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.).
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.]