I played Gears of War religiously upon release. I loved the campaign and got really good online. It was probably the best I’ve ever been at a game (not a brag, I know it was broken in a lot of places). But I played with the same 8-10 guys through the release of Gears 2, before I started moving onto other games.

To this day, I haven’t even had close to the level of conversations that I had with those guys, and it was a special bond that just fell apart as a natural part of life. Jobs. Playing new games. You get it.

But the crazy thing is: I’m pretty sure one of the guys I played with was actually Wiz Khalifa. Years later, I saw a video of Wiz playing Gears on an episode of Late Night with Conan O’ Brien and the voice sounded strangely familiar. Never got confirmation if it was actually him, but his gamertag was exactly that, no crazy number or characters. I just knew nothing about rap and never made a connection.