It seems that following the long teaser campaign with gradual reveals that Blizzard employed before the announcement of Diablo III, Epic, the creators of Unreal Tournament and Gears of War, are also implementing a viral teaser strategy prior to the big announcement at E3 regarding Gears of War 9.

The image that accompanies this piece and that you can see on the left showed up as a splash page on the official site a few hours ago. It depicts a Gear soldier holding on to some dog tags but we can also make out a gun in his left hand (are there any lefty characters in the game?). There's also a hint of things flying around and of the sun going down behind them. It's beautiful detailed game art. And most would leave it at that.

However, a couple of intrepid observers noticed that the dog tags have symbols etched into them, and so went about investigating. The symbols are numbers, more exactly 033-116-117-126-071. Turn this into something ASCII readable, by way of ASCII table, and you get ESC-N-O-V-9. Which is pretty clear in its meaning. Gears of War 2 is coming out on November 9 and we might also presume that the same date marks some important event in the timeline of the new game.

Epic has neither confirmed nor denied the meaning of the numbers on the dog tags but, as always, such information would not make it onto the company's web page if it was not sanctioned by the leadership. It might be that some random artist just put that "message" there to confuse us, but now we're all expecting the moment when Cliff Bleszinski takes the stage at the E3 trade show, to deliver the official release date for the Xbox 360 exclusive that is Gears of War. The date will, of course, be November 9.