The Mark Rein Q&A on TeamXbox follows up on a couple of long-debunked rumors (story and story) with the first semi-solid confirmation of plans for a PC port of Gears of War, which the Epic veep now says is inevitable, eventually (thanks Joystiq). After answering one question reaffirming the game as an Xbox 360 exclusive, Mark offers the following response to the question of whether it will stay that way:

’Til there’s something else. (chuckles) People ask me, “Are you going to do it on PC?” Yeah, eventually…I don’t think that’s any great secret that we would like to do it on PC, but for now it’s a 360 game. Eventually we’ll get around to a PC version. I just don’t know when.

That’s worked successfully for Halo. Halo was a big seller on PC long after it kind of peaked on the original Xbox, and they’re doing the same thing now with Halo 2. We work at the pleasure of a publisher who thinks both of those are their platforms, so I think it’s ultimately inevitable, and obviously we’re a PC company.

The big challenge is to make a game that was designed solely for the console…to take advantage of every last little corner of that console, to fill every little crack and run as many threads as we could and do as much to exploit the power of that machine, and make it run well on enough PCs to be worth releasing. That’s a challenge. UT will help us there, because Unreal Tournament 3 will be kind of our vanguard PC product, and it’s helping us get optimization on the PC. So it’s just a matter of, now, can we make Gears run on enough PCs that it’s worth selling…or do we have to wait in five years until everyone has a PC that can run it?

It’s inevitable, but it’s just not there today.