Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Duke Nukem Forever is not happening

Duke Nukem was a great game released in the 90's and in 1997 the company 3D Realms announced Duke Nukem Forever as a game they were developing for release in 1998.

In 2000 Wired Magazine ran an article on the top 10 vaporware products.

"The winners of the Wired News Vaporware 2000 awards in reverse order are:

10: Tribes 2:
9: Wireless Web Pads:
8: Bluetooth:
7: Silicon Film's Electronic Film System:
6: Warcraft III:
5: Intel's Itanium chips:
4: A New Linux kernel:
3: Black and White:
2: Duke Nukem Forever:
1: Mac OS X: "
Link to the article I quote: http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2000/12/40484?currentPage=all
The only one of these to NEVER see the light of day in 10 years is Duke Nukem Forever.

It even made PC Worlds list of the top 15 vaporware products of all time.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/145351/the_top_15_vaporware_products_of_all_time.html

It seems the title was very prophetic since it will be the far side of forever before it ever releases. The saddest part is 3D Realms treatment of their fan base, you should see the list of topics you are not allowed to discuss at their forum. Basically anything to do with the fact that they are incompetent and completely unable to plan a project to deliver this game. I work in software development so I understand the kinds of things that can derail, delay, cancel, etc product development. At this point they should just cancel the product all together and stop stringing their customers along. By this time Halo, Doom, Quake, Gears, Resistance, Call of Duty, etc have taken such a chunk of their customers away that I doubt any Duke they would manage to release could ever recoup the development cost. And notice the companies that work on these other games have actually managed to complete a software development project to produce a successful product multiple times during the last 10 years

3D Realms - Stop jerking everyone around and stop being so arrogant with your customer base. It will be done when it's done I expect from a 10 year old not from a business entity that is suppose to actually produce a product.