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Duke Nukem Forever Not Dead? (Yes, This Again)
kaychoro writes "There may be hope for Duke Nukem Forever (again). 'Jon St. John, better known as the voice of Duke Nukem, said some interesting words during a panel discussion at the Music and Games Festival (MAGFest) that took place January 1 – 4 in Alexandria, Virginia, according to Pixel Enemy. Answering a question from the crowd regarding DNF, St. John said: "... let me go ahead and tell you right now that I'm not allowed to talk about Duke Nukem Forever. No, no, don't be disappointed, read between the lines — why am I not allowed to talk about it?"'"
Duke Nukem Forever is FOREVER!
Is that one of those old bands my dad use to listen to?
And I'm all out of gum.
The only thing he sounded like, was "I'd like to tell you all about that shit and how horribly mismanaged that disaster was, but I've been gagged from telling you"
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
This is in YouTube too.
This time the plan is perfect!
* License iD Tech 4
* Begin development!
* Drool at Rage and Doom 4
* License iD Tech 5
* Struggle to incorporate previously developed content into new engine
* Start over with a new license of iD Tech 6
* ???
* Profit!
The Long Now Foundation
That's a good new name. :P
It's only been dead because the whole thing was totally mismanaged for the best part of a decade, and those in charge of it got themselves into what can only be described as a mental illness. It's far easier to promise that a game will blow away everything else if you don't deliver it, and given that DN pre-dated games like Quake and an age where 3D games were developing fast I can sort of understand it, if not forgive.
The story, plot and characters of the game are still worth quite a bit. There still isn't anything quite like Duke Nukem even after all the FPS games that came after. The question is, can anyone take those up and create an actual game to some sort of plan?
Upon seeing the headline I realized there's a whole generation of /.ers who weren't even around when Duke Nukem became old news.
http://xkcd.com/647/ applies.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
No publisher would throw away 12 years of hype.
A lot of modern games do some of these, and generally do them better than Duke3D because the technology has improved. Given how much more primitive than Quake the engine was, you should get some idea of how good the game was from the fact that the two were played about as much. The thing that killed Duke3D for us was the fact that Quake supported mods (like most Id games, it's basically a playable engine demo), and so you kept getting new games that ran on the Quake engine for free. Duke3D stayed Duke3D and I never even managed to get custom levels to work in multiplayer.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Won't this bloody game ever die?!? I feel sorry for the Duke actually, being dragged through this ordeal when he should have been put to rest a long time ago.
The Dead Collector: Bring out yer dead.
[a man puts the body of Duke Nukem on the cart]
Large Man with Dead Body: Here's one.
The Dead Collector: That'll be ninepence.
Duke Nukem: I'm not dead.
The Dead Collector: What?
Large Man with Dead Body: Nothing. There's your ninepence.
Duke Nukem: I'm not dead.
The Dead Collector: 'Ere, he says he's not dead.
Large Man with Dead Body: Yes he is.
Duke Nukem: I'm not.
The Dead Collector: He isn't.
Large Man with Dead Body: Well, he will be soon, he's very ill.
Duke Nukem: I'm getting better.
Large Man with Dead Body: No you're not, you'll be stone dead in a moment.
The Dead Collector: Well, I can't take him like that. It's against regulations.
Duke Nukem: I don't want to go on the cart.
Large Man with Dead Body: Oh, don't be such a baby.
The Dead Collector: I can't take him.
Duke Nukem: I feel fine.
Large Man with Dead Body: Oh, do me a favor.
The Dead Collector: I can't.
Large Man with Dead Body: Well, can you hang around for a couple of minutes? He won't be long.
The Dead Collector: I promised I'd be at the Robinsons'. They've lost nine today.
Large Man with Dead Body: Well, when's your next round?
The Dead Collector: Thursday.
Duke Nukem: I think I'll go for a walk.
Large Man with Dead Body: You're not fooling anyone, you know. Isn't there anything you could do?
Duke Nukem: I feel happy. I feel happy.
[the Dead Collector glances up and down the street furtively, then silences the Duke with his a whack of his club]
Large Man with Dead Body: Ah, thank you very much.
The Dead Collector: Not at all. See you on Thursday.
Large Man with Dead Body: Right.
Because the engine wasn't pure 3D, it could do impossible levels and the designers used this very effectively in a few places.
You can do "impossible" levels in pure 3D just fine. Examples: Narbacular Drop, Prey, Portal.
Yet Doom as Well as Duke 3d were supbar technologically to Ultima Underworld which came out a few weeks before Castle Wolfenstein 3d.
"I think the whole world has. Like you said, the main draw of Duke Nukem over similar games was the swearing/stripper angle, and even for today's kids that role was long ago taken by the Internet."
I actually played Duke Nukem 3D recently on Linux using eduke32 and it was still a lot of fun. Back when Duke Nukem was popular some kids may have played it because of the swearing/stripper angle, but I don't know of any adults who played it just because of that. My friends and I enjoyed playing Duke Nukem so much because it contained a lot of humor and it was also one of the first multiplayer games that worked well and in which you could interact with the environment in a more realistic way. The multiplayer mode was great, 8 of us could play Duke Nukem at the same time in the computer lab and when one of us found something he wanted to share he'd just yell "My view!" and we'd all switch to his view. I may be wrong, but I think that Duke Nukem was the first game to feature the ability to switch to another player's view in multiplayer mode.
I thought DNF stood for "Did Not Finish".
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
Why didn't they just get someone to develop something and slap a name on it?
They did slap the duke nukem name on third party stuff a couple of times, duke nukem time to kill and duke nuem manhatten project spring to mind.
It always appeared to me that the big problem with dnf was they really wanted it to be a ground breaking game but others kept overtaking them and so they kept rearchitecting the game over and over again.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
No publisher would throw away 12 years of hype.
Isn't it even longer than that now? Anyway, Duke Nukem Forever had already moved from badly delayed to standing joke in the early-2000s. Now the joke's worn thin and just plain strange. The fact that someone hasn't just slapped the name on *something* and released it as Duke Nukem Forever long before now is what is weird.
I suspect that any game released would end up being the "Snakes on a Plane" of games. People discussing it a lot, but not necessarily buying it. Anyone who remembers playing the original games in their mid-90s heyday would have to be at least in their 20s now, and even then I suspect that most of them have moved on.
Disclaimer; though I'm old enough to have been a typical DN fan, I never played- nor had even heard of it- during its heyday, only becoming aware of it through DNF's reputation as a standing joke several years ago. Even *that* was so long ago that many kids probably aren't aware of it. Its best hope is as a tongue-in-cheek attempt to ride an "ironic" revival of the 1990s. Yuk.
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He's not allowed to talk about it because there is now ongoing litigation between Take2 and 3DRealms over contracts, monetary advances, etc...
Duke Nukem 3D did have a rather interesting engine. As someone else has posted, it did various things other engines at the time couldn't do (eg. mirrors) and was well optimized.
For anyone who's interested about the history of the engine: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSVzn0F3pyQ
OK, it's got nothing to do with DNF but I found this video recently and felt it was worth sharing. :)
He's pining for the, er, strip bars.
3d realms is not 'done' and Take Two does not own the rights to Duke Nukem. Take Two is suing for the assets to Duke Nukem Forever (possibly to finish the game) saying 3D Realms breached their contract with Take Two for failing to deliver the game. By the time the court case is finished, those assets will almost certainly be worthless, if they're not already.
There's a difference between what TheRaven64 and you are talking about with impossible levels. Try making a figure-eight shape for the player to run on the inside of, but make it so that when you are crossing the center point you can't see any of the crossing point - you only go along a single path the entire time and keep passing over an impossible point time and time again. You could literally make parts of a level physically on top of other parts, and the engine would not care. Think about Doctor Who's TARDIS - this would be very easily doable in Duke3D without changing the engine in the least bit. It would require some serious hackery in just about any other engine I can think of. 3D geometry simply doesn't do the crap that Duke3D did. This is probably a good thing :).
I just have to share this here - if you are a Duke Nukem fan... or really if you are just a fan of 'the funnay' then be sure to visit 3D Realms' Duke Nukem outtakes collection page: http://www.3drealms.com/duke3d/outtakes.html (note, it says realplayer is required by they also have .wav links)
...unfortunately no one can be told what The Mat^H^H^HGoatse is...they must experience it for themselves...
> Duke3D stayed Duke3D and I never even managed to get custom levels to work in multiplayer.
It involved the arcane technique of copying the map into the data directory and choosing said map before starting the server ;)
But on a more serious note, dm14_2 was the _best_ _multiplayer_ _map_ _ever_. Tiny footprint, yet quite high; it ensured that you met each other all the time while still allowing you to hide (sometimes) and incredibly fast-paced. Fun times :)
Heh them were t'days. We used to drag our computers round to Tim's mum's house (we were all in our twenties and all lived with parents,stereotypes or what?) and trail thin ethernet everywhere. IPX , SPX , NE2000 cards, doom2 and duke3d. And there was no internet to download drivers in them days, you had to copy files off the netware floppy disks at work. Duke3d was ace because you could jetpack over an open area and drop pipe bombs on the poor fools on the ground. Good times before the cares of the world crushed my spirit.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
The irony about the latest incarnation of DNF is that this time, it really was almost done. 3DR had finally hired someone from outside to manage the project and stop the feature creep and, by all accounts from people who'd seen the latest incarnation, it would've been a kick-ass Duke Nukem game.
Unfortunately the financial armageddon meant that 3DR needed some cash (they were probably funding DNF through various investment schemes) and so they were at the mercy of T2. Take Two decided that the Duke IP was worth more than just helping 3DR and so decided to screw them over. That incident a few years ago where George Broussard told T2 to "shut the fuck up" probably didn't help matters either.
This piece on Wired is probably the best write-up of the whole saga I've seen.
Nick
Well, Descent was released one year earlier, and it let you fly too.
Of course, you could ONLY fly in that game. But I still considered it an FPS anyway.
and drop my Floppy Disks! You don't have anything that can read they anyway!
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Because there's a pending lawsuit?
Including how the enemies begged for life? "No, no! please!" and then try and kill you? Oh I completely forgot about this game!
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
Marathon had the impossible levels too... they're really quite cool, and I haven't seen anything like them in Prey or Portal.
For example, you could make a figure-8 level where the two crossing hallways in the center "don't intersect" with each other. So and your friend can be standing literally in the same place, but you can't see each other because you're in different hallways. One of the Marathon multiplayer levels was mind-bending by using this trick... it made the radar completely useless.
Comment of the year
I remember when... ...dialing a phone meant putting your finger in a hole and spinning the dialer. ...25MHz was fast for a computer. ...a dollar could actually get you a chocolate bar, and leave you with change to spare. ...downloading a song from the internet took 25-30 minutes, or more. ...I could bring my pocket knife on a plane. ...I could say merry christmas to somebody without offending them. ...cell phones were the size of masonry bricks, and were actually used to make phone calls. ...all personal computers were beige. ...a personal computer cost $2000 or more. ...playing a 4-color adventure game was cool. ...everyone knew how to use a command line interface. ...I had to rewind movies after watching them. ...I had to turn the cassette tape over in the player to listen to the other half of the album. ...camera's used film. ...polaroid camera's were the only way to get an instant photograph. ...a printer, a scanner, a copier, and a fax machine were 4 separate devices. ...the only way to make a phone call away from your home was to put quarters in a payphone.
Okay... I'll stop now. I could likely do this all day. :)
Thomas A. Knight
Author of The Time Weaver
RoTT visuals sucked, unfortunately, as engine-wise it was somewhere between Wolfenstein and Doom engine (in particular, 90 degree walls only, and ceiling height the same throghout the entire map - though it did vary between maps, unlike Wolfenstein).
The first three games in the franchise were platformers.
What was the third Duke Nukem game before 3D?
Duke3D stayed Duke3D and I never even managed to get custom levels to work in multiplayer.
I've played a few.