Apparently the newest trend in the games industry is to make major unveilings and announcements by using your website’s splash page to indirectly let the public know what is going on.  Not to be outdone by Blizzard’s crazy antics last week, Epic has decided to get their fans all atwitter by placing the above image on their website’s front end.

The image is quite beautiful, really, and it also gives us some crucial information about the release of Epic’s upcoming powerhouse shooter, Gears of War 2. As you can see, just one of the tags bears inscription, which reads 033-116-117-126-071. That might seem like gibberish to you (and me, to be honest), but the intrepid heroes of the interwebs recognized the numbers as Octal coding.  Now, here’s where it really gets geeky.  If you take the first set of numbers that reads 033 and convert them to hexadecimal you get “1B” which is the code for “Escape”.  And, when you take each of the remaining 3-digit combinations and convert them into ASCII, you get a neat little message that reads Nov 9.  That’s right, “Escape Nov 9″ is what we have to go on.

Now, that may seem like a stretch to some of you, but to be honest, this is basically as good of a confirmation of a release date as you’re going to get without a press release.  Until I hear otherwise, I’m going to mark November 9th on my calender as re-emergence day, and I suggest you all do the same.

[See also: Gears of War 2 gallery]