Believe it or not, but ten years ago today a group of huddled journalists excitedly scribbled in their notepads after hearing the first news of 3D Realms' Duke Nukem Forever... and we're still waiting to get our hands on it today.
The first iteration of Forever ran on the then-cutting edge Quake II engine and the debut screenshots in November issue of PC Gamer looked far above anything else around in terms of visual quality. Speaking in that issue of PCG, Scott Miller said that the game would be released in 1998.
The first trailer (which you can watch here) was unveiled at E3 1998 and showed the first in-game footage of Duke Forever. However, the following month 3D Realms announced that it would be porting the shooter sequel over to Epic's Unreal engine, and reassured fans that the transition from Quake to Unreal would take only "a month to 6 weeks" and Forever would be released the following year in 1999.
...then in 1999 3D Realms backtracked, announcing that it would be upgrading to the newer version of Unreal Engine, and released a Christmas card suggesting that Duke Nukem Forever was now set for the year 2000.
Almost a year later publisher Gathering of Developers announced that it would be taking over publishing duties for Forever, and 3D Realms released another Christmas card suggesting it would finally release in 2001.
At E3 2001 a second Duke Nukem Forever trailer was released (see it here), revealing a few minutes of new gameplay footage including impressive game features such as destructible environments, advanced AI, weather effects and massive draw distance. The trailer, amazingly, still looks quite good today.
But it was never to see the light of day. Gathering of Developers closed down in August 2001, Take Two took over publishing duties and Duke Nukem Forever was once again thrown into limbo.
In 2002, 3D Realms went back to the drawing board, hiring an army of new programmers and scrapping over 95% of the previous level design work in the process. The new engine was built using parts of Unreal Engine 2, with everything else written from scratch by the Nukem developer.
In early 2003 Take Two CEO Jeffrey Lapin stated that Duke Nukem Forever would not be released that year. Duke creator George Broussard responded by telling Shacknews that "Take Two needs to STFU imo". Later that year Jeffrey Lapin said that 3D Realms told him DNF was now expected late 2004 or early 2005.
After denying claims that DNF was now running on the Doom 3 engine, in 2006 Broussard gave an update on the games development stating that the team was finally tweaking and polishing the game.
In June 2006, a filing revealed that Take Two was offering a $500,000 bonus if 3D Realms released Duke Nukem Forever by December 31, 2006. Broussard denied the rumours, saying that he would "never ship a game early...for 500K."
Earlier this year a brand new in-game screenshot emerged alongside a 3D Realms job ad... and we're still waiting for more solid updates on DNF's development.
Will Duke Nukem Forever ever get released? Well 3D Realms is still working on it, and we can only keep our fingers crossed that we see it sooner rather than later.
i loved duke nukem though, i remember getting a 100 windows games and the original 2 were on it - i was gutted after having loved the 3d one hta tthey were a far cry from it.
But yea, Duke Nukem, chicks, pig cops and strip joints - and on the N64 it had no strip joints, or porn films or anything. bah.
There is only one person working on the game at this point. Then, when that person has made any progress, they bring in a new person to continue with the first ones work.
Having to understand someone elses work quickly is difficult, imagine what it's been like for ten years!
What i find funny is that if you had no knowledge about the game at all, looking at those trailers, you would assume that thy have made 2 completely different duke nukem games since Duke 3D
I remember seeing apreview of duke nukem forever in an n64 magazine nd they were freakin out because you could wear differnt clothes (cowboy etc...) and very few, if no, games had ever given you that ability before.
Just release it already, I bin looking forward to playin this for WAY too long. Scares me to think I wanted this when I was hitting puberty lol. but sayin that, release it when it done.
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The weird thing is, that is not a brand new screenshot, i was searching on the internet about 9 months ago for any new duke news and there was one site saying brand new trailer and it was just a montage of that very same pic flashing different colours.
I loved Duke 3D when it came out, the crude humour had me laughing in a few places. I wouldn't say I was EAGERLY awaiting this one, but it'd better be absolutely fantastic when it comes out or there'll be rioting or something
What worries me is the amount of cash they must have lost in this 10 years. It'd be sad after this amount of time if they had to file bankruptcy or something.
It'd be nice if they just admitted what the problem is so someone could help them with it.
I remember the review in the n64 magazine, they were raving on about it as you could shoot the enemies in over 100 different place on the body and they always reacted differently, like in golden eye ( when you had fun shooting the scientists in the knees) I'm going to dig the magazine out when i get home!
What worries me is the amount of cash they must have lost in this 10 years. It'd be sad after this amount of time if they had to file bankruptcy or something.
You've got a point, surely they can't still think this is gonna reap back the 10 years worth of production costs when they finally release it, do they??
God I hope they don't have shareholders, if they do.....man they've gotta be dumb!
Dev: "We'll release it when its ready so you'll then get the nice big share dividens when the entire world buys the game. Now go run me my ass' milk bath then give me a foot rub"
Shareholder: "Yes master. Master kind, master would never hurts us!"
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