The death and rebirth of Duke Nukem Forever: a history

Duke Nukem Forever was announced in 1997, after its predecessor, Duke Nukem 3D, had rocked the PC market with a hero who liked kicking ass, hanging out with strippers, and murdering alien police officers that were, literally, pigs. It was inappropriate, raunchy, and amazing.

It was also one of the games that gave 3D Realms the success that brought its destruction. Duke Nukem Forever began life as a completely self-funded game; its developer wanted nothing less than perfection, and would chase every update in technology in order to deliver it. The game saw monumental delays, suffered the slings and arrows of a gaming world that was first angry and then tolerant of its favorite whipping boy, had its home taken away, and has since risen from the dead.

Is the public still interested in Duke Nukem? Hell yes it is. This is the story of the gaming industry’s favorite joke, and how Duke may finally have the last laugh.

3D Realms announces via press release that Duke Nukem Forever will be created with the Quake Engine, instead of its own technology. This was 1997, and Duke Nukem Forever was slated to launch in 1998. From the press release:

This leads to the question being asked most about the Duke meets Quake connection: Why is 3D Realms using the Quake technology rather than using their own Prey technology?

Head of 3D Realms, George Broussard, responds: “It’s a very good question, but we have a very good answer. Our Prey technology is predicated on 3D hardware, such as the 3DFX card and the Rendition card. Prey will not work without the current best 3D cards on the market. When Prey is released late in 1998 only then do we believe there will be enough of an installed base to support sales of a high-end 3D hardware game.”

“Obviously, we considered developing Duke Nukem Forever with the Prey engine,” said Broussard, “but that would have put us in the position of releasing both Prey and Duke at nearly the same time, and we didn’t want both games competing so close together and taking attention away from each other. Both games would have been hurt under that scenario.”

Scott Miller, head of Apogee, adds, “We want to give Prey as much space as possible, so this meant getting Duke Forever done early in 1998, and to do this we need a ready-to-go, track proven engine. I called Todd Hollenshead, CEO of id Software, and got the ball rolling.”

1998 came, and instead of the game’s release, another press release details the switch to the Unreal Engine:

George Broussard, project leader for Duke Nukem Forever had this to say, “The switch to the Unreal engine was simply a business decision, and it came down to what we wanted to do with Duke Nukem Forever and how best to achieve it. It’s important to note that this decision has nothing to do with id software or our relationship with them, which still remains very strong.”

“The game should not be significantly delayed,” noted Broussard, “but it will take a little time to get up to speed with the new engine and learn how to exploit it. Fortunately, all of our game data will transfer very easily and we see being back to where we were at E3 within a month to 6 weeks.”

People who have seen the Duke Nukem Forever E3 video, or back room demo voiced concerns that some of the items they saw would be lost. “Not at all,” says Broussard. “If anything, the E3 demos showed what we could do with licensed technology and how we can extend it. We intend to apply the same ideas and efforts into the Unreal engine and push it until it breaks. Fans can expect all the stuff they saw at E3 to make the crossover to the Unreal engine.”

This video is the trailer from E3, 1998:

E3 1998

In 2000, Take Two Interactive purchased the exclusive publishing rights for Duke Nukem Forever and the existing catalog of Duke Nukem titles. From the press release:

“With the addition of Duke Nukem Forever to an already outstanding 2001 line-up of compelling PC content, which includes Oni, Tropico, Grand Theft Auto 3 and Max Payne, Take-Two and Gathering are heading into what should prove to be the most exciting and rewarding year in their history as PC publishers,” said Larry Muller, Chief Operating Officer Chief Operating Officer (COO).

“We are extremely excited about collaborating with Gathering of Developers and Rockstar Games on our strong line-up of next-generation titles,” said Scott Miller, President and co-founder of 3D Realms. “Both the Gathering and Rockstar labels exemplify the attitude and commitment to quality that will make our upcoming titles hugely successful. It’s going to be a great year.”

“The acquisition of the Duke Nukem franchise of products reflects Take-Two’s and Gathering’s ability to attract and develop excellent relationships with the very best talent in the industry,” said Mike Wilson, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Gathering of Developers. “We believe that Duke Nukem Forever will be the most successful PC release of 2001, and we are especially pleased to be able to bring this game to market.”

The game is not released in 2001, but a new trailer is released for E3:

E3 2001

The game has now been in development for six years. Take Two doesn’t have much leverage over the cash-flush 3D Realms, and begins to wish for the game’s release. George Broussard fires back, and is quoted in a story from CNN:

All we want to do is keep quite [sic], work on the game, and emerge later and show you what we’re working on. We don’t want hype. We don’t want drama. We don’t want Take Two saying stupid ass things in public, for the sole purposes of helping their stock.

The CNN article linked above describes why the fighting between the two companies has become so vicious:

Both companies are caught in a nasty Catch-22, though. 3D Realms says it is fully funding the game, which takes away any leverage Take Two might normally have. But 3D Realms can’t shop the game to another publisher, no matter how frustrated it gets—despite Broussard’s claims that “we’d find a new publisher so easily it isn’t even funny.”

Take Two buys the profitable Max Payne franchise for $45 million, which gives 3D Realms even more money to keep doing things their way. Three more years pass. In 2006, Take Two noted that the money budgeted for payment in the event of the completion of the game had partially been dispersed to 3D Realms. A large bonus was promised for the completion of the game. From the Gamasutra coverage linked above:

One other notable payment was the renegotiation of a $6 million charge due [to former publisher GT Interactive, now owned by Atari] upon delivery of the final PC version of Duke Nukem Forever back in March 2005. The epic delay of 3D Realms’ shooter has meant that $4.25 million of the final milestone payment has already been paid, alongside the promise of a final $500,000 upon the commercial release of Duke Nukem Forever prior to December 31, 2006.

Prey finally sees release, having been announced alongside Duke Nukem Forever, and also suffering extensive production delays. This is from our review of the game from 2006. It almost sounds like we could have been talking about another title:

It was canceled, resurrected, and now it’s finally out. When I play a game that has such a troubled development I find myself looking for clues to its age in the game: I search for old textures, see if the gameplay feels antiquated, or maybe try to see if the levels have been patched together by many different hands. After all, long development cycles make it easy for a game to lose its cohesion; it must be mighty tempting to want to push the thing out the door just to be done with it. This is also one of the few games to ship with the Doom 3 engine, which we all know was used so well in Quake 4. In case you’re wondering, yes, I’m being sarcastic.

I don’t like thinking about how a game was made when playing it though; it almost feels like an excuse to dislike it. Ultimately, no one really cares how long someone worked on it, if it was cancelled, or how many engine changes it went through. They just want a fun game.

Here’s a stub from a Duke Nukem Forever preorder. Three of the four companies on the stub no longer exist:

Ars Technica runs an April Fools gag-review of Duke Nukem Forever in 2006. Many sites fall for the gag, and run excerpts from the “review”:

The game feels a lot more like an update than a true sequel. You’ll take the firefights across movie theaters, strip clubs, underwater, all the places we remember from Duke Nukem 3D. I was glad to see that the shotgun provides that visceral BOOM that was sorely lacking the Doom 3 model. Finally we get a man’s shotgun back in gaming.

It doesn’t end there though, the game introduces a sort of FPS fatality move, where after blowing someone’s legs off you get to do a hyper-violent finishing move. My personal favorite was the one where you stuff dollar bills into an enemy’s mouth before putting your gun under their chin. Bits of money and brain fly everywhere as Duke laughs and laughs…

New footage surfaces in December of 2007. From our coverage:

“Last Saturday we had our annual company Christmas party. It was a lot of fun as usual but it featured one special surprise. It turns out that several people had been secretly working late nights and into the wee hours of the morning preparing a special video for those at the party,” George Broussard, director of the title posted on the official 3D Realms board yesterday. “They created a short teaser for Duke Nukem Forever.” After promising to share the new footage today, the message boards across the Internet went insane with jokes and incredulous comments. Surely there can’t be much to see, the punters cried. There is no way the game exists!

After watching the footage, there isn’t much to talk about. There are only quick blasts of what appear to be in-engine play between scenes of the newly updated Duke Nukem doing bicep curls, although the tentacled aliens still seem to be a large part of the game. The pig-based aliens also make a return from Duke Nukem 3D. “I’m looking for some alien toilet to park my bricks,” Duke drawls, “Who’s first?” Not the most grammatically correct tough guy on the planet, but it gets the message across.

The 2007 teaser:

2007 Teaser

In 2008, Jace Hall is given a look at the game. He likes what he sees.

In 2009, the bomb drops: 3D Realms runs out of money, and closes its doors. From our coverage:

“Thanks for being fans and for all your support,” the message says. That’s it. After all those pages of speculation and awe over a screenshot every few years, after all the jokes and faux-awards, after all the insanity over seeing a glimpse of video here and there… we just get a simple goodbye.

It’s hard to know how to feel, now that it looks like everyone’s favorite gaming soap opera may not get a final chapter. Maybe someone will pick up the game. Maybe we’ll get to play a demo. Maybe this is the last we’ll ever hear about it and Duke will remain legendary and enigmatic in the annals of gaming.

Ars Technica on the future of Duke, from May 2009:

3DRealms is closed. The rumors, the sly press releases from related companies, and all of the smoke ended up pointing to a rather large fire. The company posted a short goodbye message along with a picture, and that’s that. While having confirmation of the studio’s closure is one thing, we still don’t have the answer that everyone is interested in… what happens to Duke?

If the release of Duke Nukem Forever could be described as heaven, Take-Two is Jesus: no one enters but through Him. “We have the exclusive publishing rights, not right of first refusal,” Take-Two spokesman Alan Lewis told Shacknews. “Meaning we are the only ones that have the right to publish the title.” Those rights don’t run out, but they only include Duke Nukem Forever; 3D Realms—what’s left of it— still owns the work done on the game.

So what does that mean in broad terms? Take Two never owned the game, it just locked down the publishing rights. It could sell those rights for some quick cash to another interested party, or another Duke title could be built from the ground up and called something different to be released by another publisher. The question is: how different would it have to be before it was considered a separate project from the work done on Forever? That could be a dicey question for anyone interested in publishing a new PC or console FPS Duke Nukem title.

Wired’s 2009 look at what went wrong with the development of Duke Nukem Forever didn’t feature many named sources, but it shed a lot of light on why there were so many problems:

Only weeks after [George Broussard] showed off Duke Nukem Forever, he stunned the gaming industry by announcing the shift to the Unreal engine. “It was effectively a reboot of the project in many respects,” Chris Hargrove, then one of the game’s programmers, told me (though he agreed with the decision). Broussard soon began pushing for even more and cooler game-building tools: He ripped out the ceiling of a room at the 3D Realms office to assemble a motion-capture lab, which would help his team in rendering “complex motions like strippers,” he noted on the 3D Realms Web site.

Broussard simply couldn’t tolerate the idea of Duke Nukem Forever coming out with anything other than the latest and greatest technology and awe-inspiring gameplay. He didn’t just want it to be good. It had to surpass every other game that had ever existed, the same way the original Duke Nukem 3D had.

The end of the story? No way. Days ago, George Broussard posted a cryptic tweet with this image, before the opening of the Penny Arcade Expo.

Soon after, a press release is sent out, and it’s official: the game is alive, kicking, and playable, with development being handled by Gearbox Software:

Duke Nukem Forever will be playable right now for all attendees 17 and older of this year’s Penny Arcade Expo at the 2K Booth (booth #3417), giving the first hands-on experience with the game that was originally announced during the tail end of the Clinton Administration.

“All great things take time… a lot of time,” laughs Christoph Hartmann, president of 2K. “After a hiatus from the video game world, Duke Nukem is back and better than ever. The return of the King from the glory days of shooters will satisfy our patient, die-hard fans, as well as a new generation of bubble gum-chewing, flat top and shades-wearing bad-asses. Make no mistake about it – Duke Nukem Forever is a testament to the era of when shooters were bodacious and fun.”

A comment on our story about Duke’s return, telling Gearbox to follow in 3D Realm’s footsteps:

I’d say Gearbox would be wise to take little more than the name, the characters, the artwork, and don’t even depend on the artwork as it’s probably dated when compared with modern games.

Just create a whole new game using a modern engine like Unreal Engine or Source and throw the old 3DRealms code out. Gearbox has experience working on these engines, so they could conceivably do it.

Isn’t that what got us into this mess to begin with? Randy Pitchford, the CEO of Gearbox, talked to Kotaku about Duke. Gearbox has been working on the game since 2009, and the litigation between 3D Realms and Take Two has been settled, although no one is willing to discuss the terms. From the Kotaku coverage:

“The short story of it is: Because of my history with Duke, because of my relationship with Scott and George, because of the trust and respect that Gearbox and Take Two were able to build through our work together with Borderlands, and through the capabilities that I have built with my team to be able to ship games on these platforms—because of all of these things, I was in a spot that, if I took a bet and got in there and put myself in the line of fire in the middle of this thing, I knew that I could bring all these pieces together and that I could save Duke.”

Pitchford describes his history with the series to Joystiq:

“I moved to Texas and became a professional game maker to join Allen Blum, he created Duke Nukem 3D,” the Gearbox co-founder told an audience at PAX. “He and Todd Replogle in Southern California freaking invented this whole damned thing. And I moved out to Texas to join him and George Broussard and Scott Miller, and all the guys on the team, so that I could be part of Duke Nukem 3D. Because I wanted to add to that. I thought it was awesome; it was really fun and I wanted to be part of that team.”

The game is more than just alive—gamers were able to go hands-on with it at PAX. Shacknews wrote the following, after playing the game at PAX and praising the humor.

Okay, here’s the bad news. The engine looks dated. The color palette felt dull and the game appeared blurry at times. Since the game is scheduled for next year, it’s likely that the engine will be even more outdated when it (finally) releases. I don’t need it to look like Crysis, but I’d just a bit more clarity than what I saw. Hopefully, this is something that will be addressed by Gearbox…

Unfortunately, I was only able to carry two weapons at a time. I was hoping to carry Duke’s full arsenal, but it looks like we’re going to be dealing with weapon juggling. I’m not sure how this will play out. It could encourage using a variety of weapons, but it could fall flat, angering fans of classic PC FPS games. The other warning sign is that I was only fighting two to four enemies at a time, maximum. I hope this is based upon that level that I played and not a larger issue.

At PAX the game enjoyed massive buzz, and it didn’t take long for the lines to form. This was a game everyone felt they had to play.

PAX 2010

Destructoid’s Jim Sterling comments after playing the game:

Gearbox Software is possibly insane for taking on this project, a game which has twelve years of expectations and notoriety behind it… This is Duke Nukem at his puerile finest, and just from the demo, I was laughing out loud. It’s not even that it’s particularly witty. The humor is just so incredibly stupid that it starts to take on the illusion of brilliance, and that’s what matters.

Do you know how you can tell that a game is going to be something special? When its demo ends with the main character getting his d*ck sucked by twins, then admits that his game better be good because it “took twelve f*cking years” to make.

This isn’t just a game being released, as Gearbox has purchased the Duke Nukem IP from 3D Realms. Or, to put it more accurately, 3D Realms sold it to them. The founders of 3D Realms talk glowingly of the company in the press release announcing the sale:

“Gearbox was handpicked as the new home for Duke Nukem because of their continued passion, commitment and long-time heritage with the brand and 3D Realms. Gearbox and Duke Nukem make for a devastating match made in video game heaven,” commented Scott Miller, co-founder of 3D Realms. “The gaming community’s love and demand for the Duke Nukem brand never wavered and Gearbox will not disappoint them. As you have seen from titles such as Borderlands, Gearbox will bring the right level of addictively compelling gameplay, humor and high powered explosive action to the franchise. Duke Nukem is back and will be bigger than ever.”

“Gearbox was the only home appropriate for the Duke Nukem brand. They are very talented and possess the perfect perspective and understanding of the brand. Their vision for its future direction is exciting and unbelievable. I am personally cannot wait for fans to see their unique take on the franchise,” said George Broussard, co-founder of 3D Realms. “This will be a win-win situation for everyone involved, especially the fans.”

Wired describes the nearly manic attitude of Randy Pitchford at PAX, showing the game off to the press and public: