The Duke Nukem Forever Saga

ourselves a witch. Okay, then today we're going to talk about something that's received a lot of press over the years and a lot of ridicule um, some of which I mean I couldn't argue. I think it was justified. Uh, we're going to talk about the saga of Duke Newcomb Forever. Ah. Yes, for those of you who are unfamiliar, Duke Newcomb is an h An action video game superstar. Yeah. Uh and uh, you know, I would guess you would call it a

first person shooter. Well, yeah, let's let's let's go back and set the scene a little bit before we get into the first person shooter apart, because lucle the history actually stretches back before the first person shooter genre. Really. Yes, all right, First of all, before we even go into this at all, Wired has reported that the typical development cycle for a video game is two to four years. Yes, so it can take between two and four years to

develop a typical video game. And that's uh. That was a recent article, so I think that would go for today's video games. So keep that in mind. Two to four years, all right. This story starts really with a pair of friends, Scott Miller and George Brossard. Scott Miller was a are still is, and Scott Miller started programming back in building video games all the way back in. One of the first ones he wrote is called Beyond the Titanic, which is now freeware. You can actually go

and download it. It's a text based game, sort of like the old Zorki games. I love those games me too, and I really enjoyed this as well. So Beyond the Titanic, if you do a search for it, you can actually play one of Scott Miller's first games. See. Miller came up with a brilliant idea. He thought, why not find a way to get people interested in a computer game by releasing part of the game for free and then in order to unlock the whole game, you have to pay,

which is the shareware based model. Okay. So he came up with this idea and he founded a company called APAG Software Limited. So this was back in. Apage was kind of a part time business for for Scott and then in he quit his job and concentrated on Appa G full time. And uh and Bissard George Bissard was a a co founder. He was also interested in this and um he joined on with Scott Miller. So July one, nineteen, the first Duke Newcomb game came out. That's Duke Newcomb

one point oh right. Back then it was a side scroller game. Yes, so so not a first person shooters, side schooler side scrollers like the old Super Mario Brothers games, you know, not like a platformer. A platform er exactly, it was. It was innovative because your character could go left, right, up, or down. The screen would scroll in all four directions, so you weren't forced in a single direction like you know, like the old Super Mario game. You start going to

the right, you could never backtrack to the left. Yeah, there are a number of games I've played like that. It's very frustrating if you feel like you could catch that extra power up and you know it too late, right, Yeah, you ran a little too far and now you can't get that one up on the first level Super Mario Brothers. Not that I'm better anyway. So uh So that was the first game in the Duke Newcomb series and introduced this kind of Schwarzenegger type hero, although back then a

very primitive. Again, it's just a side scroller in a white justice, very good side scroller, but it was not a first person shooter. I was gonna say. It was just sort of a two bit character, except he was more than two bits, like eight. He was definitely a two dimensional definitely. But the game had some cheat codes in it and other stuff they got built into later Duke nukemb games. So that was July first nine, and by November one, Duke Newcomb two point I was released. Um,

and then we're going to skip ahead too. May five, a new game developed by i D Software hits. Do you know what this one was? It involved shooting Nazis. It's that wolf Stein. Yes, Wolfenstein. Um, Wolfenstein three D comes out. Now Appog wasn't just a game developer, they were also a game public sure. So this game was developed by i D software. I always said that was it. Yeah, it's probably it. I've always I you know what, I

have always called it it. And I got to this and I was like, I'm just gonna say i D just in case it software, We'll go with it. So it created Wolfenstein three D. APPAG published it, and this started off the whole first person shooter craze. Really, I mean, it was the first one to really get attention on the BC. So December three Duke Newcomb two comes out and it's still a side scrolling game, but the property is still going strong, and in Appog creates a new

brand called three D Realms. Now, the idea back then was that appog was publishing all these different styles of games, and they thought if they could create a brand specific to each style of game, it would make it easier to identify. So three D Realms would have gone with

all the three D environment games, mostly first person shooters. Uh. It turned out that eventually three D Realms became the unofficial name for the company, that the legal name was still APAG Software Limited, where everyone knew of them as three D Realms, mostly because the first person shooter I think pretty much took off and the other honors kind of died down. So January twenty nine, nineteen n Duke Newcomb three D hits It Goes Gold. This was the

game that that really took the world by storm. Uh. It was incredibly successful, so successful that it flooded three D realms coffers with filthy, filthy lucre. In other words, it made him rich. Yeah, they made that some money off Duke Newcomb three D. A lot of people just thought the game was a lot of fun as a first person shooter, had a lot of snarky comments, and it mostly culled from the Army of Darkness and evil

ed movies. Uh, you could easily imagine Bruce Campbell. Actually is easy to imagine Bruce Cambell saying these things because he has said them. But your character would say things like come get some and groovy and all that kind of stuff, which pretty much came straight from those movies. Um. Yeah, I'll have to take your word for it because I'm not much into the first person shooter top games. I played played it so many hours of Nukem three D. Now.

It was based off a The The engine that used was called build it was It was developed in House by three D Realms. Yeah, and there were very very few people I I understand who built the original game, very very small team of people who created it. Yeah. This was back before you had to have enormous teams

to build a video game. I mean, today you'll hear weird reports of I think I once heard that Grand Theft Auto four cost an insane amount of money to develop, Like we're talking like a hundred million dollars to develop. I don't believe that necessarily, but it's kind of indicative of how video game development has has spiraled into this enormous thing when back in the day it was a much smaller uh task. So uh yeah. So the game

comes out in ninety six, it's a huge success. Three D Realms ends up getting really really rich off of it, um Brossard and Miller in particular, and they weren't doing poorly too before that. It's just that Duke NUKEMB really Yeah. And then um some patches and mods come out over the next few years for Duke NUKEMB three D which allow you to alter the game. I've actually played a few. I remember getting a mod for Duke NUKEMB three D that created a whole new levels that were not designed

by three D Realms. Other people have designed these and then uploaded them, and then you could download them and as long as you had the basic game, you could play the moded levels. Um. You also could play on a local area network against other players, which to me

was phenomenal. I remember the first two games I ever did that with were Duke Nukemb three D and Descent, which was the three dimensional spaceship game where you you could move in three different planes right, you could go up, down, left, right, actually you know you do the X, y and z axes anyway, So really popular game. Three D Realms diad what would come back to hunt them multiple times over the next few years. They announced officially the development of

a game called Duke Newcombe Forever. It was at this point where Brossard had decided that because the first Duke Newcomb game three D game was such a huge success, uh, he was not going to cut any corners in developing Duke Nukem Forever. And that was a decision that would hunt many people for many years. Yep um. Both Jonathan and I had consulted an article that ran and wired um in December two thousand nine by Clive Thompson. It's

a really, really awesome article. If you're interested in this topic, you should definitely go check it out. But from from everything I read, especially in that article, UM, it appears that he is the consummate perfectionist. He wants everything to be just so um and to a fault. And the problem with that in the video game world is that as you're developing a game, other companies are developing new engines, and a new engine will come out that will make

your game look primitive in comparison. And so Broussard hated this. Like back back when they were developing Duke Nukem three D, they were on the cutting edge, right, And then what happened was when they went to Duke Nukem Forever, Broussard made a judgment call. He decided that it would be faster and more efficient and more cost effective if they licensed the game engine uh instead of trying to build

a brand new one. Because the build game engine was showing signs of being out of date renew they were gonna have to go with a new game engine. I think we should point out to what a game engine actually is. Um. Yeah, it's like the chassis. I would guess if you use a car metaphor for it, it's it's the software on which the world can be built for a first person shooter game, especially, I would I think if an engine as being a first person or three D type construct, not like a side scroller platform

or something like that. Yeah, and often it'll have elements to it. It may or may not involve a physics engine, because sometimes you can have a physics engine that's separate from the game engine, um that gets incorporated later. It's built on top of that chassis if you will. I shouldn't.

I shouldn't mix engine and chassis. But yeah, I mean it's the if you used engine strictly as the metaphor, Yeah, it's what powers the game or and the physics engine powers how the physics run in the game right exactly, So you may have everything from how the game renders to just just what happens when you do this, What is the result, like when you shoot a monster? What is the result. All of the stuff depends upon the

game engine. And uh, and we're most mostly talking about the way the game engine rendered graphics, especially graphics in motion, and so Brizard made the decision to to uh least the Quake two engine um and of course Quake two was that this engine was designed by by a completely different company. UM, so three D Realms had you know, they had to pay in order to use it, but

they decided that would be faster than developing their own. Uh. This same year, which was again uh, that was when Miller announced that the villain from the very first Duke Newcomb game, Newkemb one point oh the side score one Dr Proton would be returning in some form newkemb forever. All right, so when they announced it, they start to lease the Quake two engine. Uh and uh. In May, trailer came out for this game for E three Right three,

which is the Electronic Entertainment Expert. Yeah. Yeah, it's all about video games and I've been a couple of times. It is amazing and intimidating. So this trailer came out and people thought it was pretty impressive. It showed some new gameplay elements, including Duke firing guns at aircraft as he's on a moving truck. So it had like a part where you're playing in a turret. You know, you were manning a turret and firing at at planes pretty cool stop a big jump from Duke Newcomb three d uh.

And there was also an introduction of a female character called Bombshell, who the less said about the better. Anyway, she did not look like she was a Saying that she wasn't a fully developed character is probably going to be the wrong way of putting it. Um, I'll just leave it at that. Let's just say that a lot of a lot of Duke nukelem is based off juvenile fantasies. Yeah. So then, and that was one month later, three D

Realms announces that it's dropped the Quake to license. It's switching instead to the Unreal engine, which is was from Epic Mega Games. Yeah. I remember when Unreal came out, and so many people who loved the first person shooter genre really really enjoyed Unreal and Unreal tournament. Um and I do remember that being a great big deal at the time because it was basically it's Quake versus Epic

Mega Games Unreal and which one was the best. And Yeah, I think I think most people did think that Unreal was provided faster, smoother graphics than Quake. They may not have liked the gameplay as much. But they thought that the graphics themselves were better, which is kind of what Broussard thought, so they decided to go with the Unreal engine instead of the Quake two engines. So at that time, Broussard says, hey, don't worry, this won't really delay us

that much. Expect the game next year, which would be and how long is this after the initial announcement? Two years? So we're now two years in because ninety seven was the official announcement um and nine would uh, you still have seen nothing of the game. And two years after they first started working, actually two years after they first

announced it. Going to keep in mind it companies work on these things before they announced them, right right, So it's it's at least two years into a two to four year average developments, and they've just scrapped their game engine entirely, which means they're going to have to recode every much everything from scratch. You might keep the level designed the same, and you might keep the same sort

of monsters and everything. You may want to try and maintain the same look but in a more sophisticated way, but you still have to recode all that. So October twenty second, n that's when Miller says that they're tweaking the engine again to take advantage of new Unreal uh engine improvements that were developed for Unreal Tournament. Mostly this would be the multiplayer stuff, but just engine improvements in general. So November they say, Okay, these engine changes are causing

more delays than we thought. We're having to patch the engine a lot, and so it's slowing us down a bit. Uh And at that point, a company called Info Grames purchased a majority stake and another company called GT Interactive. Al Right, GT Interactive was the retail distributor for Duke newkembe Forever, so now those rights revert to Info Grames. Info Grames announces expect Duke Nukem Forever in the year

two thousand, three years after the initial announcement. Uh So, that year two thousand was the first time Wired gave Duke Nukem Forever a special award. Well that would be more of an infamous infamous award. Yeah, it gave it the second place for the Vaporware of the Year awards. We've we've mentioned vaporware a few times on the podcast.

I don't think we've mentioned it recently at all um. Basically, when there is a product this I've heard the chairman used more in tech than anything else, but it refers to a product or software that is announced people expected for a while, and then keep expecting it for a little while longer, and then after that they expected some morning it just never shows up. And sometimes the company folds.

Other times, you know, they you know, end up scrapping the project, or it gets it gets somehow looped into some other project and so it's called something else when it finally comes out and people don't remember. Yeah. But in this case, the company was still very much around

and they were still theoretically working on the project. Actually not theoretically, they were in fact working on the project, but it just hadn't shown up, And so Wired gives it the second place of the Vaporware of the Year awards in two thousand, two thousand one, it gets first place, and it gets it again in two thousand two, and in two thousand three they give it the Lifetime Achievement Award.

So in two thousand four no Duke Knewcom forever listed in Wired Vaporware of the Year, but two thousand five, two thousand six, two thousand seven, two thousand eight, it's listed. They skipped it. In two thousand nine they acknowledged two do comb Forever, but they did not include it in the list. So vaporware all those years, and again that's much longer than a two to four year life cycle. But but jumping back a little bit, I'm sorry you're

gonna say something. Well, no, I was going to jump back a little bit because you know, at this point in in uh Clive Thompson's article back in two thousand three, UM he said only eighteen people were working on developing the software UM which again talking in today's terms at two to four year development cycle. UM, that's relying on a staff of fifty or even more people depending on

the title. And a game as ambitious as Duke Nukem Forever, you would expect lots of people to be working on this, especially because well honestly, they expected to make a lot of money on it, so you could afford to hire more programmers and get more people involved with the project because you'd be able to pay off in the end even with that added expense. Yeah, here's here's the thing, is that because they made so much money with Duke Nukem three D and because and other projects, they had

a lot of money they could pour into this development project. Yes, so it's we should we should clear this up to uh and we'll back in back in two thousand, December two thousand, to jump back just a little further, Infogrames sold those those retail distribution rights to someone else. Do you remember who that was? No, I don't take two. Oh yes I did. Take two. Interactive just didn't want

to be wrong. Same distributors who who publish out games like Red Dead, Redemption, the Offee games, Grand Theft, Auto Civilization five, Take two. Indeed, so take two that's going to be important in a little bit when we get to the explosion of three D realms in the Duke Nukem Forever project. So now now jumping back ahead, yeah, you you started to see problems more than more than

just delays. I mean the in two thousand two they scrapped all the work they had done on Duke Nukem Forever and decided to dump the unreal engine and go with an in house engine after all, right, you know, Jonathan, I think it's fascinating, Just as a side note here um that there are if you're interested in evidence of

these different builds of the game. There are trailers that they would show at E three every so often to show what they were working on, and you can actually see evidence of the different builds of the game running on different engines. Yeah, there's there's aating, there's a trailer for the one that they showed a d three. There's a trailer for the unreal engine version, which was shown

I think in UM Yeah, two thousand one at E three. Again. Uh, the Inhalse stuff is sort of what we're seeing now, although it's been heavily modified of course since that time at any rate. So so they've gone through three different game engines they went. They also switched their physics engine at one point, so that there's another change there. Um. At one point, take To, a CEO for Take two, said that they were actually using the Doom three engine,

but Broussard refuted Dad said that was not true. And Um and Broussard and take To have had a very contentious history. Yeah, it seemed like it from the from the Thompson article especially. Yeah, there was a point where the CEO for Take two said that the game would definitely not be out before a certain time and Broussard said, Hey, you have no right to say when and win a game will or will not be ready, because you're just

publishing it, you're not building it, So shut up. You don't know anythink I've actually used much worse language than that, but at any rate, So Brissard was not shy about this at all, and during the around two thousand and six, three D Realms had a severe morale problem with especially with the development team for Duke Newcomb Forever, because this is two thousand six. They've been developing this game for

almost a decade. Now, well, think about it. If you're one of the programmers, you would be able to say that you had this massive, super duper cool title on your resume and go, look what I worked on. Except if it never shows up, then you get to say, yeah, I just wasted the last five years in my life on something that never got released. More than that, it also became a monetary thing because, as it turns out, three D Realms apparently was was paying their developers less

money than compete competing developers. But the promise of three D Realms was that hey, look at Duke newkemb three D that game was phenomenal. It made us rich. This game is going to make you rich because we're going to give you these profits sharing uh bonuses. So but here's the problem is that you can't share in a profit if the game never comes out. So one of those little tricky things about profits, you can't make them

till you're selling something. Um. So, the profit sharing promise was starting to get a bit stale, actually very stale by two thousand six, and several employees left Three D Realms during that period. Um Duke Nukem forever look like it was in danger of being put on the shelf because a lot of the people who were carrying that knowledge had left the company. And then, uh, they decided.

Broussard's like, no, I am not going to let this die, And he went on to the three D Realms web page and put out job openings and they put a big picture of Duke Nukem on the job openings. One of the people that Broussard hired was a man by the name of Brian Hook, and Brian Hook brought with him a certain quality that was much needed at three

D Realms. He had the ability to look at Broussard in the eye and say no, because here was the thing was that again, like you said, Brissard was a perfectionist still is a perfectionist who wants the absolute best for his game, which is an admirable quality, but it means that you never let go, which we can see there's evidence of that by the fact that this game

has yet to come out. Brian Hook was the first person to actually stand up to Brissard and say, you know what, that's a great idea, but we can't put it in this game. We'll put it in the next one. This game has to go out. We can't keep changing things this late in the development cycle. It wasn't quite enough to save the company. If that had happened. If Hook had come on earlier, this game would have been out. In fact, this game and sequels would have been out

by now. I fully believe that. But because Bisard is a very powerful personality, um, you know, no one else really did that, and so things just kept changing. And I'm not really criticizing Broussard because I think I'd probably be the same way if I saw a superior engine come out while I'm working on this game, and I had made my reputation on a game a few years earlier, I would also be tempted to switch, so I can't really criticize him. Over the next couple of years, more

screenshots get leaked to various websites and magazines. Uh. And in two thousand nine, Broussard took a demo of the game to Take two and he was asking them for six million dollars additional funding to finish the game. Yes, they had, They had run out of a lot of their funding. And that's even with the co founders of the company starting to put forth some of their own cash. I read that according to the Thompson article. Yeah, I

read that. The the the head of Gearbox Software. And we'll talk about them a little bit in a second. Randy Pitchford. Randy Pitchford said that he leaves Broussard put twenty to thirty million dollars of his own money into developing this game. I mean, now, that's a story of a man who is absolutely determined to get this thing out. I mean, clearly, you don't. You don't put that money into any sort of project and just consider it like

a vanity project or something that's a ton of cash. Um. Anyway, So he Takes takes the game to Take two, and they asked for six million dollars. Now, what happens next depends upon whom you ask. According to Brossard and Miller, they say that Take to initially agreed to the six million and then said, you know what, never mind, here's

two point five million instead. What Take two says is no, they said the six million figure was unrealistic, and so they offered two point five million to start and an additional two point five million once the game was finished, but that they had rejected the six million dollar um uh proposal in either case, Uh, three D Realms left without the money. So then on May six, two thousand nine, very very sad day at three D Realms, they dismissed

the development team for Duke Newcam Forever. And we're immediately hit with a lawsuit. Yeah immediately being a week later, but yes, well almost immediately when you're talking about a game that's been in development for twelve years. Yeah, three times the maximum length for a typical video game. UM so yeah, they they released the team, They essentially fire the development team. Now three D Realms exists to this day, Yes,

that company itself has not gone away. But that entire division of their company is gone apart from Brossard and Miller. Um So, then Take two does file a lawsuit against Three D Realms, saying that they failed to deliver upon a promise deliverable. Uh So, some people began to conjecture the reason Take two did this was not to get any money back from Three D Realms, but in order to bleed the company dry so that they could get

hold of the I p of Duke Newcomb. So that way Take two would own the distribution rights and the actual intellectual property of Duke Nukem, and they could develop the game anyway they want and make money in perpetuity. That's not exactly what happened. What did happen was Randy came along. Yeah. Now, um, I'd like to say, for the in defense of the Thompson article, if you go read it, you're going to go wait, this is it ends. It ends here, The game is over, it will never

come out. There's there are lawsuits. Well, it was written in December two thousand nine, and that really did seem like the final word until Randy stepped in. Yeah, it turns I was I was just gonna say that he was a developer on Duke nukemb Three D Yes, so he liked Duke nukembe he had some history with whom he knew, Mr Bruce Hard. He credited a lot of his own personal success with the lessons he learned back when he was working on that initial project. And he uh,

he's also a very passionate guy. It turns out these guys are not shy, no, and they're they're very driven people. Yeah. They are also not afraid to use colorful metaphors, as Spock would say, okay um, because in every quote I read, I was like, I can't say that one on the podcast, not without some beeping anyway. So yeah. Randy Pitchford heads a company called Gearbox Software, and Gearbox Software according well, according to Randy, three D Realms sold the intellectual property

to Gearbox Software. Some people say Gearbox Software, I went out and bought the intellectual property, and Randy says, no, they sold it to me. And it really is just a matter of perspective, saying that what that means is the people at three Realms felt that Gearbox Software, out of all the companies in the world, would be the one that would preserve their vision for the game and keep it true what they had been working on for

more than a decade. Right, Well, yeah, that that what I read was the article that you sent me, Jonathan from Nick Cowen in a telegraph um and from from what it it sounds like from reading that article, it's important to Mr Pitchford that it stays. He said, Honestly, it could the company could go in a different direction. A lot of companies would take Duke Newcomb and throw the old game out and build a new game with

him as the lead character. But they're trying to preserve as much as they can, not to mention what Three D Realms had done. It also falls into the danger that Bissard fell into that, you know, you try and change everything, you may keep this lingering in development instead of actually coming out as a game. Right. So, Randy decided that he wanted to just put the finishing touches

on this game, which included lots of stuff. He said that the game was not not close to being finished, but at the same time, it wasn't gonna make any fundamental changes. He was just going to complete the work that already been started and then polish it. So he announced at Penny Arcade Expo UH September two thousand ten that Gearbox Software was bringing the Duke back, and this was the first public announcement of Gearbox Software being involved

in Duke newkemb forever. And he said, the game's coming out and you'll have it in your hands in two thousand eleven, and I brought demos. He let the crowd come in. Anyone who is seventeen or older could play the demo because it has some objectionable material in it um but the which I will not go into, but

at any rate, they they allowed. He allowed players to line up and try out the demo and it got a lot of positive reviews, saying that it brought back the spirit of the old Duke Newcomb games that has

that same sort of cheesy since of humor. Um. Some people question whether or not that's even relevant today, because you know, Duke Newcombe came to prominence during the whole like the real big beefy action hero movie craze like die Hard, Predator and all of those movies Rambo, and then we kind of went through a period where that sort of fell out of style, although you could argue that with movies like the latest Rambo movie and the Expendables,

that there's a bit of a throwback that's coming into vogue right now, and maybe a good time for the man. It might became perfect for them to jump, and maybe it'll spiral into a whole new era of us making terrible, terrible cliche quotes and and then walking away in slow motion. At any rate, So two thousand and eleven is when we expect to see this game, and um, I'll probably play it. I played the first Duke NUKEMB, well, the Duke NUKEMB three D. I didn't play the side scroller.

I have to say, though, it's um Whereas a lot of other types of games, UH might falter after a development cycle this long. One thing that three D Realms did right is to create a personality um that's driven serious, heavy duty fan base. I mean there there are lots and lots of fans other than just Jonathan here who really want to play this game because they loved the kind of game it was, and they love the character

behind it. I mean you've got people like Mario and Sonic and Lara Croft and some of the others, um, you know, other other lesser characters probably would not have been supported through this long, long period of vaporware for this game. But I honestly think that they certainly did something right by creating such a memorable action hero for this game. Definitely, and we'll have to I'll have to see how the public reacts to this this game coming out.

It's um, it's been a long time coming, and really, at this point, I think it's impossible to say that any game could live up to the expectations of a thirteen year development cycle. But um, hopefully it won't just crash and burn right all the gate. I would love to actually see it succeed. For one thing, I anytime you can add more variety to the first person shooter genre,

I'm I'm happy to see it. Uh. You know, there's some great examples out there, and there's some, but it's always nice to have another entry into there, especially if it's if it's one that's got, you know, some history behind it. So we'll keep our eyes open. We'll let you guys know what we think, or at least I'll let you know what I think when I get my hot little hands on it. And uh, that wraps up this discussion about Duke Nukem Forever it's something that I honestly,

for a while there I wasn't expecting to see it ever. Ever, Yeah, I don't think out yet, so I shouldn't. I shouldn't count my chickens or anything. But at any rate, if you guys have any suggestions for topics we should tackle, or you have any other like the story of pac Man or something that you really want us to to sit down and have a detailed discussion over, let us know.

You can let us know on Facebook or Twitter. Are handled there is tech Stuff hs W, or you can email us at tech stuff at health stuff works dot com and Chris and I will talk to you again really soon if you're a tech stuff and be sure to check us out on Twitter Text Stuff hs wsr handle and you can also find us on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash tech Stuff h s W. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com and be sure to check out

the new tech stuff blog now on the house stuff Works homepage. Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you