The Very painful Past of Duke Nukem

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 first started with It all began John Romero’s development company which earned its money from games like "Doom" and "Duke Nukem 3D". Enough money was earned for the company to continue operations for the next decade without having to release another game. The company’s philosophy was solely focused on the designer. This meant that the developers of the game were given total control over a project without having to argue with game publishers who try to impose their demands on the creation of the product or even its release date.

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.

Thus a cycle began. Every time a better game engine would come out, the solution was to drop everything that’s already done and go back to step one. As a result, the way towards completion proved to be longer than ever. And since the company had awful lot money to burn, Romero’s obsession to make the game flawless instead of just releasing it didn’t really do the damage it should have. In fact, the only financial trouble they had was when they put out "Daikatana," which spectacularly failed to even be remotely playable.

Over time, Romero finally started to realize that he was running out of finances. He had no product to show for all the years of development other than a few chaotic demos and useless materials. So he tried to find investors to support the company, so it could push DNF for the last attempt. Unfortunately for Romero, they failed miserably. By this point, investors gave the intellectual property over to another company that could get the game out. And this is where the design house, Gearbox, would come out.

As of now, the tentative release date of DNF is May 6, 2011. There also comes out a trailer that proves it to be at least playable. A lot of gamers are pessimistic about how the game would turn out to be. However, as the trailer says, after 12 years of development, it better be damn good.

It’s a good thing that not every great game has to take forever to be done. There are lots of outstanding games in the market that still offer the best gaming experience possible.