
3D Realms shuts down. No Duke Nukem forever - vaksel
http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/58519
======
petercooper
I heard Tim Ferriss is going to spend 10 minutes learning C++ so he can finish
Duke Nukem Forever in his spare time.

~~~
demallien
Oh 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.

------
Alex3917
This 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...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8ihf5/3d_realms_shuts_down_no_duke_nukem_ever_forever/c09e2eo)

~~~
screwperman
I 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.

------
sachinag
Actually, 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
Plus 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
Hey, 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-
ocarin...](http://www.dawdle.com/product.php/the-legend-of-zelda-ocarina-of-
time-collectors-edition-nintendo-64-045496870386-643f1)

Regular: [http://www.dawdle.com/product.php/the-legend-of-zelda-
ocarin...](http://www.dawdle.com/product.php/the-legend-of-zelda-ocarina-of-
time-nintendo-64-045496870041-6902e)

~~~
froo
To 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

        his fingers went up in the air to indicate the quotation marks
    

Mark my words. When the revolution comes... people like that..

------
spatulon
Companies 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
_Companies 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.

------
robin_reala
As 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/>

(scroll to about a third of the way down for the actual list)

------
Eliezer
We should all try - when times get tough - to lose hope, admit loss, and give
up a little faster than _this_.

~~~
Tichy
I 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.

~~~
jm4
They 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.

------
GavinB
Well, we got Chinese Democracy, so 1 out of 2 isn't bad.

~~~
mynameishere
Is 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>

~~~
cubicle67
I 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.

------
stavrianos
I 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.

------
marvin
This 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
Good that HURD is still around..

------
dfranke
Farewell, Apogee Software. You were a wonderful part of my childhood.

/me gives Commander Keen a final salute

~~~
klocksib
Well, Apogee published Commander Keen, but ID Software developed it. So fear
not, maybe after DooM 4... :)

~~~
viraptor
Oh yes please! The lack of pogo stick in today's games is just embarasing...
;)

------
Xichekolas
Man 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
True resolution independence in OSX :P

------
Hexstream
Personally 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.

------
nocman
Rats! 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
Parrot 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.

