Apparently, 1Up employs cryptologists as well as games journalists, as some clever sleuthing has unearthed what is believed to be the release date for Gears of War 2. The team scoured a Gears of War splash page which features a soldier holding COG tags, one of which bears the digits: 033-116-117-126-071.

Now, must of us would just assume these are random numbers that have no significance, but that’s why we’re not geniuses. Someone had the clever idea to plug the numbers in as ASCII octal values, and lo and behold! they come up with ESC-N-O-V-9, a.k.a. "Escape November 9th."

We had been anticipating a November release for Gears, and this all but confirms the specific day. Thankfully, this will give you a few weeks to play the game before Thanksgiving hits, so you can actually enjoy a nice dinner with family rather than fervently curb-stomping and chainsaw-dueling random strangers. Oh Epic, always looking out for the American family.

Of course, this is still rumor for now, but we fully expect Microsoft to confirm this date on Monday at their E3 press conference. If they don’t, you can fully expect us to troop immediately over to the Epic booth and badger them into telling us when the game drops, forcing them to talk by any... means... necessary.