Duke Nukem Never

[Jonathan]

http://www.shacknews.com/featuredarticle.x?id=1127

3D Realms shut down before Duke Nukem Forever could escape. I am surprised. Why close shop after 12 years of no revenue?

[George]

I'm not sure why anyone believes that they were still working on it.

[Jonathan]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWuteFLUPSY

Because they released a trailer 18 months ago?

[George]

A couple months ago, I happened across a website that talked about the game's history. They've been releasing teaser screen shots and stuff the entire time. But noone's seen anything playable. I doubt any game company short of EA has the margin to keep a full development team employed for this long without a single product.

[quantus]

Even EA couldn't do it and keep the stock holders happy. It sucks to be a public company and try to follow any strategy that needs longer than a year to work unless you've got as much cash as Microsoft or Google.

[Alan]

I'm just surprised it lasted this long before someone finally pulled the plug. How they managed to keep someone paying them all to produce nothing for this long is truly an accomplishment. I wonder how these guys will spin this project on their resumes.

What was the deal? From my perusing it seems like they just kept missing deadlines and then had to start from scratch each time the gaming world moved on without them and made their game look like crap. And at the same time kept trying to add more cool stuff to their "game" instead of just getting it out the door.

[Jonathan]

I am 80% sure they turned over multiple teams. That is, no one (except maybe George Broussard) spent 12 years on this game.

They also spent a ton of developer time on the engine even though they had paid for a middleware engine and had no in-house engine expertise (the Duke Nukem 3D engine was developed by a contract programmer). I think possibly they couldn't ever get their art assets working right in the engine, so they kept tweaking and switching the engine and failing, horribly.

But I guess we'll only really know if someone writes a book about it. Or maybe a blog.

[Vyrosama]

the plot thickens or does it....

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Duke-N ... ,7759.html

http://gamingisstupid.com/2009/05/06/th ... y-revival/

I see some merit in the conspiracy but it still seems too far-fetch (I'm not even considering the "chair" incident). I'd imagine that developer/publisher wannabees would be more interesting in licensing the epic engine after seeing "results" versus knowledge it is being used for a big name game. Who cares if it's being used for DNF or heck even SC2, if the game bombs the market...why would I want that engine?

[Dave]

BECAUSE IT CONTAINS BUBBLEGUM

[quantus]

They should've just done a bait and switch... Something like, "yeah yeah, we're working on DNF, but wait, we have DN: Kickin' Ass to keep you busy for now." That way they could've been making even more money on the Franchise rather than just engine licensing revenue.