Oh dear, I've just discovered that the thing that I had always assumed was just a joke, was actuallly real. There really was a Duke Nukem Forever? I thought that was just an internet code for Did Not Finish, like you see in racing car results.
This Reddit thread on why it was canceled is hilarious:
"Poor developers got screwed over. They coded the whole thing in Arc before an implementation was released, then Paul Graham pulled a stunt and released a set of MzScheme macros instead of the auto-vectorizing native code compiler he promised them."
Actually, this probably increases the likelihood of Forever getting made. 2K/Take Two owns the publishing rights to the game. If they made the determination that the title carried enough cachet to complete, they could easily buy the IP, the existing code (if they liked), and develop it in-house at 2K Marin, 2K Australia, or even 2K Boston.
Given that it was most certainly vaporware at 3D Realms, you're starting from a probability of 0. I'd give Forever a 10% chance of being published now.
[Note: I have no inside information about 2K or 3D Realms at this time.]
Plus given all the hype around the game as it is, people will more than likely buy the game just to say they owned a copy of something that wasn't supposed to exist.
Hell, make it a "Limited Edition" like Nintendo did with
"Ocarina of Time" which in the context of that game seemed to mean "Limited (to as many of them as we can sell) Edition"
That way there is also a sense of scarcity created, where there is none.
I read this yesterday about some changes Nintendo made between pressing the gold cart and later versions:
Eventually the Muslim community complained that the chanting was in the game, and it had to be removed, along with the original Mirror Shield crescent moon design, which is also an Islamic symbol. The only way to see either one of these things now is by playing the original OoT Version 1.0, which amounts to all of the gold cartridges and only the very first gray ones.
To be honest, I don't think I've ever seen the grey cartridge version of Ocarina of Time, at least not in Australia... I purchased my Ocarina of Time just around the same time Majora's Mask was released and I received a gold one.
I remember at the time talking to the salesperson at EB about if it was so limited edition, how could I pick order one easily after the release of the next version. He told me that he'd never seen a non "limited edition" (his fingers went up in the air to indicate the quotation marks) version.
I'm tempted to say the game's worth more dead than alive. It's been over 12 years now since it was first announced so anyone desperate to play it has probably come to terms with never getting that opportunity.
Beyond that I have to believe it would have found some way to get produced by now if it was really a great game. My guess is it's a mediocre mis-mash after 12 years of mishandling.
So in the end it's legendary as a game that was promised for over a decade and never delivered. But if it ever does get released, and it is bad, it will just be another sucky game that fell by the wayside.
There's nothing stopping them from licensing the latest id engine and writing a Duke Nukem game with it and just calling it Duke Nukem Forever, which is probably a more plausible line of action than continuing with what they have now.
…but that’s what they’ve been doing all along. They’ve been on the engines of all of Quake 2, Unreal, Unreal 2 and Doom 3 I believe. The trouble with that approach is that every couple of years the state of the art has moved on so much that you have to regenerate all of the graphical assets (models, textures, etc.).
Companies such as Blizzard and Valve are rightly applauded for ensuring the quality of their games by delaying or cancelling them as necessary. For years I've been defending 3D Realms, saying that the situation with DNF was no different: it's not a game that has been in development for 13 years. It's two cancelled games and another that has been in development for five years.
Perhaps they were doing the right thing but have been terribly unlucky somehow. Perhaps they were simply perfectionists, doomed never to be satisfied and fooling themselves into thinking that starting again would fix everything. Perhaps they played WoW all day, in denial about their rapidly depleting funds.
Any one of these scenarios seems possible. I hope we find out in the coming days and weeks just what went wrong over there.
Companies such as Blizzard and Valve are rightly applauded for ensuring the quality of their games by delaying or cancelling them as necessary.
People also seem to conveniently forget that Vivendi Universal were actively trying to offload Blizzard a year or two prior to the release of WOW, because the studio was hemorrhaging money as a result of this philosophy.
It's a good way to be when you're continually producing titles that knock people's socks off - which 3D Realms weren't.
You can defend many things, but the fact is, they cocked it up in a big way. There's no defence against poor performance.
They were working on a lot of other things besides DNF so it spent most of that time on the shelf. It's not like they had a team working on this thing for 9 years straight. The real push to get the game released didn't start until relatively recently-- I think only in the past couple years.
DNF is actually a playable game. In fact, I know someone who played it and thought it was great. As far as I'm aware most of the remaining work was creating level maps and polish.
3d Realms didn't shut down because of this game. It's just one game in their portfolio, albeit one of the more recognizalbe ones.
They did start over, at least twice. I think the first implementation was with the Quake 2 engine, but once it became obvious that was too dated, they moved to a version of the Unreal engine.
Their brand alone costs good few millions. There's also an accumulated goodwill, naturally acquired (mostly positive) hype and lots of curiosity surrounding the title.
"Giving up" here just doesn't make any business sense.
In other words - "we should all try" consider the circumstances when deciding to lose hope, admit loss, etc. YMMV.
I spent all these years waiting for someone to post the lyrics to Chinese Democracy and a strategy guide for Duke Nukem Forever on Project Xanadu, and today I have nothing left but bitter disappointment.
I'm going to be walking around all day now muttering "balls of steel..."
Sounds like a great dare/challenge - see how long you can remain engaged in conversation using only the DN phrases in this video. 2* the points for use in a meeting.
Except that Chinese Democracy is unbelievably bad. But perhaps whoever owns the rights to DNF now could get funding the same way Axl did: exclusive retail deal with Best Buy.
It didn't take 9 years though - as far as we know the original TF2 was put on ice to focus on releasing Half-Life 2, and work didn't begin proper until that game was released, at which point they scrapped what they had in the first place.
Curiously, the development of DNF is very similar... switching engines, scrapping previous work several times, eventually releasing screenshots and gameplay videos. We don't know how much other Valve projects delayed the production of TF2, but we also don't know how much other 3D Realms projects (e.g. Prey) delayed DNF. The big difference is TF2 released while DNF did not.
I had the idea this year, sadly too late, for a great April Fool's - sneak a pro-looking display selling DNF, complete with boxes of discs, into any relevant games retailer. And now I never can.
This is a tragedy. We will have a storm of vaporvare jokes now, but 3D Realms was actually one of very few utterly uncompromising game developers. This seems like a massive case of perfectionism run wild, but perfectionism is how you create really great stuff.
Prey was released after 10 years in development, and it is one of the artistically best games I've ever played. We are not talking about desktop software here. Perfection in games is good.
I've actually been looking forward to this game, expecting that it will be completed and be as good as the developers' obvious OCD suggests. 3D Realms' track record doesn't suggest that I was wrong about this judgment, but their bankruptcy does. Now we are in the situation where the best-case scenario is that we get a lame ripoff that breaks the spirit of the original, just like we always feared.
Personally I'm glad it will never be released, else it would invalidate all those analogies comparing something to DNF as a way of saying it will never be released. It would waste a nice well-established meme.
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"The closure came about as a result of funding issues, our source explained"
Rats! Now I'll have to stop joking that Duke Nukem Forever is in a holding pattern, waiting for a rewrite in Perl 6. And it would have been great, too -- if they just could have gotten a fully implemented Perl 6 compiler in time! :-D
Parrot 1.0 was released. This means the API is more stable, and this was the main problem of Rakudo (the Perl 6 compiler for Parrot).
The jokes about Perl 6 are kind of lame. It's an open-source project and you can check its progress (instead of reading reddit :)) ... regular releases are made, and it does have a comprehensive tests suite. The latest version released in April is passing 10467 spectests (65% of the tests suite), with an increase of 3194 since March.
I know that it's fun joking about such projects, but Perl 6/Parrot are very ambitions, and even if they could use some help, progress is being made. I wouldn't be surprised if the "Christmas release" is this year.
