Screenshots and video snippets would leak out every few years, each time whipping fans into a lather — and each time, the game would recede from view. Normally, videogames take two to four years to build; five years is considered worryingly long. But the Duke Nukem Forever team worked for 12 years straight. As one patient fan pointed out, when development on Duke Nukem Forever started, most computers were still using Windows 95, Pixar had made only one movie — Toy Story — and Xbox did not yet exist.
On May 6, , everything ended. Drained of funds after so many years of work, the game's developer, 3D Realms , told its employees to collect their stuff and put it in boxes. The next week, the company was sued for millions by its publisher for failing to finish the sequel. Front and center in the photo sits a large guy with a boyish face. You can't tell from the picture, but he had gotten choked up when he made the announcement. Now 46 years old, he'd spent much of his adult life trying to make a single game, and failed over and over again.
What happened to that project has been shrouded in secrecy, and rumors have flown about why Broussard couldn't manage to finish his life's work.
What went so wrong? Broussard would not talk to Wired for this story. He was polite about it, but because his firm is being sued over its failure to complete Duke Nukem Forever, he declined to be interviewed, as did his cofounder and partner, Scott Miller. Broussard also emailed his former employees to warn them not to talk; many refused my requests, often because they remain friends with Broussard.
But enough were willing to discuss the game — almost all anonymously — that a picture began to emerge, aided by Broussard's and Miller's prodigious postings on discussion boards and a handful of public interviews.
Broussard and Miller met in the late '70s in Dallas, during Miller's senior year of high school. They would hang out in the computer lab, programming clunky 2-D and text-adventure games. When Miller was in his twenties, he invented the shareware model of selling games and formed his company, Apogee which started going by 3D Realms in : He'd break a game into chunks, release it for free on BBSes, get people addicted, and then charge them for the remaining parts.
By , he was publishing and marketing titles created by others. He quit his day job and brought Broussard on. They were a study in contrasts: Miller, guarded and quiet, became the savvy business dealer, while Broussard — a voluble, energetic, ponytailed presence who carried around a single notebook as his organizational tool — became the creative impresario, famous for an unerring sense of what was fun.
In , the duo published Wolfenstein 3D , created by a then tiny studio called id Software. It was the first game to let players run around a 3-D first-person environment shooting enemies, and it became a breakout hit, selling , copies. The realistic, lead-spewing shoot-'em-up was born. By , Broussard began concocting his own breakout game — one that would upend the conventions of the fledgling genre. Where other titles were gloomy and self-important, his would be brassy, colorful, and funny.
Instead of playing as a faceless marine, gamers would play as Duke Nukem, "a combo of John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, and Arnold," as Broussard described him. Broussard and Miller assembled a seven-person team to build the product. The pair had a knack for discovering talent: One of their recruits was a year-old programmer from Rhode Island — barely out of high school — who created their game engine, the crucial piece of software that displays the 3-D world for the player.
After a year and a half of work, Duke Nukem 3D was released online in January Sales were explosive. The game was addictively fun and crammed with racy humor, including strippers you could tip at which point they'd flash their pixelated boobs and mutant pigs dressed in LAPD-like uniforms. Critics went fairly mad with praise. In most games, the world was static, but Duke Nukem players could interact with objects — they could get Duke to play pool or admire himself in a mirror "Damn, I'm looking good!
The title sold about 3. In April , Broussard announced a follow-up: Duke Nukem Forever, which he promised would outdo the original in humor, interactivity, and fun. The firm set no formal deadline, but Miller predicted the game would be out within about a year, "well before" Christmas Broussard compared Duke to Nintendo's Mario — a character that would star in title after title, year after year.
Part of what caught Broussard off guard was the sheer speed at which videogames were improving. In the late '90s, the processing speed of computer chips exploded, so each year programmers were releasing more and more powerful game engines — able to handle increasingly lifelike graphics, more enemies onscreen at a time, smarter artificial intelligence, and more objects that could be destroyed. This ignited an arms race in game development. Barely a year later, though, it looked antiquated.
Broussard's key rival in the Dallas gaming scene, id Software, had announced its Quake II engine, which produced graphics that made Build seem blocky and crude. Broussard decided to license the Quake II engine, figuring it would save him precious time; programming an engine from scratch can take years. When the engine was released in December , Broussard's team quickly began creating game levels, monsters, and weapons around it. Instead, Duke Nukem Forever became the biggest videogame that never was.
A few key milestones. The sequel, Duke Nukem Forever, is announced in April Fans and critics rave. Broussard says, "We're sick of jumping through pointless PR hoops.
By May , the team had created enough material to show off at E3, the annual videogame industry convention. Duke Nukem Forever was set in Vegas; in the game's plot, Duke operates a strip club and then has to fight off invading aliens.
Broussard showed a trailer featuring a dozen different scenes, including Duke fighting on the back of a moving truck, jet airplanes crashing, and furious firefights with aliens. Critics were awed: "It sets a new benchmark for making a 3-D game more like a Hollywood movie," Newsday proclaimed.
Broussard was clearly obsessed with making his product as aesthetically appealing as possible. When he brought a few journalists over to a computer to show off bits of the game, he pointed out the way you could see individual wrinkles on characters' faces and mused over how to make his campfire more realistic.
Behind the scenes, though, Broussard was already unhappy with the results and was craving better technology. Its graphics were more realistic still, and Unreal was better suited to crafting wide-open spaces.
One evening just after E3, while the team sat together, a programmer threw out a bombshell: Maybe they should switch to Unreal? Switching engines again seemed insane — it would cost another massive wad of money and require them to scrap much of the work they'd done. But Broussard decided to make the change.
Only weeks after he showed off Duke Nukem Forever, he stunned the gaming industry by announcing the shift to the Unreal engine. I never wanted to kill the game. We got things turned around dramatically in , with a lot of new hires, and most of the game as it exists today was created in that timeframe. DNF was spectacularly saved from development hell in September when Borderlands developer Gearbox bought the Duke Nukem intellectual property and announced plans to polish the game off and release for PC, PS3 and Xbox next year.
Publisher Take-Two sued the developer a lawsuit Broussard calls "bitter" for failing to deliver the game in a reasonable time frame. They settled in May. Most people play games to escape and enjoy a fantasy for a while. Buy Duke Nukem Forever from Amazon [? Sometimes we include links to online retail stores. If you click on one and make a purchase we may receive a small commission.
Read our policy. Jump to comments Editor wyp Wesley is Eurogamer's editor. He likes news, interviews, and more news. He also likes Street Fighter more than anyone can get him to shut up about it.
GTA Trilogy has removed some cheats for technical reasons. Duke Nukem Forever was initially scheduled for release on May 3 in the United States and May 6 internationally and after another delay was finally released on June 14 in North America and June 10 worldwide, nearly four weeks after the game had 'gone gold' after 15 years. One may also ask, who made Duke Nukem Forever? Many believe that the game as it currently exists is dead. A week after 3D Realms shut down development, Take-Two sued, arguing that by failing to produce the game, 3D Realms had deprived the publisher of future profits.
Take-Two also demanded the source code for Duke Nukem Forever. Gearbox Software just announced that it's bringing back the original Duke Nukem 3D in a special 20th Anniversary Edition World Tour that packs in 8 new levels , a ton of freshly recorded voice lines and a modest graphics update.
Even better, all this new content was designed by much of the classic's original team. John has taken to Twitter to lament that no new Duke projects — be it a game or movie — seem to be happening.
There does not appear to be any upcoming Duke Nukem game , there is no Duke Nukem movie in the works. The last game to be published under the Apogee name was Stargunner in Since , all the company's games have been using a 3D engine even if the gameplay is 2D, like in Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project.
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