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3D Realms shuts down. No Duke Nukem forever
- sachinag 18y agoActually, this probably increases the likelihood of Forever getting made. 2K/Take Two owns the publishing rights to the game. If they made the determination that the title carried enough cachet to complete, they could easily buy the IP, the existing code (if they liked), and develop it in-house at 2K Marin, 2K Australia, or even 2K Boston. Given that it was most certainly vaporware at 3D Realms, you're starting from a probability of 0. I'd give Forever a 10% chance of being published now. [Note: I have no inside information about 2K or 3D Realms at this time.]
- froo 18y agoPlus given all the hype around the game as it is, people will more than likely buy the game just to say they owned a copy of something that wasn't supposed to exist. Hell, make it a "Limited Edition" like Nintendo did with "Ocarina of Time" which in the context of that game seemed to mean "Limited (to as many of them as we can sell) Edition" That way there is also a sense of scarcity created, where there is none.
- sachinag 18y agoHey, I pre-ordered that at Toys R Us to get the gold cartridge back in college. It's clearly different than the regular. Why? Because we say so: CE: http://www.dawdle.com/product.php/the-legend-of-zelda-ocarina-of-time-collectors-edition-nintendo-64-045496870386-643f1 http://www.dawdle.com/product.php/the-legend-of-zelda-ocarin... Regular: http://www.dawdle.com/product.php/the-legend-of-zelda-ocarina-of-time-nintendo-64-045496870041-6902e http://www.dawdle.com/product.php/the-legend-of-zelda-ocarin...
- froo 18y agoTo be honest, I don't think I've ever seen the grey cartridge version of Ocarina of Time, at least not in Australia... I purchased my Ocarina of Time just around the same time Majora's Mask was released and I received a gold one. I remember at the time talking to the salesperson at EB about if it was so limited edition, how could I pick order one easily after the release of the next version. He told me that he'd never seen a non "limited edition" (his fingers went up in the air to indicate the quotation marks) version.
- cturner 18y agohis fingers went up in the air to indicate the quotation marks Mark my words. When the revolution comes... people like that..
- mtinkerhess 18y agoI read this yesterday about some changes Nintendo made between pressing the gold cart and later versions: Eventually the Muslim community complained that the chanting was in the game, and it had to be removed, along with the original Mirror Shield crescent moon design, which is also an Islamic symbol. The only way to see either one of these things now is by playing the original OoT Version 1.0, which amounts to all of the gold cartridges and only the very first gray ones. http://www.destructoid.com/other-worlds-than-these-hyrule-in-zelda-ocarina-of-time-130982.phtml http://www.destructoid.com/other-worlds-than-these-hyrule-in...
- nopassrecover 18y agoAnd the endless cycle continues.
- TomOfTTB 18y agoI'm tempted to say the game's worth more dead than alive. It's been over 12 years now since it was first announced so anyone desperate to play it has probably come to terms with never getting that opportunity. Beyond that I have to believe it would have found some way to get produced by now if it was really a great game. My guess is it's a mediocre mis-mash after 12 years of mishandling. So in the end it's legendary as a game that was promised for over a decade and never delivered. But if it ever does get released, and it is bad, it will just be another sucky game that fell by the wayside.
- philwelch 18y agoThere's nothing stopping them from licensing the latest id engine and writing a Duke Nukem game with it and just calling it Duke Nukem Forever, which is probably a more plausible line of action than continuing with what they have now.
- robin_reala 18y ago…but that’s what they’ve been doing all along. They’ve been on the engines of all of Quake 2, Unreal, Unreal 2 and Doom 3 I believe. The trouble with that approach is that every couple of years the state of the art has moved on so much that you have to regenerate all of the graphical assets (models, textures, etc.).
- trekker7 18y agoI want to believe!
- GavinB 18y agoWell, we got Chinese Democracy, so 1 out of 2 isn't bad.
- SwellJoe 18y agoThat 1 out of 2 is definitely bad.
- mynameishere 18y agoIs that album any good? Cause I've had it on a flash drive for 2 months now and haven't bothered with it yet. This is pretty good, though; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IE3KdcTgrno http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IE3KdcTgrno
- cubicle67 18y agoI hate it when people do that :) I'm going to be walking around all day now muttering "balls of steel..." Sounds like a great dare/challenge - see how long you can remain engaged in conversation using only the DN phrases in this video. 2* the points for use in a meeting.
- philwelch 18y agoI spent all these years waiting for someone to post the lyrics to Chinese Democracy and a strategy guide for Duke Nukem Forever on Project Xanadu, and today I have nothing left but bitter disappointment.
- mtinkerhess 18y agoWe also have Mother 3, which makes 2 out of 3.
- jcl 18y agoTeam Fortress 2 took 9 years, and it's awesome.
- potatolicious 18y ago
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- petercooper 18y agoI heard Tim Ferriss is going to spend 10 minutes learning C++ so he can finish Duke Nukem Forever in his spare time.
- demallien 18y agoOh dear, I've just discovered that the thing that I had always assumed was just a joke, was actuallly real. There really was a Duke Nukem Forever? I thought that was just an internet code for Did Not Finish, like you see in racing car results.
- dfranke 18y agoFarewell, Apogee Software. You were a wonderful part of my childhood. /me gives Commander Keen a final salute
- Eliezer 18y agoWe should all try - when times get tough - to lose hope, admit loss, and give up a little faster than this.
- Tichy 18y agoI don't know - they could have started over and succeed several times in that timespan. The problem must be something other than not giving up.
- scott_s 18y agoThey did start over, at least twice. I think the first implementation was with the Quake 2 engine, but once it became obvious that was too dated, they moved to a version of the Unreal engine.
- jm4 18y agoThey were working on a lot of other things besides DNF so it spent most of that time on the shelf. It's not like they had a team working on this thing for 9 years straight. The real push to get the game released didn't start until relatively recently-- I think only in the past couple years. DNF is actually a playable game. In fact, I know someone who played it and thought it was great. As far as I'm aware most of the remaining work was creating level maps and polish. 3d Realms didn't shut down because of this game. It's just one game in their portfolio, albeit one of the more recognizalbe ones.
- huhtenberg 18y agoTheir brand alone costs good few millions. There's also an accumulated goodwill, naturally acquired (mostly positive) hype and lots of curiosity surrounding the title. "Giving up" here just doesn't make any business sense. In other words - "we should all try" consider the circumstances when deciding to lose hope, admit loss, etc. YMMV.
- Xichekolas 18y agoMan this sucks... now we'll need a new piece of vaporware to be the standard by which we make fun of things. Oh, and I guess not getting to play DNF also sucks. What is everyone else's favorite vaporware?
- cubicle67 18y agoTrue resolution independence in OSX :P
- treo 18y agoso hurd will not ship with a copy of DNF, now I am disappointed
- godDLL 18y agoTextMate 2
- furyg3 18y agoCopland: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copland_(operating_system) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copland_(operating_system)
- spatulon 18y agoTeam Fortress 2, i.e. the type of vapourware that does eventually materialise and proves to be worth the wait.
- petercooper 18y agoMaglev. It's a "Ruby that scales." http://maglev.gemstone.com/ http://maglev.gemstone.com/
- stavrianos 18y agoI had the idea this year, sadly too late, for a great April Fool's - sneak a pro-looking display selling DNF, complete with boxes of discs, into any relevant games retailer. And now I never can.
- robin_reala 18y agoAs per usual with any DNF thread, time to link to ‘Things accomplished since Duke Nukem Forever's announcement on April 28th, 1997‘: http://duke.a-13.net/ http://duke.a-13.net/ (scroll to about a third of the way down for the actual list)
- nocman 18y agoRats! Now I'll have to stop joking that Duke Nukem Forever is in a holding pattern, waiting for a rewrite in Perl 6. And it would have been great, too -- if they just could have gotten a fully implemented Perl 6 compiler in time! :-D
- bad_user 18y agoParrot 1.0 was released. This means the API is more stable, and this was the main problem of Rakudo (the Perl 6 compiler for Parrot). The jokes about Perl 6 are kind of lame. It's an open-source project and you can check its progress (instead of reading reddit :)) ... regular releases are made, and it does have a comprehensive tests suite. The latest version released in April is passing 10467 spectests (65% of the tests suite), with an increase of 3194 since March. I know that it's fun joking about such projects, but Perl 6/Parrot are very ambitions, and even if they could use some help, progress is being made. I wouldn't be surprised if the "Christmas release" is this year.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- marvin 18y agoThis is a tragedy. We will have a storm of vaporvare jokes now, but 3D Realms was actually one of very few utterly uncompromising game developers. This seems like a massive case of perfectionism run wild, but perfectionism is how you create really great stuff. Prey was released after 10 years in development, and it is one of the artistically best games I've ever played. We are not talking about desktop software here. Perfection in games is good. I've actually been looking forward to this game, expecting that it will be completed and be as good as the developers' obvious OCD suggests. 3D Realms' track record doesn't suggest that I was wrong about this judgment, but their bankruptcy does. Now we are in the situation where the best-case scenario is that we get a lame ripoff that breaks the spirit of the original, just like we always feared.
- varjag 18y agoGood that HURD is still around..
- Alex3917 18y agoThis Reddit thread on why it was canceled is hilarious: "Poor developers got screwed over. They coded the whole thing in Arc before an implementation was released, then Paul Graham pulled a stunt and released a set of MzScheme macros instead of the auto-vectorizing native code compiler he promised them." http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8ihf5/3d_realms_shuts_down_no_duke_nukem_ever_forever/c09e2eo http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8ihf5/3d_realms...
- screwperman 18y agoI thought the parent might be downmodded to hell here on HN. Only time will tell. The guy who wrote that comment is Slava Pestov, author of the Factor programming language.
- spatulon 18y agoCompanies such as Blizzard and Valve are rightly applauded for ensuring the quality of their games by delaying or cancelling them as necessary. For years I've been defending 3D Realms, saying that the situation with DNF was no different: it's not a game that has been in development for 13 years. It's two cancelled games and another that has been in development for five years. Perhaps they were doing the right thing but have been terribly unlucky somehow. Perhaps they were simply perfectionists, doomed never to be satisfied and fooling themselves into thinking that starting again would fix everything. Perhaps they played WoW all day, in denial about their rapidly depleting funds. Any one of these scenarios seems possible. I hope we find out in the coming days and weeks just what went wrong over there.
- froo 18y agoCompanies such as Blizzard and Valve are rightly applauded for ensuring the quality of their games by delaying or cancelling them as necessary. People also seem to conveniently forget that Vivendi Universal were actively trying to offload Blizzard a year or two prior to the release of WOW, because the studio was hemorrhaging money as a result of this philosophy. It's a good way to be when you're continually producing titles that knock people's socks off - which 3D Realms weren't. You can defend many things, but the fact is, they cocked it up in a big way. There's no defence against poor performance.
- Hexstream 18y agoPersonally I'm glad it will never be released, else it would invalidate all those analogies comparing something to DNF as a way of saying it will never be released. It would waste a nice well-established meme. ------------------ "The closure came about as a result of funding issues, our source explained" Oh please. That's just a symptom.