Gears of War PC won't start...any ideas?

Longshot here, folks, but I was wondering if anyone had any ideas. Asked over on Epic Games' GoW PC forum and got no responses.

So being thoroughly hooked on the cover-based shooter thing from ME2/3, I wanted to get back to the beginning, so I bought Gears of War PC for $19 on xbox.com for Games for Windows Live. It downloaded just fine, but when I try to run it, literally nothing happens. I double-click on the icon and...nothing. No error messages, no going into the game and crashing, etc. I just stay on the desktop. When I try to run it again, it tells me "another instance of Startup.exe is already running."

Any ideas?

 

...never mind, figured it out. It's the infamous date bug. Set my machine's date to 2007 and it opened just fine. Unfortunately

COME ON GUYS, you still haven't patched this bug?

EDIT: Now that I reset my clock to the current time, it boots up just fine. Maybe it just needed the original boot of the game to be pre-2008 and after that it functions fine? Ah well, it works and that's what matters.

 

Yeah sadly they abandoned that game along time ago. I am big Gears fan but after number one on the PC they said screw it and stuck with consoles. PC version was the best with added content and overall just a better experience with the mouse and keyboard. If you really end up enjoying the first game you should see if you can borrow an XBOX and get the 2nd and 3rd game cause wow they are awesome.

People Can Fly handled the port of it and they went on to make other games for EPIC like Bulletstorm.

 

My plan is to buy a second-hand Xbox 360 when the 720 drops...I got an amazing deal on a PS2 when the PS3 first dropped, and was planning on doing the same.

 

You can go here for the patch. Gears of War: Error "You cannot run the game with modified executable code"

 

It must have patched itself automatically once I got it working, but it's now running just fine. I played about a half-hour of it, no problem.

It's shocking to me how a five-year-old game can look and play at least as good as ME3, arguably better.

 

I forget what all that the patch does, but it is suppose to fix the date problem and some other improvements.
It is a great game, and I always like to go back and play it again.