Gearbox Follows on a Decade-Old Game

If there is one game that the entire gaming community thought would never actually come out, it was "Duke Nukem Forever." The game was – and arguably still is – a sequel to the very old game "Duke Nukem 3D," a classic in the FPS genre. However, after about a dozen years in development mire, constantly being reworked from scratch, it came to the point where the prevalent thought among gamers that are old enough to remember is that DNF was "going to take forever to come out." Indeed, the story of how the game got to where it currently is has been one mishap and miscalculation after another.

It all started when John Romero’s game development company made a preposterous amount of fortune on "Doom" and "Duke Nukem 3D." The money was more than enough to finance the company’s operations for ten years, perhaps even longer, even without coming up with another game. The philosophy of the company was to give the designers the sole control. They were at liberty to direct the process, without having to deal with meddlesome publishers and executives.

In theory, this meant that the designers had the freedom to implement as many fun things into the game as they wanted, with enough time to do so. In practice, it meant that terrible management could delay a game indefinitely. To be fair to Romero, the game was being developed at a decent pace using a licensed version of the then-advance Quake Engine. At some point in the process, they noticed that the Unreal Engine was vastly superior, tossed out all the work that had already been done, licensed the better code and set about working on everything from scratch. In theory, this should not have caused the game to mire in development hell for more than a decade. In practice, it did not.

Each time a new game engine came out that proved superior to the one the company was using, the practice was to drop everything that was already done and start from scratch. The result of all this was a game that was always getting near completion, but never actually getting there. Romero’s obsession with making the game perfect rather than simply getting the game out was not doing the damage it should have since the company had a massive amount of cash to spend. The only time finances ever really became an issue was then they put out "Daikatana," which had failed to even be remotely playable and ended up costing the company money..

Because of this, Romero’s sources were starting to run out. Years of development yielded nothing but a failed demos and useless material. He didn’t give up and instead tried to look for investors who were willing to fund the project so he can attempt to finish "Duke Nukem Forever" for the last time. However, it just wouldn’t work out. Because of this continued failures, the investors decided to hand the project over to another company that was sure to get the game out. Design house Gearbox was then given full control over the project.

Now it has a current May 6 2011 release date and a trailer that looks like it can at least be playable if it ever comes out. That’s the big question, though. Gamers don’t have high hopes for it to ever come out, let alone think it’ll be a good game. As the trailer itself admits, after 12 years in development, the game had better be damn good.

Nevertheless, "Duke Nukem Forever" is a game that we all secretly look forward to. I know I will try my hands on it. Will you?