
Duke Nukem Forever Gets Delayed... again - mrschwabe
http://www.thinq.co.uk/2011/03/24/duke-nukem-forever-gets-one-last-delay/
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cryptoz
The Duke Nuken Forever List is my favourite place to check out at times like
this.

> Things that have taken less time than Duke Nukem Forever's Development: The
> United States' entire program to put a man on the moon, from Kennedy's
> challenge to the landing.

<http://duke.a-13.net/>

~~~
jamaicahest
Elite IV migh find it's way onto that list, if they keep up this pace.

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raniskeet
Let's admit to ourselves. We don't want duke nukem forever to be released.
It's legendary.

~~~
crististm
Exactly - it's like the movie you play in your mind when you read a good book.
No movie you see after that will ever raise to your expectation level.

~~~
Florin_Andrei
Lord Of The Rings came pretty close.

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jedsmith
I've never worked on a AAA game, with a fancy engine and an art department and
motion capture and so on. That said, I can't help but wonder how this has been
in development _14 years_. What failures of management and process took place
here? It seems like once Gearbox got control, there was an entirely brand-new
development effort (I could be wrong, that's what it _seems_ like, though).

Importantly, could Programming, Motherfucker have fixed this? Or could the
game have been so far ahead of its time that they were waiting on hardware
able to run it? Or -- my personal theory -- were they not working on it for 14
years, and they just told the public they were ... some kind of 20% project
that ended up having press releases and screenshots?

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eli
If you're curious:
<http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/fail_duke_nukem/all/1>

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jedsmith
Thank you, I am; that's on my list for reading at home this evening. From
skimming, it looks like managerial incompetence, which is unsurprising.

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artmageddon
Ultimately it can be boiled down to that kind of incompetence, but I got the
impression that they HAD to be the best by the time they released... but the
bar kept getting raised each time a new game came out(Quake, Unreal, Quake II,
etc), and thus got delayed to perpetuity.

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larrik
The root issue is that they interpreted "the best" to be "the best at every
single feature," which is completely ridiculous. The fact is that the Duke3d
had an atmosphere, depth, and immersive-ness that most games since haven't
matched. They definitely should have been able to release a game within a few
years that was the best game for its time.

Tycho at PennyArcade wrote a great piece about it yesterday:
<http://www.penny-arcade.com/2011/3/23/>

~~~
artmageddon
The comic touched on a good point, too. The controversy behind Call of Duty:
Modern Warfare 2's airport massacre level went on for a little while but has
since fizzled away-with that in mind, I can't see how long people will be
really taken aback by this game mode.

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michaelty
I hope I can pass this experience on to my grandchildren.

~~~
iwwr
Like the Second Coming of the Messiah, the arrival of DNF (The Second Shipping
(or third, if we count the apocryphal side-scrolling Duke)) will be a basis
for a future religion.

~~~
ShardPhoenix
There were two Duke Nuk[ue]m side scrollers.

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iwwr
Heretical tales not part of the Canon...

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huyegn
Part of me thinks this is a genius marketing ploy. Seriously, outside of the
few remaining die-hard fans, who even knew that Duke Nukem forever was still
being developed? I certainly didn't before this piece of news, and I'll now be
watching when they release the thing to see how it goes.

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jacques_chester
It boggles the mind how much money this would have cost in forgone earnings.

Perfection comes at a high price. Duke had and retains the power to be an
absolutely _massive_ franchise. With a steady tick-tock development model, you
could pump out new Duke games every 18 months and be raking in hundreds of
millions per release by now. And that's before considering movies, tie-ins and
merchandising.

Perfection has destroyed value.

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joelackner
"duke never comes early"

cheeky bastards.

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JanezStupar
Well I for one welcome our always late to the party overlord.

Wanna speculate about stealth April 1st launch?

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spydum
I wondered that myself.. you still get the free PR for claiming to be late
(which everyone expected), but then you get MORE PR for being early, and an
April fools joke..

who knows..

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JoelMcCracken
Yes, but games _always_ get delayed. It isn't surprising that the new
developer is subject to the same forces that delay everyone else.

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zavulon
I feel even more confident about my 2011 prediction:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1970634>

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pauldisneyiv
Sounds like Duke hasn't run out of gum yet....

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jonursenbach
I'm convinced that it's not actually delayed, but rather Gearbox is trolling
all of us.

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jacques_chester
I'm glad to see that the new development team will stay true to the source
material.

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dgallagher
Personally I was hoping for a February 29th release date this year.

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charlief
Another good resource:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_history_of_Duke_Nuk...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_history_of_Duke_Nukem_Forever)

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Semiapies
Idle, evidence-free speculation: I suspect that Gearbox completely started the
project over when they got the trademarks. I suspect that they didn't use a
single line of whatever morass of code in various stages of abandonment or
obsolescence that they got out of acquiring the property.

I think they dove in and built a game from the ground up. Perhaps there were
art assets worth using, but perhaps not even that.

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caf
Surely this is the classic tech "dog bites man" story.

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arnorhs
It's pretty obvious that this delay is a pure marketing stunt. It's a pretty
obvious one, but I mean, developing this title, you kind of have to!

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mrschwabe
Hmm, I don't think it was a pure marketing stunt. They simply embraced the
situation - and leveraged it for some extra publicity.

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bron
Mis-read the title as 'Duke Nukem Gets Forever Delayed'

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qwertymaniac
I now get the joke with 'forever'.

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Refringe
Really? Just now?

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SaltwaterC
Darn. I though I could play a GNU Hurd port of this title somewhere around
this year. Tough luck ...

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tjr
Yeah, but we did see the release of Volume 4A.

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samatman
It remains to be seen, however, whether we'll actually get A Dance with
Dragons.

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thatusertwo
Duke Nukem Forever Delayed

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olegious
haha

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olegious
how is it not funny that this game, that has been years in the making, is
delayed again? I think they're trying to go for the Daikitana record...

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newobj
John Romero started writing the design for Daikatana in February 1997 and it
shipped in April 2000. I don't think that's much of a record.

~~~
iwwr
3 years development (2 if we discount the abandoned Quake engine work) is
standard for a large project with lots of content. Although, around 1996 there
was little experience in what a big project entailed.

