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More like 'Duke Nukem Never'
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Steve Chiotakis:
Give this a listen:
[Sound effects for Duke Nukem 3D]
Sound familiar? If so, you're probably a long-time video gamer. That's from Duke Nukem 3D, one of the biggest action games of the 90's. The company that made it, 3D Realms, has been promising a sequel called "Duke Nukem Forever."
And they've been promising it forever -- 12 years, in fact. Now gamers wonder if a better title might be "Duke Nukem *Never," as Rico Gagliano reports.
Rico Gagliano This week, 3D Realms confirmed it's laid off the entire development team for "Duke Nukem Forever," due to lack of funding.
George Jones, editor in-chief at GamePro magazine, says it's just the latest disappointment for fans.
George Jone:s I think it was like April of '97 when they announced the sequel. And uh, 12 years later, there's nothing. It's pretty amazing.
But what's could've possibly taken so long? Jones says the team working on the game was understaffed, so they kept falling behind the moving goalpost of cutting edge technology.
Jones: The way you build games is you kinda have a core foundation of technology, it's called an engine. And the engines change every three or four years, so they become more elaborate. And it sounds like they got into a place where they had to chase the technology three or four times and completely restart.
3D Realms says it still intends to create games around the Nukem franchise. But now it has to contend with a lawsuit from a company called Take-Two. That outfit owns the rights to market and distribute "Nukem Forever," and it's not happy about another delay. Knowing our legal system -- the lawsuit could be resolved in about, oh, 12 years.
In Los Angeles, I'm Rico Gagliano for Marketplace.
"Now gamers wonder if a better title might be 'Duke Nukem *Never,' as Rico Gagliano reports."
Gamers have not just now started wondering about this, we've been wondering about it for years. Like the other commenter above, I gave up on waiting for Duke Nukem Forever quite some time ago, as it's been obvious for a very long time that the developers have been seriously mishandling the project. There's just no reason that it should take twelve years develop a game. Even World of Warcraft took only five years to develop, and anyone who's spent any time at all playing WoW knows how huge and intricate the game is.
I mean, for pete's sake... twelve years? Twelve years is the same length of time from the first artificial satellite (Sputnik, 1957) to the first manned moon landing (1969).
I pretty much gave up hope for the sequel to come out after year 7. This just saddens me as Duke Nukem was very iconic and reminds me so much of my tween gaming days. Ah those were good times. Duke Nukem + Quake were my first foray into FPS and into gaming in general. Though I must admit, I play more of my [url=http://www.accounts.com/]world of warcraft account[/url] now than any other game... Nevertheless, RIP Duke Nukem. Maybe sometime in the future, someone would come up with another version of it. I'll keep my fingers crossed for that.
Wait ... they were STILL working on "Duke Nukem Forever??" I thought that project had tanked years eight years ago! How were they possibly convincing their funding sources (or shareholders) that the project was viable. Today's hot gamers weren't even walking, let along gaming, when the last Duke Nukem title was a hit. Boy, I'd like to hire some of their project management team ... we need more cleaning people here.
Hey Thom, according to a TIME news article today, the workforce of tomorrow is being trained by World of Warcraft. There's an option for you:
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1898024_18980...
Someone should realy have told 3D Realms that the original Duke 3D game was about good game play over actual bleeding edge graphics. Quake used a real 3D engine but had far worse game play and was always rated behind Duke 3D at the time. Sad they forgot this. If nothing else just release the original Quake 2 powered sequal with a enhanced graphics upgrade like they did for Half Life 1. Then sell it as the best budget ware title of all time!
Sounds like incompetence to me. A video game does not have to have the absolute latest engine to be competitive, it just needs to be updated frequently enough to maintain a loyal following and 12 years is not often enough. A company can still pick up a lot of sales by people who don't have the latest GPUs in their computers. It sounds like they set unrealistic goals for themselves: "we have to be the latest and greatest or we're not going to market."
I suppose, though, that the graphics market is a lot more competitive for first person shooters like this than for games like World of Warcraft. Personally, I get bored with FPS's pretty quickly.
