You all know that one of my favorite passtimes, is poking fun at 3D Realms and their lack of progress on Duke Nukem Forever (the most aptly named game in the history of the games industry).
Well, some guy decided to compile a list of events in the DNF development cycle (or lack thereof), including a long list of games that have been released in the interim, a small selection of UseNet posts, one for every year. Oh yeah, and this:
“The Voyager 1 spacecraft has travelled approximately 2.5 billion miles since the announcement of Duke Nukem Forever.”
Update: Rumors are abound that at some point development has switched to the Doom 3 engine… Heh, sorry, but I’m laughing my ass off here.
“That there Quake II engine looks pretty cool! Colored lighting and everything!”
“Yeah, it ain’t bad, we’ll take it!”
A couple of years later…
“Hmm, that Unreal engine is pretty good!”
“But… We’ve already built a whole bunch of levels and models. Set up lighting, designed encounters, written massive amounts of new code…”
“Bah! Naysayer! Nice engine, we’ll take it!”
“But levels are constructed in an entirely different manner on Unreal! There is no way we can just port our levels!”
“You’re fired.”
The unreal engine is continually updated, but then at some point the dear Brussard (CEO of 3D Realms) finds out that id Software is working on a new engine:
“Uh, per-pixel-lighting!”
“Sir, I don’t want to poke a pike in your pie. But we’re 6 years intos development now… Our competitors have all released 3 games each in the interim, and we’re only just now about done with rebuilding out levels for the Unreal engine, remodelling our models to current standards. And I don’t even want to tell you how many times the coders have rewritten their code, I think they may be wearing down a bit on this whole thing…”
“Bah Nigel, you were always a pussy! CHANGE ENGINE!”
“Sir, the leads are all wearing t-shirts that say ‘Time to chew bubblegum and burn out on the endless self-perpetuating game development cycle, and I’m all out of gum!’. And while I know that the plan was to lengthen development so much that a new Evil Dead movie could be released and we could once again rip it off, that just doesn’t seem realistic anymore! We’ve got to ship something!’
“Doom 3 it is then.”
“But the Doom engine isn’t even capable of handling the outdoor scenes that we have been rebuilding several times already!“
“F”
“Not to mention that we’ll have to rewrite all the code again!“
“I”
“We’re the ridicule of the games industry!“
“R”
“Will you be switching to the Half-Life 2 engine once that’s released? I mean why not? We’re already rebuilding everything for the third time, so what’s a third?!“
“E”
“I quit!“
Update Again: So it turns out that Gamespot was a bit hasty, and that they aren’t using the Doom engine, but rather their own in-house engine. Changing very little of the above conversation :)
“The rovers Spirit and Opportunity were proposed, authorized, announced, designed, launched and successfully landed upon Mars within the timeframe of Duke Nukem Forever’s development.”
hah :)
Personally, I think it’s insane that they’ve taken so long and I look forward to hearing their version of why that was once the game comes out. And yes I do think it’ll come out and I do think it’ll kick ass. I could certainly be wrong though, that’s for sure.
Also I think it’s kind of sad that someone would spend so much time “researching” such useless material just to illustrate how incompetent a certain video game development team is. Oh shit and he’s Canadian too :(
Mike: 3D Realms is a joke. They made one good game (I didn’t like it, and no, I don’t think their platforms were particularly interesting).
Just to put that into perspective, that’s like rooting for Limahl to make a comeback, for George Lucas to resurrect the Star Wars feeling of old, for the sexpistols to come back together and not be old men and or hey… World Peace.
I have absolutely no faith in Duke Nukem Forever ever making it onto the streets.
I swear, if it does, I will create a Duke Nukem themed template, which I will carry on this site for a minimum of two entire weeks. If it gets rave reviews I will carry it for an entire month.
I find not only the name amusing, but also the acronym it shares — Duke Nukem Forever -> DNF -> Did Not Finish…
I’m not really a first person fan, but hey ;)
Michael: For once I totally disagree with you. In my opinion 3D realms have been connected to some great titles. To name a few: “Rise Of The Triad”, Raptor, the Commander Keen serie and of course the numerous Duke Nukem incarnations and Shadow Warriors…from: http://www.3drealms.com/games.html . But of course it’s a matter of opinion…but did’nt you like Raptor?…damn it’s one my all time favorite shoot’em’ups.
Henrik: Yes that’s all nice and all, except 3D Realms (then Apogee), didn’t develop those games, they distributed them :)
I did like Raptor :)
Sorry, hit submit too early: Except for the Duke series and Shadow Warriors, which were indeed inhouse. However I don’t consider the platformed Duke series classic games, and Shadow Warriors wasn’t IIRC a particular classic either.
Well they were’nt typical classics…well besides Super Mario, Pacman, Zelda and the likes I never label games as classics, but a game like Shadow Warriors I actually had a pretty decent time with and also enjoyed most of the Duke games. BTW now you mentioned Raptor and distribution it seems I simply forgot it…long time since I played and read about the game – but damn I miss my sweet L33T seeker laser :-) .
In my opinion, no ninja game have ever been, and will never be, as great as Shadow Warriors was.
Pride prevents them from admitting what everyone else already knows. Their 15 minutes of fame died long ago.
Ooh, Raptor. That was a very fine game.
I was a big fan of Duke Nukem 3D. I had a mild interest in DNF once, but it’s already dead to me now.
Tomas: Shadow Warrior was great! The level design wasn’t as good as Duke Nukem’s, but I consider Lo Wang a better character than Duke Nukem.
Me and a bunch of friends invented a little game on one of the levels in the shareware version: there’s a drivable tank, and a nuke launcher in the other end of the level. The goal was to spend as much time as possible driving the tank. If someone was in the tank, everyone went after him (usually ending with a nuke blast). Otherwise it was free for all.
The tank killed with one shot. That was a blast to play.
It just came to me, the so called “Duke Nukem Forever” game is a hoax and the biggest april fools joke ever.. It took me let me see (1997 to 2004) 7 years to understand it.
Okay. I’ll retract my previous statement and change it to: ‘two games’… AND add, that it’s been almost 8 years, with no end in sight…
Michael – I don’t see the George Lucas comparison at all. George Lucas has obviously lost whatever it was he had when he wrote the original Star Wars. I know that because I have actually seen two crap movies of his now. I think it’s proven that he’s lost the Star Wars feel.
DNF is all speculation. We know it’s not here yet, everyone can make educated guesses at why but I played a shit game yet. If DNF came out and was shit and I was rooting for DNF2 then perhaps your comparison could be considered valid. All that’s been proven here is that they suck at meeting deadlines and dealing with PR. That’s all.
Yes, they’ve made one good game (D3D which I loved) and they have tonnes of cash (relatively speaking) and were still hiring people on the game up to only a few months ago. Like I said, if it sucks I won’t be too surprised, but I’m expecting it to be good. If I’m wrong then I won’t really care.
that was supposed to be “but I haven’t played a shit game yet”
Dude, they don’t just ‘suck’ at deadlines. They overshot their initial release date by 6 – 7 years!
You have to actively try and not develop a game in that time… My best guess is that they’re writing not only their own proprietary programming language to do it in, but also their own OS. I’m still out on whether or not they’ve had to build their own hardware out of actual bambus. However if the release slips into late 2005, I’ll go with that as well…
That was the funniest post ever – I can’t wait for DNF!
Ahgh, pirates, chillax!
Of course the game has been in development for that long, and my bet is that it is still in development. I wager theyøve gone through a ton of expensive hardware and software changes and been trumped by other games coming out with feature X. They’ve most likely scrapped the game a couple of times and keep aiming high. This is something you can do with a fat bank account and no share holders.
I personally think the game is going to be mediocre to good when it comes out, but naturally 3DR knows by now that anything else than FANTASTIC is going to kill them publicity wise. That’s why they keep extending it, adding new stuff as they see competitors doing the same.
If they are hiring, they are making it, that’s for sure. Whether or not it’s the same game as it ever was 6 years ago I seriously doubt.
Oh Lord. 1997…. that sure takes me back. And its weird and cool because I was a part of “The majority of the children who were entering high school the school year following Duke Nukem Forever’s announcemnt are now eligible to drink” (well actually I entered high school in 1996 but its close).
I think the only thing left to do is to keep delaying it ad eternum, why? it gives people something to look forward to. Did you see a movie called Motorama? :P
I anticipated this game two or three years ago (or more, I’m not sure) and have come to the realization that it will probably never be released.
If it is released, I’ll be the first to rush out and buy it and eat my own words. It can’t be any worse than Daikatana. That game was the Ishtar of the gaming realm.
By the way, I should have mentioned this earlier. Wired Magazine honours vapourware top favorites every year and DNF has been nominated several years in a row. But earlier this year they offered up something special:
“However, rather than award 3D Realms the coveted Vaporware title for the third year in a row, we decided the company deserved something special. We created a new honor, the Lifetime Achievement Award. This year that award goes to Duke Nukem Forever.”
Try not to break any ribs laughing too hard. :)
Bjørn:
No no, if they’re hiring, they’re doing something, that’s for sure. Not necessarily DNF ;)
Well, far as I remember the position was specifically for DNF, loud and clear. Mike Frayn can confirm or deny.
As I remember it, they were hiring specifically for that game.
“ So it turns out that Gamespot was a bit hasty, and that they aren’t using the Doom engine, but rather their own in-house engine. Changing very little of the above conversation :)”
No that is not true they still use the Unreal engine, just that they have rewritten almost all of it except the netcode and the UnrealED level editor.
You’re basing this on what?
The main problem is that after this many years there lays an unrealistic expectation from the players and industry for something “that was worth the wait”. It’s analogous to someone who starts off a joke by saying “Oh, I got a really really funny joke…” and they start to tell it and keep laughing half-way through because they are so convulsed with laughter and when the punch-line hits you — you are so disappointed by the joke while simultaneously losing respect for the joke teller because well, he/she hyped up your expectations and you were waiting for something real big and worthy.