feel dangerously real. Holding it in hand, you can’t help but want to melee a Locust with the thing. You simply want to play.

Meanwhile, Sid’s going through a critical transformation. Loaded up with armor plating, rifle, and Marcus Fenix’s do-rag, Sid looks like he just stepped out of a multiplayer match. “When I get into the suit, I’m in-character,” he says with respectful pride. “I am Marcus Fenix.”

Sid Garrand, aka Marcus Fenix.

FOG OF WAR
It’s show time. With the Epic staff distracted with a cunning ice-cream social, Lionel tosses smoke grenades around the corner of the building. Delta Squad penetrates the haze, weapons in hand, striding purposefully toward the unsuspecting employees. A voice cries out: “What the hell is this?” Someone else shouts, “Carmine lives!” Within moments, the crowd is a sea of dropped jaws and shiny cell-phone cameras. Even CliffyB, who usually looks perpetually ready for his close-up, seems a little stunned, emerging from the crowd to tentatively poke and prod each soldier. “The entire thing is just downright trippy and fulfilling,” he says, knocking on the armor, re-enacting game scenes, even pretending to kick Carmine in the crotch. He can do what he likes — his lifesized action figures just arrived.

Only CliffyB is allowed to do that.

After a few minutes of gawking, Sid breaks character. “Once we started playing Gears of War, we were hooked,” he tells the crowd. “We said, ‘That’s our armored suit for the year.’” The scene becomes a mutual-admiration society as members of the crowd start venturing out to have photos taken with the squad, striking silly action poses and asking “Where’s your dropship?”

“At first I was a bit taken aback,” admits Gears producer Rod Fergusson. “You’re used to these guys being virtual, so to see them in real life walking around a corner is a bit surreal.” Cliffy agreed. “I didn’t know whether to jump up and down and cheer or get the hell out of there,” he added. “It was like meeting a celebrity, or having your dreams come to life right in front of your face.” Even the bewildered ice-cream servers are beaming with a mixture of confusion and excitement, cameras snapping all around them as Delta Squad takes an ice-cream break. For all the insane deadlines and relentless pressures of working in a multibillion-dollar entertainment industry, Epic is a sea of easy smiles today.

Everybody got a chance to get their photo taken with Delta Squad.

While Mark Rein conducts his own arms inspection — “Look at all the blood on the chainsaw!” he squeals, with a hint of sick glee — the squad retreats for a moment, and returns bearing a gift for Epic: a military-style trophy case. Sealed inside are the results of hundreds of hours of artistic labor: the original sculptures of the Lancer, Snub pistol, and Boltok pistol, now chrome-plated and preserved for posterity. Screened inside the case’s background is the legend “There’s a reason why nightmares happen in the dark.” To top it off, Sid presents Cliff and Mark with their very own blood-spattered Lancer and COG helmet to pass around the office. Mark immediately puts on the helmet and strikes a heroic pose, but Cliff looks humbly overcome. He wears the helmet for the remainder of the day.

Presenting arms!

ART BEYOND ART
After the gang has stripped off their armor and character quirks, Sid is called away to chat with Mark Rein and Epic’s vice president of business development, Jay Wilbur, to talk business. While details were not finalized at press time, the stage seems set for Nightmare to keep creating Gears of War armor, now with Epic’s official blessing. “We’re blown away,” Jay says. “The quality of the armor was beyond what I could have imagined.”

It's love.

“When I see that kind of dedication, I definitely feel proud,” adds Fergusson. “The team here put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into making Gears, and it’s incredible to see fans willing to put in hundreds of hours’ worth of their own work to show their enthusiasm for the game and world we’ve created.” Mark Rein already seems to be planning the next visit: “Next time you’re going to drive in in the APC, right?”

After Epic treats the gang to a few sneak-peek rounds with the then-unreleased Hidden Fronts maps, Sid Garrand — running on adrenaline instead of sleep — is weary but wired. It’s clear that Epic appreciates Nightmare’s creations as much as Nightmare appreciates Epic’s. The cycle of inspiration looped back on itself, creating what Sid had hoped for from the journey — what he describes as “art beyond art.” “This was a dream come true,” he declares. “I don’t think it could’ve gone any better. I’ll remember this forever.”