SpawnPoint

It's been ten years, so long that the delay has become a joke that has itself worn out its welcome. It is an act of the most unbridled gall to boldly announce that after all this time, you're actually going to release Duke Nukem 3D. Yet, with a verve of one announcing their plans to conquer Russia in the winter, that's just what 3D-Realms president Scott Miller declared, as recently as last year. Late 2008. For sure. Come hell or high water. This time, really, really now! And then on February 8, 2008, 3D-Realms co-founder George Broussard jumped in to say 'not so fast' - we're not guaranteeing anything.

It would make sense if it turned out to be a psychological experiment, a clever hoax, or a plot by a Super Villain to drive us all crazy. Yet 3D-Realms seems to be a legitimate software company. Max Payne and Prey had to have come from somewhere; we couldn't have just imagined them. Ah, but read the fine print. These games, while produced by 3D-Realms, were actually developed by other companies. Even the three Duke Nukem Mobile games, the most recent spawns of the series, were actually developed by Machine Works Northwest.

What would actually make sense is if it were all a clever marketing gimmick, used to keep the company's name in the headlines whenever it's starved for releases that year. Why not? After all, if you actually released such a title, how could you possibly live up to the hype and anticipation after all this time? But if you roll along with the joke, accepting Vaporware awards from Wired magazine and tossing out a teaser trailer every now and then, you just feed the legend. It's like believing in Santa Claus after awhile. Heck, it's harmless fun, and in the meantime please enjoy our other game releases.

In the end, the puzzle is almost more fun than the game... Who killed Duke Nukem?

In the Beginning, there was Apogee...

And the games flowed like wine. Pretty much anybody who was playing PC games in the early 1990's had to have encountered at least a few Apogee games. Apogee didn't invent the concept of shareware games, but it certainly perfected it. And their previews were generous - you could play quite far for free before being asked to pay for the rest of the game. The original Duke Nukem, released in 1991 by Apogee, was a DOS platformer with so-so EGA graphics and squeaky speaker sounds - it was pretty good for its time, but it's a codger now. The sequel, Duke Nukem 2, came out in 1993, and that is just the point where you can sense the curse begin to take hold.

Let me throw down another card from the deck of legends - Halloween Harry. Apogee released Alien Carnage the same year as Duke Nukem 2, and if you download those two games and play them today on a DOS emulator side by side, you will have no doubt afterward where the love went. Alien Carnage looked awesome for its day and even looks pretty good now. It's a platform shooter, but it is quite possibly the finest platform shooter ever crafted. Duke Nukem 2 suffers by comparison.

And then 3D happened...

Apogee was the midwife when the 3D gaming revolution was born. 1992 was also the year that Wolfenstein 3D was released, developed by id Software and published by Apogee. And Wolfenstein begat Doom, and Doom begat Heretic, and Heretic begat Hexen, and the gaming world simply could not shut up about any of them. Until Apogee started counting its cards and asking itself, "how do I stay in the game?" The only answer apparent was to renovate one of their platform games to 3D. After all, id Software had leaped effortlessly from Dangerous Dave and Commander Keen to 3D games; so, how hard could it be? Really, Doom and friends were actually pseudo-3D anyway. So Apogee begat 3D-Realms, and it's still sore from the labor to this day.

Duke Nukem 3D was revolutionary for its time, and yet its curse was that it was born at the precise moment when everybody on Earth was suddenly producing miracles of gaming left and right. Hexen allowed you to look up and down, let you fly, allowed walls to move, and could chain many events from one trigger, but it was still basically a Doom engine with some upgrades bolted on. Duke Nukem would have the Build engine, and 3D-Realms surely held this dear baby to its adoring chest in the silent watches of the night. It was 1996. What could possibly go wrong?

The next sound we heard was the Bambi-meets-Godzilla moment when Quake squished Duke Nukem 3D into a juicy spot. Quake blew away everything that went before it in 3D gaming, and of course the series is still being released, sold, and played today, thank you very much.

And the poker game begins!

Let's look back at a time-point we breezed over earlier: Prey. Prey (that's 'prey' as in opposite of 'predate', not 'pray' as in 'pray it gets released') was based on nothing more than the modified Doom engine, and was - again - not developed by 3D-Realms. This tells you something: even the Build engine couldn't be extended to meet their needs.

If you play Duke Nukem 3D today, you almost get heartburn. There's the daringly innovative environment - never again would a FPS be this devoted to trying to make every single object be interactive. DN3D got love, tons of it. And there it is, stuck forever in 1996. With anengine that doesn't go very far beyond a modified Doom engine. The game today feels less like you're walking around and more like you're a little car moving on a track through an amusement-park dark-ride. It's not really 3D, after all, it's "2.5D". Shadow Warrior, released in 1997, would be the last game developed in-house at 3D-Realms, and it, too, with the Build engine.

Since then, it's all been vapor. But of course, plenty of good games have been published through 3D-Realms. But if all you do is publish what others produce, pretty soon somebody's going to ask why we need a middle man.

The only way forward:

Really, actually releasing DNF today would be a waste of everyone's time. These ten years have gone not to development, but to half-building, tearing apart, and rebuilding it halfway again. Developers have come in and walked off angry. The whole industry has had several revolutions. People have gotten old and gray waiting for it. Pick any of the below as how this story should end:

1. Toss it out to the open-source community. id Software has done this a dozen times; they still make money on the artwork, to play on the free engine. The open-source community has produced the odd FPS title from time to time, Cube being probably the most notable. Granted, native open-source games don't rock anyone's world, but at least they do, by golly, release something!

2. Sell the rights to another company. id Software or Valve comes to mind as companies which might be interested.

3. Pick a significant date and stage a "Mystery of Al Capone's Vaults" style reveal of their hand, in which it is shown that they were bluffing the whole time. Funeral parlors call this "closure". It's healing.

4. Just forget it. First person shooters are a dime a dozen these days (in 1942 dimes).