

How Duke Nukem Forever Failed: Unlimited time, budget and ambition - TrevorBurnham
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/fail_duke_nukem/all/1

======
jmtame
Wow. If you watch the trailer, the gate that closes on a monster actually
crumples where the monster gets stuck underneath it. This seems like one of
those guys who really nit-picks down to the very last detail. It's probably
like having a Steve Jobs around, except without the sense of urgency for
shipping the actual product. Saying to your team "we could build for 5 years
and not deliver anything" is probably not the right attitude you want to
instill in a gaming upstart.

I was really blown away when a friend showed me that you could blow up parts
of buildings in a recent popular game, and then I realized that the effect
wasn't all that glamorous after buying the game. It wasn't as if you were
dynamically destroying buildings, they just had pre-calculated bits and pieces
that would fall off if you shot near them. Broussard would have said "no, the
buildings have to be destroyed dynamically" and at that point, the game would
never have been shipped.

On top of that, 18 developers? The effects they were after seemed really cool,
but as the article pointed out, game teams are growing:

"The long grind began to wear on the staff. The Duke Nukem Forever team was
unusually small; by 2003, only 18 people were working on it full time. This
might have been adequate back when the game was announced in the mid-’90s. But
in the years that Broussard had spent tweaking Duke Nukem Forever, games had
become bigger and bigger. It wasn’t unusual for a developer now to throw 50
people or more at a single title. In essence, 3-D games had grown up: It’s as
if Hollywood had evolved from tiny hand-cranked three-minute reels to two-hour
epic blockbusters in half a decade."

I don't think this guy had anywhere near enough people to get this done.

~~~
drawkbox
Well considering it was pre-production and research, many game titles start
off with teams this small. Blizzard only had 20-25 on World of Warcraft before
it went into produciton (i.e. the systems ready to start producing assets in).
Now they have thousands, but before you get to production game teams are
pretty small.

Even to this day here is their team:

Interesting Internals at Blizzard on World of Warcraft

Team:

\- team structure max 5-8 people

\- 32 programmers total

\- 51 artists total

\- 10 production total

\- 37 designers total

Output:

\- 5.5 million lines of code

\- 1.5 million assets

\- 900,000 web files

Points of interest:

\- leads still work (art lead creates art, programming lead codes)

\- structure team around employee skills and strengths

\- 20,000 computer systems

\- 1.3 petabytes of storage

Total people supporting (only 120 people actually making the game)

\- total 4600 people support

<http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=25307>

------
colinplamondon
It seems like the big problem was that they were trying to be on the cutting
edge by licensing other engines. But, by the time a engine is available for
licensing, the flagship title (Doom 3, Half Life 2, whatever) has already
shipped and set the new standard. At the same time, they wanted to have the
best looking game available, despite always being behind the curve in their
base technology.

~~~
snprbob86
Most of the best games on those engines were produced by teams who used the
engine as a starting point and built their own tech on top. Many games even
contribute back to the parent engine project. Some that stick out in my mind
are Soldier of Fortune (complete new damage system for Quake 3), Bioshock
(advanced water effects for Unreal 3), Counter Strike (more reliable
networking for Source), but there are countless more examples.

~~~
defen
Another great example is the original Half-Life - built on an extremely
heavily modified Quake (1!) engine.

~~~
TeHCrAzY
Source Engine is essentially the original HL engine + years of heavy duty
modification. (This may somewhat fall afoul of the "replace all the parts in
the robot one by one, is it still the same robot?" identity problem). I've
never ceased to be amazed at just how flexible the orignal HL engine turned
out to be!

~~~
tetha
So the source engine is a demonstration that continuous refactoring actuallz
works well for a long time? :)

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Ygor
What do you think about all those developers who, as the article says, spent a
decade working on a project and now have nothing to show for it?

Do you think they really have nothing to show for it? Do they take a part of
the blame?

I mean, they still have a decade of experience in 3D game development and, as
it seems, working with some of the newest technologies out there.

Would you consider hiring them, or would you rather hire someone who spent a
decade working for someone who was a better leader than Broussard and actually
finished some projects?

~~~
potatolicious
In the game industry the standard metric is "titles shipped" - you will see
this as minimum requirements for various job postings. Not having enough
titles shipped on your belt is _deadly_. It's hard to get people to even look
at your resume.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
Wouldn't "developer for _Duke Nukem Forever_ " carry a certain cachet in the
industry?

~~~
xsmasher
In the same sense that "Welder on the Titanic" would, yeah. Everyone knows you
weren't steering the ship, but...

~~~
RyanMcGreal
I laughed at the analogy, but I don't think it's appropriate. DNF didn't fail
because the coding was subpar. Far from it: every time they released demos,
jaws dropped over the extremely high quality of the graphics and game play.
Rather, it failed because the project management had no endgame.

In your analogy, the Titanic would have to be the most technologically
advanced ship _never_ to, well, ship.

~~~
xsmasher
The Titanic didn't fail because of bad welding either, so I think the analogy
holds. It set sail auspiciously enough but never made it to port, and hubris
and bad management certainly played a role in both cases.

Someone with a better knowledge of nautical history could probably come up
with a better example. Or aviation - the Spruce Goose maybe?

------
elblanco
The problem is likely that Broussard wanted to make the DN game that would
last forever. It would be perfect and without flaw. He did this instead of
just shipping one in a series of polished games (which he could have made over
the last decade+).

I remember when one of my friends was hired at 3DR and lamented when they were
going about one of their engine changes. None of the art assets were usable
after the change, meaning they could have just finished up the old game,
shipped and then started work on the next one and shipped that too.

~~~
jurjenh
That first statement kinda reminds me of Xanadu... (wonder if they're ever
going to call it quits)

The main problem with doing a sequel to a top-selling paradigm shift project
is that the sequel by its very nature will not be able to repeat the paradigm
shift and still stay true to the original. Or at least its so hard that there
are very, very few examples.

I'd imagine that being part of that original team blinds you somewhat to the
practicalities of releasing a sequel.

What I would love to see though, is all that unfinished work (if it is still
around) being released to the public, so that duke enthusiasts can collaborate
and "finish" some of the work to a playable standard...

------
electromagnetic
I think it was a major case of student syndrome. With no date set to deliver,
they had no incentive to finish.

If you hire me to paint your house, I'll say "sure, happy to help." If you
hire me to paint your house by Friday, I'll say "where's the paint can?"

~~~
randallsquared
But we also hear "Ship it when it's ready." These conflicting messages are so
confusing... ;)

~~~
colinplamondon
You have to have to pre-define 'ready' with your team to be able to know when
to ship.

------
vaporstun
Single Page: <http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/fail_duke_nukem/all/1>

------
sutro
Reminds me of another deeply troubled project out of the Dallas-area FPS
community circa 1999: John Romero and ION Storm's development of "Daikatana,"
as described by this excellent Dallas Observer article:
[http://www.dallasobserver.com/1999-01-14/news/stormy-
weather...](http://www.dallasobserver.com/1999-01-14/news/stormy-weather/)

~~~
nickelplate
This article in Geoff Keighley's "Behind the Games" series:
<http://www.gamespot.com/features/btg-daikatana/>, provides a more complete
account of the story of Daikatana. Without Eidos, and had Romero been as rich
as 3D Realms at the time, I am convinced that Daikatana would have ended up as
another DNF.

~~~
abossy
Daikatana basically did end up like DNF, although it was finally shipped after
nearly three years of delays to critical disappointment. The time frame of the
original was similar to DN as was the hype.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daikatana>

~~~
nickelplate
Well I wouldn't label it as another DNF, precisely because it shipped. But I
get your point.

------
gkoberger
I feel this is extremely relevant to startups. Most startups have no "end"- at
least Duke Nukem had a goal ("release"). With startups, they really just go on
forever. No startup will ever be finished, and it is far too easy to just keep
toiling away with no real goal.

If startups had a set end date where the developers moved on, I would argue
that we'd have more useful projects coming out of the Bay Area.

~~~
swombat
That's easily countered by launching as early as possible.

~~~
gkoberger
Sure, you can launch. But then what? You still have nothing but time. You can
set milestones, and releases. However, since there will never be a "shipped"
or "finished" product, many startups end up having no direction.

After all, they have forever to get it right.

~~~
Retric
IMO, software has cycles. Early systems have lot's of known issues that can be
quickly fixed. Then mid cycle have little or nothing _minor_ wrong and so you
tackle one or more major issues. Then your back to having lot's of little bugs
to fix. Microsoft has discovered you can sell both parts of the cycle both new
features aka Vista and then bug fixes Windows 7. But, when people talk about
the minimum valuable product what they really mean is the smallest cycle where
you get something people will pay for at the end.

The secret is to setup your cycles so you make enough money to keep going and
or know when to let a product keep without investing in the next cycle. EX:
Windows ME. Or Coke _with sugar_ , new Coke _with corn syrup_ , Classic Coca-
Cola _with corn syrup_. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-Cola>

------
bkbleikamp
If you've never read the book Predictably Irrational there is an interesting
chapter regarding a professor who performed an experiment with deadlines for
his 3 papers due in the semester.

[simplified]

Class 1: Set your own deadlines Class 2: Strict deadlines from the professor
Class 3: No deadlines

Guess who performed best? Strict deadlines.

[edit]

Also, I highly recommend the book : <http://www.predictablyirrational.com/>

------
woid
second system effect? <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect>

~~~
abossy
I definitely think so. I remember reading an Gabe Newell interview in a 1999
PC Gamer magazine about this. Newell stated that, after the excellent critical
acclaim of Half-Life, that he wasn't eager to begin Half-Life 2, because, "our
fans will expect it to be the best game ever." Alas, six years later, Newell
and Valve was able to deliver a worthy sequel. The Duke crowd certainly had
the same problem, but perhaps lacked the managerial skills and vision
necessary of such a project.

~~~
jcl
The same is true of Team Fortress 2, which took Valve ten years and multiple
from-scratch rewrites but was eventually released to wild success.

It's like the DNF story rewritten to have a happy ending.

~~~
arohner
Does anyone have numbers on how much those 10 years cost, and how much they
made on TF2?

I got TF2 for free with the orange box, which I bought primarily for portal
and HL2e2.

~~~
ricree
Yeah, it would definitely be tough to figure the numbers out. I got the orange
box mostly for TF2, and I'm sure I'm hardly alone. But other than the actual
TF2 only purchases, it's tough to separate how many units TF2 really shipped.

------
johnl
That why it's a good thing to get rid of the founder when the company gets to
a certain point some times. Broussard was never really running a business. It
may have been a lot of fun, but never really a business.

------
jlgosse
This story is great and all, but it isn't complete. Why don't they mention the
original, side-scrolling Duke Nukem games for the PC? I'm pretty sure I
remember owning 2-3 side-scrolling, baddy-shooting Nukem games, and they were
equally as awesome.

------
10ren
One of the terrible things about being your own boss is you have no one to
push back against, and ridicule for their moronic opinions about cashflow,
release it ready or not etc.

Instead, _you_ have to play that role too.

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Quarrelsome
I felt like crying. What a terribly, terribly sad tale. :(

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rapind
Would be interesting if they open sourced it. Maybe some of the original
developer's would get involved.

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messel
Part of our psychology as humans needs a deadline then. I shall go forth and
create by Friday then!

~~~
gvb
Thursday. Friday is Christmas, Santa will deliver.

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jonursenbach
Feature creep is never a good thing.

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alanthonyc
The worst case of procrastination ever.

------
diggboard
"I've got balls of steel"

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maukdaddy
Fail early. Fail often.

~~~
sfk
Four legs good, two legs bad. Or the other way round.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
I don't think the points on this comment should be negative.

To expand - the message I take from it is that it's easy to mouth platitudes
(and indeed, "mouth platitudes" is a platitude that I've just mouthed) but in
some cases they just don't apply. The big game business cannot work on the
basis of "Fail early. Fail often." and to trot out that aphorism smacks of
cargo-cult thinking.

Such phrases as "Fail early. Fail often." are to be regarded as starting
points, something to consider, not as implacable, infallible advice.
Unfortunately all too often it is taken as such.

My advice - to be taken with a pinch of salt - is that everytime you hear a
well-worn phrase, stop. Is it really applicable in this context?

That's the message I get from "Four legs good, two legs bad." Probably you'd
get the same message if you stopped and thought about it. In this forum, it's
a shame if you didn't.

~~~
RevRal
Some comments are victims of drive-by downvotes, and it is annoying.

I see this problem a lot with nested comments, where people fail to read the
comment within the context of the parent.

I would really like to see more people explaining their downvotes. Maybe,
through this, they'd figure out the source of the quote and its point would be
brought into better focus.

------
swombat
Duke Nukem Forever isn't dead. It's just hanging out with Elvis for a little
while, before the time to come back is right.

------
shahzad_may
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