Okay, so maybe it’s a slow news day. Here in the states we’re observing a national holiday (Presidents Day) that has us honoring some of the past leaders of the nation (think George Washington and Abraham Lincoln), so that may explain some of it. But in adding to the Katamari-like rumor bin, I’ve acquired this bit of information.

Travis Moss, the assistant editor at GamePro, has written a piece titled “Microsoft will buy Epic games for $1 billion this summer” that will be in the new issue of the mag available next month. Now that title is just all kinds of funny.

Microsoft wanting a chunk of Epic wouldn’t come as a total shock, being that Microsoft already paid them millions to develop the life-eater some of you refer to as Gears Of War, which not only was extremely well received but is still very popular on LIVE to this day. But would Epic really sell the entire company and hand over their Unreal Engine tech ? Microsoft controlling the most licensed multi-platform game engine on the planet ? And $1 billion ? That’s a whoooooole lot of money.

We’ll just have to keep our ears to the streets. But you can bet as soon as we hear something, you’ll be reading it here. In the meanwhile, a thing to keep in mind is that GamePro is the same magazine that wrote the Gears of War 2 Special Speculation Report. Even Epic’s CliffyB thinks it was just a cheap trick to sell a few extra copies of the magazine, so it’s safe to assume the upcoming article won’t have any inside scoop from Epic’s employees.