The Duke Nukem Story

There have been a lot of video games released in the last 12 years, but the one we were all waiting for "Duke Nukem Forever" looks like it's never going to see the light of day. I don't follow video game news as much these days, so I missed the announcement from 3D Realms back on May 6, 2009 that they were laying off their staff, effectively ending development on the long awaited sequel to Duke Nukem 3D. Wired Magazine wrote an excellent article "How Success Killed Duke Nukem" in December, 2009. I ran cross the article as I was doing research for my "Early Years of Online Gaming" book project. What I found interesting about the Wired article is that despite ending development back in May, what happened to make the development drag on for 12 years is still shrouded in mystery. Reading about George Broussard, co-owner of 3D Realms and the man who headed the Duke Nukem Forever project, is fascinating to say the least. 3D Realms made millions off of the Wolfenstein 3D and Duke Nukem 3D games back in the late 90's. Duke Nukem Forever was first announced in April of 1997 and over the next 12 years they released just enough news to give hard-core fans hope that they would someday get to play the game. A few screenshots and a promo video is all that ever materialized. According to the latest on Wikipedia's Duke Nukem Forever page, 3D Realms claims to still be working on the game despite becoming a much smaller company and being sued by game publisher Take-Two Interactive. I suspect that once the dust settles, the Duke Nukem franchise is too valuable for a new game not be released at some point in the future. But for those of us who have been waiting, we'd probably get more satisfaction out of reading the true story about what really happened to DNF.