Slashdot Mirror
The Nuking of Duke Nukem
Rick Bentley writes with more on the story behind the meltdown of Duke Nukem Forever, the game that will now live on only as a cautionary tale: "Although the shutdown was previously reported on Slashdot, this new Wired article goes in-depth behind the scenes to paint a picture of a mushroom cloud-sized implosion. Developers spending a decade in a career holding pattern for below market salary with 'profit sharing' incentives, no real project deadlines, a motion capture room apparently used to capture the motion of strippers (the new game was to take place in a strip club, owned by Duke, that gets attacked by aliens), and countless crestfallen fans. *Sniff*, I would have played that game."
Dude, that was the third iteration of Duke Nukem and it lacked much that the side scrollers had. My favorite part of DN1 (a squeaky little side scroller that used the PC speaker for sound) and DN2 (similar to 1 but better 2D graphics and used the PC's sound card) was shooting the Energizer Bunny.
George Broussard used to post at Planet Crap almost daily shortly after DN3D came out. He said there were 35,000 people that registered DN1, which had been released as shareware.
I was one of the 35k. It was twenty bucks well spent! I think I picked up DN2 at K-Mart.
Free Martian Whores!
Tycho said it best, "...there are lessons about what makes for good play still bottled up in Duke Nukem 3D, lessons haven't truly informed the last thirteen years of industry progress." If anything at all comes from the DNF fiasco, I hope that some younger gamers (and developers!) go back and give D3D a playthrough.
Maybe it's not as great as we remember but it sure as hell deserved a better fate than it got.
--- Do you believe in the day?
They weren't all free, most were tied up or in handcuffs.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Hate to break it to you, dude, but #3 and #4 are figments of your imagination. Every strip joint has at least 1 girl who's "working her way through college", but it's just a story line that's been repeated 100 million times to sucker some dude for a few extra bucks. It's the same as the illusion that they make $2500 per night. It's always interesting to ask one of these characters "if you make $2500 per night, how come your boyfriend has to drop you off and pick you up in your 1982 Ford Escort?" and watch her head explode.
Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against strip clubs, and have had some great times in them. I've just been in enough of them for long enough to know that there is no mythical lawyer-in-the-making who's paying her tuition with tips.
It's one of the most treasured running gags on /. It's way more treasured than Natalie Portman, a Beowulf cluster or our sharks with friggin' lasers could ever be. It's one of the oldest ones, old enough that even the ancients here can barely remember a time without it.
And now, it's gone. We have to find a new idiom for something that will be released bundled with $current_topic_considered_vaporware.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Someone posted a link to the WIRED story yesterday and one of the responses was from Jason Bergman who worked for Shacknews at one point as a writer and later moved on to Take Two and now works for Bethesda. In the discussion he posted:
Which naturally got the "Well how could you even know?" response, to which he responded:
Granted this is from someone who used to work at Take Two, which is the company somewhat demonized in the article, so there may be some bias in play there, but it sounds like some of the stuff in this article may just be flat wrong.
That said, this article is probably the best it can be under the circumstances, given that no one can really talk too much about it because of the lawsuit.
Schnapple
You must be looking in the wrong places (or just not close enough to a local college). Trust me I've been in and out of them for a LONG time and have known plenty of strippers both in and out of the club setting. When I was in college I knew 2 other students specifically (who I met AS a student, not as a strip club attendee) who were doing it explicitly for tuition money. One of my sister's best friends also is a stripper who does it to fund her tuition (she's going for an anesthesiologist - my sister goes to the same school and is in the nursing program).
I think you're just visiting the wrong caliber of club ;).
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
You must be looking in the wrong places (or just not close enough to a local college). Trust me I've been in and out of them for a LONG time...I think you're just visiting the wrong caliber of club ;).
Well, let's see, I started going to them when I was 17 (with my boss at the time who was dating one of the "girls"....though his wife didn't know), and have been in and out of many different ones in many different cities over the last 20 years, so I'm not exactly a stranger to the scene. I've had more than casual "acquaintances" with several girls often spanning several years, so it's not as if I'm making these statements based solely on the table-talk. All I'm saying is that IF you've met any who actually did complete their respective degrees and went on to leave the stripper life, you sir, have met a rare breed indeed. It has been my experience that the clubs are filled with plenty of girls with seemingly good intentions, that rarely manifest.
I've been in all walks of clubs, with all types of girls, from the seedy to the chic, and the stories/archetypes appear to be universal.
most members of group #3 either aren't very active (since they're normally working for beer and weed money, not tuition)
Actually, I think you proved my point for me. For any girls you've met who may actually have been attending classes at some school (rather than just claiming that they are as many do), too often, they're actually stripping to support the things you're referring to, rather than the noble pursuit of paying their tuition. Typically, the fun and partying becomes a lot more appealing than the various sacrifices it takes to complete a degree and enter the working world, and the allure of higher education and a "real job" fades.
hey end up transforming into a member of one of the other groups
Yep, I agree....although they transform into group #1 or group #2.
members of group #4 don't exactly strip in your regular strip joint in the bad part of town, they can most likely be found in places where you have to pay $50 for a drink and just checking your jacket at the door ends up costing more than what most people are prepared to spend on beer in one night...
I'm familiar with the so-called "feature dancer", and yes, I've been in attendance for several. They too are an illusion, as they all have dreams/aspirations of becoming actresses (whether in porn or not) and one day leaving the trenches in the strip clubs, while the reality is that most do not, and in fact also eventually morph in to members of group #1 or group #2. As I commented to another poster, I've been in many, many clubs of many types from the pristine ones where most of the girls look like models to the ones where you're not entirely sure you're going to make it out the door alive, and the stories (and story-lines) are the same wherever you go, just slightly modified to fit the situation/people involved.