Duke Nukem Forever Ago
Everyone who came up in the nineties is very excited to tell you about it, should you give them even the slightest opportunity to do so. Movies and comics maintained the machismo and over the top action of pictures from the eighties, but now with a swelling undercurrent of stone faced seriousness.
Video games also experienced a major change in style and substance. RPGs and adventure games, as well as arcade cabinets had dominated through out the seventies and eighties, but the medium was growing.
First Person Shooters are pretty much exactly what they say on the tin, featuring shooting action from a first person perspective. First person shooters have technically existed since the seventies, with one Maze War having begun development in 1973.
Its developer, Steve Colley, was interning at NASA and messing about with some of the programs that were used to work on the Space Shuttle Project. He noticed far ahead of his time that he could easily render walls and halls if he was to utilize perspective, and released what’s most likely the first walking simulator to grace the market. However, with the help of two other interns, Greg Thompson and Howard Palmer, Maze War (then simply titled “Maze”) became the worlds premier First Person Shooter.
It being the first didn’t make it the best. It’s gameplay was a simplistic, deathmatch only format that lacked staying power in the hearts of gamers. It hardly finds its name in the mouths of gaming historians, as Wolfenstein and Doom are generally considered the progenitors of the Genre. Wolfenstein 3d launched in 1992, to great aplomb from audiences and critics alike. The fast paced and violent gameplay, in which not at all suggestively named American hero B.J. Blazkowicz kills the hell out of the Nazi inhabitants of the titular Castle Wolfenstein, provided a format that many first person shooter games followed from thereon. The gameplay was praised for its realism and pace, as well as its practical and intuitive controls. Developers of first person shooters have been playing catch up ever since.
Apogee Software, the developers of a lesser known series named Duke Nukem, found their 1991 release to be abruptly outdated. Following a format established by games like Mega Man, The original Duke Nukem was a side scrolling shoot-em-up that tasked the titular hero with making it to the end of one level after next, killing aliens and boxes as needed.
It released to comparatively little fanfare, but enough for a sequel, appropriately titled Duke Nukem II to be released 2 years later in 1993. Taking a similar two-dimensional perspective, Nukem II was moderately successful, but not nearly to the degree of Doom, which launched in December of the same year.
Critics and gamers praised Doom for its visceral violence, functional and intuitive controls, as well as its beautiful graphics. The game is considered to have paved the way for first person shooters for the next twenty years to come. Moreover, Doom had the benefit of controversy to propel sales. Nobody had seen quite a game as unashamedly violent and satanic as the demon-slaying shooter that had just dropped, and many took great offense to it. One David Grossman called it a “mass murder simulator”.
Perhaps noticing the traction that this sort of controversy can bring a commercial release, Duke Nukem developers (now called 3d Realms) shot their shot into the first person shooter market with Duke Nukem 3d. Abandoning its side scrolling roots, Duke Nukem 3d was the first in the series to imitate the models of gameplay laid down by Wolfenstein and Doom, and it did so with great effect. It sold a staggering 3.5 million copies on a 300,000 dollar budget, and had dozens of add ons and re-releases on different consoles.
Some critics decried the misogynistic depictions of women as sex workers and damsels to be saved, but for the most part praise was heaped upon 3d Realms for Nukem 3d’s varied and entertainingly brutal arsenal of weapons, as well as the cartoonish and extreme violence. Duke Nukem 3d was a great success, and set its developers on a positive track that they’d later ride deep into the ground. The Duke Nukem series was edgy in the nineties, but featured some severely misogynistic attitudes that didn’t age so well. Women featured in the much loved Duke Nukem 3d were positioned as secrets; rewards for players to enjoy for combing through the game.
Though neither the at the time ground-breaking graphics nor the tasteless portrayals of sexuality would be likely to turn many heads in 2018, the intent behind the inclusion of scenes like the provided video was clear, and did not go unnoticed. Nonetheless, the party wasn’t over yet for 3d Realms, and they quickly announced a sequel, Duke Nukem Forever, in the following year. What follows would be the most infamous example of development hell to ever touch the video game industry.
A 1998 trailer was the first sign of life for the game after its initial announcement, and it looked good for the time. Game play depicted the “lovably” chauvinistic meathead, Duke Nukem, with returning voice actor Jon St Jon, shooting aliens and spouting off one liners, along with some very promising graphical improvements.
The visuals of Duke Nukem, although beautiful at the time of its release, were outdated by 1998. Enemies were represented as sprites navigating a 3d background, where first person shooters had since incorporated full 3d modeled enemies. Nukem Forever’s 98 trailer featured all that and more, with vertical aiming and even destructible environments.
The drastic change in graphical fidelity wasn’t a cheap one. It cost 500,000 dollars in licensing the Quake II engine to make the jump. Lead developer George Broussard was confident that using the new engine would cut development costs. As the engine used to create Duke Nukem 3d was on the fritz, they would have otherwise had to create an engine from scratch.
Broussard was eager to show off the advancements in press interviews, bragging about little details the team had and could put into the game, but was dissatisfied with the project behind closed doors. Video games in the late nineties were a fast evolving medium, and even Quake II’s engine failed to keep up with the times. While 3d Realms worked overtime on crafting a game around their chosen engine, a better engine dropped and shook the industry. The engine was called Unreal, made for a game also titled Unreal that was released in 1998 to positive critical reception, again setting a benchmark for the genre in terms of realistic gameplay and rendering.
Pressured to keep up with the times, Broussard and the rest of the team would eventually agree to upgrade their engine to Unreal. This was a costly decision, as the years of development and fine tuning of the game were thrown out, essentially starting back from square one. Broussard made lofty promises that no content had been lost, but it was clear that a jump to an entirely new engine would mean a new start.
He wasn’t satisfied with making a great game in its own right, but rather wanted to make a game that revolutionized the industry. He wanted to emulate the success of Duke Nukem 3d, but the industry continued to grow. Broussard could hardly keep up. He could certainly afford to try, with the blistering success of Duke Nukem 3d and the licensing of its Build Engine still producing revenue in droves. Duke Nukem Forever became bloated with features, taking bits of inspiration from movies and games released during its development, but lacked a coherent picture. Broussard and 3d Realms wanted to create the next big thing, not just a big thing. Three years after the world saw the first gameplay video of Duke Nukem Forever, another trailer was released in 2001.
The video showed off an impressive amount of polish, and fans were again elated to see that the game was coming. It, unfortunately, was not. For the next six years, the game was subject to numerous delays and rumors. Some reports suggested that yet another new engine was put into place in 2004, and Broussard vehemently denied them.
In 2007, another trailer finally dropped. This one was much less indicative of the quality of the game, only featuring some masculine posturing from the hero and some rock n roll.
The money was drying up. Since Day One, DNF was funded by co developers Scott Miller and George Broussard, and it had cost around twenty million dollars between the two of them. Two years later, they suspended all development and laid off the staff after being denied six million dollars from their publisher, Take Two, to finish the game.
Nevertheless, the game was picked up and finished by developer Gearbox, and released in 2011, some fourteen years after its initial announcement. By then, the game had become legendary for its total failure to release along with its astronomical promises of quality. It turned out to be a waste of time for everyone involved, as the final project was critically panned. The graphics were considered outdated, the game play poorly paced, and the misogynistic depictions of women archaic and ugly.
Duke himself has made appearances in other franchises, but has yet to see a sequel in his main series. With how the last one went, it’s hard to say he ever will.
