Duke Nukem Forever developer defunct, says staffer
From vapourware to nowhere?
Duke Nukem Forever, probably the best known example of vapourware in PC gaming, may now never be completed. Developer 3D Realms has shut down, a company employee has stated.
3D Realms webmaster Joe Siegler told 3D Realms forum members that rumours of the company's closure were "not a marketing thing. It's true".
Certainly, the company's website was down at the time of writing. As yet there's been no official confirmation of the closure, but other firms working on Duke Nukem-related games said they were continuing to do so despite "the situation at 3D Realms". So something's up.
If so, it leaves ongoing Duke Nukem Forever development hanging in the air. But then many Duke fans had given up hope of ever seeing the promised shoot-'em-up anyway.
Duke Nukem Forever was officially announced more than ten years ago - 28 April 1997, to be precise - and panting punters have been on tenterhooks ever since.
The first first-person shooter to challenge Doom's popularity on the PC in the mid-1990s, Duke Nukem 3D gained a legion of fans for its eponymous wisecracking hero and explosive action. It's sequel was pledged to contain better graphics, better gameplay and even more mayhem.
But switches from one 3D engine to another, as new, rival first-person shooters emerged - iD's Quake, Quake II and Quake III; Epic's Unreal and its many sequels - held development back, and fans wondered if the game would ever be released at all.
Only brief snippets of in-game footage have ever been shown, along with occasional mentions of release dates, often later said to have been taken out of context or announced off the record.
It's claimed 3D Realms ran out of cash - publisher Take Two Interactive has said it wasn't funding the game's development despite winning the right to release the title when complete. It said it still owns the game's publication licence.
Will it pick up the tab now? That depends on whether it or anyone else believes the work to date is worth preserving. Hardcore fans will want that to happen, but many more one-time Duke players have long since moved on to other titles, other platforms. ®
COMMENTS
@ Glen
I had to register just to respond to your quake analysis. bajillion quid...it was $325 bucks for a 3d accelerator, I was in my early 20s and had 2 kids when I purchased my first voodoo1 card, so it wasn't prohibitively expensive. Quake deathmatch didn't suck....ever, and CTF was outstanding with 16 players on a dial-up connection! I should know I played it for years. It rocked and will ALWAYS be #1 as far as shooters go for pure instantaneous, non-stop action. You have no idea what you're talking about.
But as far as Duke Nukem Forever. Good. It's about time 3DRealms bit the dust. How they 'survived' this long with vaporware is beyond me. Bunch of losers.
@ daniel re: nostalga
dont forget that the original quake ran like a dog on the same systems that duke would play quite happily.
quake: any more than 5 or 6 bad guys in a room and most computers of the time would crawl, (no more than 3 onscreen at any one time) unless you had a bajillion quid for a 3d accellerator card (gl quake gasp!), thats what made quake death match suck in the long term... that and all the brown... and the lag...
duke: streets that looked sorta like streets, "many" bad guys, the same juvinile humour that has kept GTA, south park, bevis and buthead et al solvent for decades (well 1, anyway), i mean a lot of us *were* teenage boys then, and we were the only ones playing computer games, or at least the only ones that would pay to see cartoon strippers.
as for comparisons to ABBA, most of the music of theirs that is around now has been filtered by years of people forgetting about the rubbish. (how many albums full of songs? how many songs could we name?)
so yes, the ai was crap (as with all fps till half life), the graphics were pixely even by the standards of the time, but all that was swept away when Duke would pipe up with a "witty" comment, or the many comedy deaths that could be caused.
(Hell, even the bugs could be funny, like how duke could kick with his right foot and left foot *at the same time* and remain standing.)
Sad to see Duke Nukem gone....
Are we talking about Apogee the orginal writers of Duke Nukem on floppy disk? I call it Duke Nukem 2D..along with Commander Keen, etc. I had alot of fun with these games back in the 80's
Open Source? Get real!
F/LOSS is completely unsuited for some types of application - games being near the top of that list.
You can't get coherent art direction from part-time amateurs and, unlike code monkeys, digital artists have very little reason to give away their work. High production values also require staff working closely together - and, often, for long hours, motivated by fear for their jobs - because you can't make a silk shirt the way you'd make a patchwork quilt.
Games are very much a "Cathedral" application, so "Bazaar" techniques are inadequate and inappropriate. Just look at what pass for open source games - nethack derivatives, a bunch of clones of casual/parlour/puzzle games, some sim/war games, the occasional bit of piss-poor 3d, and a handful of closed-source commercial games dumped out long after their value has expired.
(Coat, because that's apparently all 3DR's people will be leaving with)
Gutted?
Don't know why but I'm gutted! I used to love playing Duke Nukem.
Somebody "sensible" please buy it up.
