Duke Nukem has always been a firm favourite of mine; ever since I saw my dad first freeze a pig cop then kick it into a million pieces back on Duke Nukem 3D in 1996, I was hooked. The variation of levels and bosses coupled with Duke’s bad ass attitude really made the game for me and I would spend hours watching my dad play when it first came out. When I got a bit older, around ten or eleven, I then started playing Duke 3D myself; killing aliens, watching pixelated boobs on the screen and even trying my hand at a bit of level editing on the Duke 3D level editor – I didn’t think this game could get much better.

Unfortunately, as with all games, they do eventually age and get very old and so I moved on from Duke 3D, got a PlayStation and had my weird phase of really enjoying extreme sports and wrestling games but, that aside, my heart did crave another Duke Nukem game to come round the corner. Eventually, of course, Duke Nukem the Manhattan Project and Duke Nukem Land Of The Babes both came to the PlayStation and I was really excited for all of three seconds until I found out these were nothing like the first person shooter I fell in love with – Manhattan Project was a side scroller and Land Of The Babes was a third person shooter. Both of these games were pretty poor, in my opinion, and didn’t give me the Duke Nukem fix I needed.

Being the young video gamer I was, I didn’t actually know that Duke Nukem Forever had originally been announced a year after Duke 3D’s initial release. You have to let me off here as I was only nine years old and didn’t actually get internet savvy till I was around fifteen. Having said that, my dad did hear about the announcement of Duke Nukem Forever by word of mouth at work, and so we started to keep an eye out for any other news on Duke Nukem Forever.

The announcement of Duke Nukem Forever back in 1997 came barely a year after Duke 3D was released and came from Scott Miller and George Broussard who were co-owners of 3D Realms, the developers of Duke Nukem. Their “awesome” idea was to cash in with Duke Forever and shed out a whopping $500,000 licensing fee for the game to be built on id Software’s Quake II engine. Broussard thought that this would be a brilliant money saving idea, and would also save time on building an engine from scratch, thus giving 3D Realms a leg up in the creation of the sequel. Turns out that id didn’t actually give the engine rights to 3D Realms until November 1997, already delaying the previously announced mid 1998 release. It wasn’t until E3 in 1998 that the first video was shown of Duke Forever on the Quake II engine. Critics were generally impressed but Broussard on the other hand wasn’t, while Infogrames, the publishers of Duke Nukem, were happy for the development to continue forward.

After the Quake II engine was released, Epic Games released its Unreal Engine and got 3D Realms thinking, as they were struggling a lot with the Quake II engine. By “struggling”, I mean that they couldn’t even manage to make the Nevada desert look right and so one of the programmers at 3D Realms suggested they move Duke Forever to the Unreal Engine and, after a meeting or two, 3D Realms agreed that the change was a good idea, although it also meant scrapping a load of their work and wasting Broussard’s $500,000 investment. So in June 1998 the switch was announced and Broussard himself said that this wouldn’t severely delay the game, and that Duke Nukem Forever would be in the same stage as it was on the Quake II engine within six weeks. Broussard also stated that none of the features in the video shown at E3 would be lost. One of the 3D Realms programmers, on the other hand, stated that the whole game was going to go through a full reboot, making the E3 trailer pretty useless.

It was coming to the end of 1999 and the game had now missed quite a lot of release dates, whilst still needing a stupid amount of work to be done on it. It was still deemed unplayable and a load of the weapons still remained conceptual. Broussard was getting shot down time and time again by game critics and the future of Duke Forever looked bleak. Broussard himself then saw more complex games coming out and, as he did so, he rushed to 3D Realms stating that all these elements he had seen in all sorts of video games needed to be put into Duke Nukem Forever. Broussard then thought it would be a good idea to upgrade Duke Forever to the latest Unreal Engine, so that the game could have the Unreal Tournament style multi-player for Duke Forever. It was said that Broussard had no clue what he wanted the finished game to look like, and that he basically wanted to make the best video game in the world that had every single video game element imaginable. Personally speaking, by this time I was getting sick of all of this back and forth and decided to leave the Duke Nukem Forever idea aside and go on to play more PlayStation 2.

E3 2001 came along and Broussard decided to showcase a new Duke Nukem Forever trailer. This was the first time Duke Forever had been seen publicly for three years now, thereby missing its mid 1998 release. The trailer, however, left pretty much the whole of E3 gobsmacked as this was a new level of FPS for the time and the graphics looked outstanding. Broussard and 3D Realms appeared to be very pleased with themselves but Broussard still had no idea exactly what he wanted as the finished product. While this was all going on, the publishers for Duke Forever, Infogrames, hit bad financial problems which mean they had to close their main offices in Texas, which were then absorbed into their parent publisher company, Take-Two Interactive.

In 2003, only eighteen people from 3D Realms were working on Duke Forever and 3D Realms employees stated that Miller and Broussard still had the 1995 games mentality that only small groups of people can work on video games without a huge budget. Miller and Broussard were personally funding the project meaning that 3D Realms didn’t have the added pressure of being badgered by the publishers which, by this time, were Take-Two Interactive. This is when the fuss from Take-Two came in to play. In 2003, Take-Two’s CEO announced that Duke Forever would not be out that year and that Take-Two themselves were going to cut $5.5 million from its earnings due to Duke Forever’s lengthy development time. Broussard shot back by telling Take-Two to literally STFU and that he and Miller were investing their own time and money into the project and that Take-Two had no right to say what they had in order to cover their own backs. Later that year the CEO of Take-Two had told him that the game would have to be finished by late 2004 or the beginning of 2005.

At E3 2005 there were rumors that Duke Forever would be making an appearance. These rumors were later quashed when the appearance was cancelled and later replaced by the game Prey. In a 2006 interview with Broussard, he stated that Duke Nukem Forever’s main elements had been finished, that the final game was just being pulled together and that it was being made more fun. Later that year Broussard showed some tech demos of the game such as vehicle sequences, a few test rooms and even an in game computer that sent e-mails. Take-Two, on the other hand, were trying to push this game out as it stood. They revealed that they had regenerated the Duke Nukem Forever deal and that 3D Realms would be receiving $4.25 million instead of $6 million on the release of the game, but that they would also get a $500,000 bonus if Duke Nukem Forever was released by December 31st 2006. Broussard being Broussard later said that the 3D Realms didn’t care for the bonus and that he would never ship a game early.

As you can well imagine, some of the 3D Realms staff were pretty tired of delays because, as Duke Forever was the only 3D game most of them had been working on, it didn’t leave much to say on their resumes. Between 2005 and mid 2006, between seven and ten employees working on the Duke Nukem Forever project had left 3D Realms and, although Broussard said that this wasn’t a huge blow to the game itself, Duke Nukem Forever was still another two years away from completion.

In January and May 2007, Broussard became infatuated with the thought of completing the game and bringing it to market, and so posted some ads for game developers with what he claimed were actual screen shots from Duke Nukem Forever. The 3D Realms Duke Nukem Forever team then doubled size within a short space of time and in December 2007 a teaser trailer for Duke Nukem Forever was released – the first trailer that had been released in six years. This of course got a lot of people, including myself, excited and even though Broussard was now saying that the game would be released when it was done he did mention the fact that a lot more media would be coming out for the game over the next few months. A video was released on American TV in 2008 on a talk show, which was filmed on a handy cam as the host of said talk show played through a level of Duke Forever. Broussard later claimed that it was an out of date build and it only had basic combat elements. Duke Forever didn’t go on to make an appearance at E3 2008 because Scott Miller thought the idea would be irrelevant.

The game was finally nearing completion but the money was drying up and, by this point, both Miller and Broussard had put $20 million of their own money into this project, and asked Take-Two for $6 million to complete the game. According to both Scott Miller and George Broussard, Take-Two agreed but then claimed that they were only going to give them $2.5 million but eventually compromised by saying that they would give $2.5 million in advance and a further $2.5 million when the game was completed. Broussard rejected this offer and suspended all development on Duke Nukem Forever in May 2009.

In May 2009, 3D Realms laid off the Duke Nukem Forever team entirely due to lack of funding and Duke Nukem Forever looked dead and buried. Take-Two said that they still owned the publishing rights to the game but refused to fund it anymore and so, throughout May 2009, a load of Duke Nukem Forever footage and screen shots were released on the internet by former 3D Realms employees as their way of saying goodbye to Duke Forever. On May 14th 2009, Take-Two then filed a lawsuit against 3D Realms for not completing Duke Nukem Forever and claimed that Take-Two gave Infogrames $12 million for the game to be completed. 3D Realms, however, denied that they had received any money as it was between Infogrames and Take-Two only.

In December 2009 Scott Miller officially announced that they had ceased all development on Duke Nukem Forever and that they were looking for some outside development help to complete the game. On June of this year the lawsuit between Take-Two and 3D Realms took place and, according to the United States Patent and Trademark Office, 3D Realms still remains the sole owner of Duke Nukem. In August of 2010, rumours began circulating that Gearbox Software, the developers of Borderlands, were picking up where 3D Realms left off and that Duke Nukem Forever may actually be resurrected, with a demo as early as the fourth quarter of this year. This was a relatively strong rumor as Gearbox were working on another Duke Nukem title called Duke Begins, which was subsequently axed during the Take-Two lawsuits.

On the 3rd of September 2010, however, the unthinkable happened. At the Penny arcade expo (PAX) in Seattle it was unveiled that Gearbox Software has now officially put the finishing touches to the development of Duke Nukem Forever. The stone cold thirteen year wait is finally over and a publicly playable demo of the final build of Duke Nukem forever was available at their PAX booth. The game is pegged down for Q1 2011 release and Randy Pitchford, the president of Gearbox Software told a crowd of excited Duke fans at PAX that they couldn’t let Duke die. So, after all these years, it is finally here.

Will it live up to the 13 year wait? I sure as hell hope so.

Rob Bunce is the creator of PlusXP and a contributor to GamingLives

Last five articles by Rob

• Do Games Need A Reboot?
• What Makes A Good Fighter?
• Golden Joystick Awards 2010
• Duke Nukem Forever
• Is It All Down To The Gamerscore?