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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.
Sounds like they are all outta gum
Will they be shutting down the coming next 10 years?
SCNR...it is bad for the devs at 3d, but still...it opens a whole new series of jokes.
scheuri
yeah, well you can go to hell. Thank God Duke Nukem Forever was never released. If they had "competent managers" as you call them, we probably would have had a laughable pile of shit for an FPS released under the title that will forever have soiled Duke's reputation, which I foresee happening under Take-Two.
There've been calls to open-source the game.
Why ? There is already better open source vaporware - Hurd. Though I must admit that DNF has a much cooler mascot with Duke.
Perhaps Duke can become the mascot of Hurd now ?
He is free... for other vaporware.
Old answer: "When it's done."
New answer: "No, we are done."
"Die endgueltige Teilung Deutschlands - das ist unser Auftrag." - Chlodwig Poth
This is like the vatican coming out and saying "Shows over people, no second coming. Sorry, pack it up and go home."
What ridiculous mythical everpresent promise are we going to look forward to now?
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Competent managers are not required to have a product out the door in, what?, 15 years? Other companies without real managers do that in three. Example: iD Software managed several of these feats, making quality games, having some kind of time and money estimate beforehand and then actually finishing something.
When a product like this takes *umpteen* years without any kind of progress or even a measly status report, you have incompetent managers, incompetent programmers, insufficient funding, incompetent financers, inadequate workplace or ideas distant from reality. 3D Realms probably had all of it and more.
Unfortunately, badly managed companies go bankrupt. Fortunately, they're not wasting anyone's resources, money and time anymore.
But it's much much worse when badly managed companies cannot go bankrupt under any circumstances, being deemed "too big to fail" or having some other kind of socialist protection.
hail to the king baby
...
...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...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I guess the Hurd has a chance to beat Duke Nukem Forever to 1.0, after all! Who woulda thunk it?
we aint even on the same plane here man. Duke Nukem isn't something to trifle with, if you're putting out THE Duke title of all time, you gotta do it right, and if that means scrapping everything multiple times over a span of time larger than a decade, you do it. Some things are more important than time and money, Duke Nukem is one of these things.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm going to repent all of my sins and start frequenting a church, hopefully when I die, Duke Nukem Forever will be waiting for me on God's Commodore 64.
I always thought Guns 'n' Roses was DNF's main competition in the Vaporware Wars Of 1994-2009. :)
I honestly never thought Axl would ship his album first for the win, but, here we are.
Guinness World Records reports that the long-standing record for constant masturbation previously held by Gooey, a chimpanzee at the Buffalo Zoo, in what was thought to be an unbreakable grip, was "overcome in one magnificent stroke" by the DNF team at 3D Realms.
The sheer magnificence of the accomplishment has moved a Guinness spokesman to suggest that DNF has actually outgrown the term "vapourware", and become something else entirely. He suggests a new definition, "spankerware", be coined to cummemorate this astounding, 12-year feat of dong-flogging. "If this were an anniversary, the appropriate gift would be linen...and lots of it", the spokesman said.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
I'm here to kick ass and fund development!
And I'm all out of funds.
I think now would be as good a time as any to repost the Duke Nukem Forever List for those who haven't already read it, or remember it fondly and looking for a encore laugh.
Just as the DNF team would occasionally tease us over the years with trailers, the list has been updated to include humanity's latest accomplishments (and failures.)
Interestingly, a conversation regarding the late great duke came up at work just today...
Loved Duke 3D back in the day, but I was 15 when I last played it and 16 when Duke Nukem Forever was announced. My computer back then was a Pentium 166 with 16 megs of RAM and a 3dfx Voodoo Banshee card. And now, I'm 28, typing this on a multi-gigaherz, multi-core, multi-gigabyte, multi-monitor setup. My, how times have changed.
For a couple years I eagerly awaited DN4, but after that, enough is enough. I gave up the ghost, earned a college degree, started a career, and next thing I know, I'm almost 30. I literally have not thought once about DN4 in years until I saw this headline.
What a shocker. Not.
Does 3DRealms still deserve headline space? They haven't done anything innovative in years. Their management is curt, snarky, and drunk with hubris. If anyone dares to post something anti-3DR on their forums, the thread gets locked, Siegler and/or Broussard gets the last word, and the user gets banned. But that's cool. It's their forums, they can do whatever they want, and apparently they only allow sycophants.
"When it's done," they say. "The game will revolutionize interactivity," they say. "We don't need any money, we're 100% self-funded, and can afford it indefinitely because we are rock star developers and can sell ice to eskimos," they say. Oops.
How many engine changes did DN4 go through? How much work was wasted in redesigning all the levels over and over again? And most importantly, how much money could DN4 have made if they simply instilled a little more discipline than "when it's done" into their culture? Management has to be stunningly demented to squander such a valuable franchise, and instead be content with trickling out old Duke Nukem ports and re-makes. If I were a developer at 3DR, I would be seriously pissed at having busted my ass all these years without ever seeing a dime of royalty that could've been seven figures, and instead am now laid off and have to look for another job in this craptacular economy.
Memo to 3DRealms: thanks for the good times back in the day, but good riddance to your arrogance, your lack of respect towards the industry, and your vaporware promises. You will not be missed.
This is the strangest read I've had in a while:
http://gamingisstupid.com/2009/05/06/the-chair-story-revival/
I was told to think about my next words very carefully before giving my final answer. Honestly, I felt this was a test to see how well I would hold up to pressure later when we had to "hold the lie" (the similarity to "hold the line" isn't on accident), so I held firm and said I really wanted to, but needed to have it reviewed...
oh fuck...
Faster than I can even remember (literally... I don't remember) I was knocked out of my chair by I *think* of all people Tim Sweeney (it was a wooden kitchen chair) and was pinned on the ground by Mike Wilson and Cliffy B (he's so much stronger than I ever expected). George walks over to my chair and fucking stomps the shit out of it until the legs are broken off. He casually picks up one of the legs that had split into a shit your pants style point and starts tossing it up and down. Scott and Mark Rein alternate on and off saying that I apparently wasn't aware how *real* business is done and that if I didn't want to find out why those two companies had maintained such a strong position in the industry dating back to the shareware days (when it seems people didn't ask nearly as many questions about why developers appeared, made a game, and then disappeared without a trace)... I had better reconsider my answer.
I do remember the next part very very well though... I will never forget it and I have to admit that I have dreams about it pretty frequently.
Cliffy and Mike pulled me up and shoved my face about 6 inches from the point of the chair leg. I was drenched in sweat (the trailers didn't have decent AC so it was already hot as hell in there)... and if they had let go of me I would not have been able to stand on my own.
George looked me in the eyes and asked me one more time what I was going to do... so at that point I did what anyone would do...
I mean, this guy actually did work at 3DRealms and this is his blog, but seriously, CliffyB and Marc Rein threatening developers with broken chairs? Tim Sweeny tackling people and holding them down for gang beatings?
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
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
Or maybe the reason for the shutdown is that they couldn't deliver a product after at least 11 years of development.
This has got me all nostalgic, so I loaded up Duke Nukem 3D to pay my last respects. But when I try to run it, I keep getting this message:
SecureROM Activation Failed: Could not connect to the 3drealms activation server.
What does it mean??
Take off every Sig. For great justice.
With such an acronym as the abbreviated name of the game, who could have expected anything less, to be honest? Maybe it was just a practical joke all along!
Yeah, I mean, I read "DNF" and I'm like Disjunctive Normal Form ? Ha, what kind of name is that !
*chuckles*
aha... okay, stop staring at me, guys ?
What, I thought DNF was "Digital Noise Filter". Which is what you need when reading rumors about the impending release of DNF :)
Wikipedia says it's
"Did not finish" in racing parlance
(Non-native English speakers might not be familiar with this particular acronym expansion.)
I would like to reiterate http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1220783&cid=27813603
The vapor that I long for most
The Duke, the Wolf*,
And the Starcraft: Ghost
They saw their code build
So they'd boast
The day
Their sche-----dule died.
And Duke was saying:
(Chorus)
bye, bye
Eat some shit and then die
... apparently, writing code isn't as easy as (American) Pie :)
I take it the developers have plenty of gum.
You've got it all wrong...
it's time to write code and chew bubble gum; and I'm all out of job...
-Seeing the problem is ½ of solution-
I thought it was "Do Not Fold" - which is normally stamped on packages containing CDs or other fragile media, and indeed, it seems that DNF are folding :)
"Did not Finish" makes much more sense though.
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
GPL v. 2 isn't bad, just outdated.
As opposed to GPL v. 3, which isn't good, just new.
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.
Treating your employees decently is not what killed 3DR. Let's not pretend that they were some nice group of nice guys that just can't make it in this era.
It was poor management that ruined them. Whether a company treats employees well or not poor management can kill a company.
The FSF will take over the project, call it Duke Gnukem Forever, and make it the killer app for Hurd.
I read "This is a story I wrote on..." to mean it was fiction. Do you honestly believe that if these people really behaved as described, that Charlie would post the entire story with his and everyone else's names intact?
I'm gonna rip your head off and shit down your neck
-- dnl
Crap normally means deification
I have no humorous quip to add do this, but it stands on its own =)
Your brain is not a computer.
It's not very usable as a real system, but it's definitely not vaporware.
LOL. I'm not sure this distinction is all that great. After all, people develop software to use it. After 15 years (whatever) of development, a reasonable expectation is that the system would be usable for something other than just rebooting.
After all, I have Windows for that task.
Duke Nuken Forever
1997 - 2009
tl;dnf
So while Crap normally means deification it has been expanded to anything so worthless that it needs to be disposed of as soon as possible.
Crap means "deification" to you? Man, you've got a weird theology. Are the 2 Girls and One Cup considered holy artifacts?
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)