Duke Nukem For Never

PLSQL Guy writes "Duke Nukem Forever developer 3D Realms is shutting down, according to Shacknews. They cite 'a reliable source close to the company,' who said the developer is finished and employees have already been let go. It looks like all of the Duke Nukem Forever jokes are turning into reality; DNF might turn out to be the ultimate vaporware after all." 3D Realms' webmaster, Joe Siegler, confirmed the closing, saying that he didn't know about it even a day beforehand. Apogee and Deep Silver, who are working on a different set of Duke Nukem games (referred to as the Duke Nukem Trilogy) say they are not affected by the problems at 3D Realms.

Comments

RIP DNF

[Anenome]

There've been calls to open-source the game. Take-Two still owns the publishing rights on the title, and apparently never had an agreement to support development with funds--DNF was essentially privately funded.

DNF is now the gold-standard for vapor-ware. How much money did they spend, I wonder, producing nothing?

Re:RIP DNF

[sopssa]

If you read their site you'll see they seemed to do lots of fun stuff along the years.

I think most of there where to have fun and do what they liked. If you read their job posting, you'll see they offer revenue from sales of their projects and honestly are a cool company to work at. And that probably was what caused their shutdown, with all the EA and others just going for profits and making developers and programmers a slave.

Also see their company info page, theres lots of fun stuff. I wish I had worked there, they had a great mentality and fun in it.

Re:RIP DNF

[thetoadwarrior]

If you read their site you'll see they seemed to do lots of fun stuff along the years.

Of course they've been having fun. They've been playing around for over a decade.

What'll be interesting is to find out how true this is.
http://www.shacknews.com/laryn.x?story=58519

By: mourningstar Crosspost from SA:

Channel_F, a previous employee of 3DR, posted some interesting info:

In my best interest, I'm going to be somewhat candid for now. I will, however, elaborate a bit on some things:

The 2001 trailer was 100% scripted cinematic, and not actual gameplay. They built specific demo maps just to record video from to make a trailer. Everything you see in that trailer was phony.

The typical work flow there went something like this: Designer would be assigned a task (build a new map, rebuild an old map, polish a bit of a map, etc.). Designer would work on said task for two, three weeks, a month, all the while lower management would be looking over it and making sure it was going in a "good general direction." Designer would move on to another task. A month or two later upper management would finally look at the work and say, "It's all wrong, do it again." Rinse, repeat.

Entire maps would be done from the ground up, almost to beta quality, and then thrown out simply because no one would make decisions early on in the process. (Read up on Valve's 'orange box' method of design -- that's how you make games)

Another example of WTF is the fact that there was one part of one map that was being worked on before I started working there. Nineteen months later and the same designer was still working on the same part of that same map... I'm not blaming the designer, it wasn't his fault.

I think the biggest problem that the company had in general is being self-funded. When you're a developer working directly with a publisher and you have milestones to meet it's a whole different ballgame. If you don't meet those milestones, you don't get any money. That right there will keep your project on schedule. If, however, you're funding it yourself, you don't really have anyone to answer to except yourself and you can quickly lose sight of just how much money is going out the door.

Re:RIP DNF

[Fred Or Alive]

AFAIK Valve tend to prototype the gameplay side of things using basic graphics, notably orange (with a white outline) textures for walls and so forth, before moving onto the graphics side. It sounds like 3D Realms went strait to the "making good looking levels" before making sure they worked gameplay wise.

About time

[something_wicked_thi]

I've been kind of expecting/hoping for this for some time. Ever since the economy got so bad, I figured we might come to this. I'm actually amazed this didn't have before. You can't go that long with such incompetent management of a project and expect to be allowed to keep going, especially when you can't even be bothered to produce an actual time estimate for completion anymore except "When it's done".

I want to hear more...

[TiggertheMad]

...I would kill to have an ex-employee give a tell all interview about what the hell was going on for the last ten years or so. If any game media people are out there, I will gladly click through thirty pages of crappy advertising to read this one.

Rampant egos? Ineptness? Fraud? There has to be some juicy tidbits that will come put of the tale...

Re:I want to hear more...

[Danathar]

Man...the miniseries is going to be great.

The resulting article will be better than the Daikatana story.

Re:I want to hear more...

[Anonymous Coward]

Linked somewhere else in the comments: http://gamingisstupid.com/2009/05/06/the-chair-story-revival/

TL;DR: Working as intended.

I propose...

[phillymjs]

...that Wired names their annual vaporware awards in honor of Duke.

~Philly

this is so sad!

[AlgorithMan]

I loved Duke Nukem 3D, I played it until 2003 or so (when the last DN3D league was closed). I still have it on my HDD and play against the sob-bot every now and then. I even helped working on the High-Resolution-Pack for some time and I wrote the win32 launcher for the sob-bot...

I was patiently waiting for DNF since 1997 and I never lost hope that some day it would be done

to me, this is as if a relative had died :-(