The gaming community would have never expected the game “Duke Nukem Forever” to come out. It is a sequel to the FPS classic game “Duke Nukem 3D”. It took forever to completely develop DNF. After about a dozen years, being constantly reworked from nothing, gamers thought that it really would take forever to come out, if it would really come out. Undoubtedly, a lot of mishaps and blunders after another came up before the game reached where it currently is.
It all began with John Romero and his game development company, which made a ridiculous amount of money on “Doom” and “Duke Nukem 3D.” There was enough money, in fact, to bankroll the company’s operations and expansion for a decade without putting out another game. The idea behind the company’s philosophy was that it focused on the designer almost entirely. This meant that the creative minds behind the game took near-total control of any project handed to them, without having to deal with executives from game publishers meddling with their product or imposing a definite release date on the team.
This meant that the designers oversee the whole thing, adding their own creative flavor, at their own pace. However, there was a danger that a terrible management could delay the game indefinitely. At first, the game was being developed at a decent pace, with the help of a licensed version of the then-advance Quake Engine. But overtime, they discovered that the Unreal Engine was enormously superior so they set aside all the work they’d already done, licensed the better code and went back to square one to start all over again.
Thus a cycle began. Every time a better game engine would come out, the solution was to drop everything that’s already done and go back to step one. As a result, the way towards completion proved to be longer than ever. And since the company had awful lot money to burn, Romero’s obsession to make the game flawless instead of just releasing it didn’t really do the damage it should have. In fact, the only financial trouble they had was when they put out “Daikatana,” which spectacularly failed to even be remotely playable.
Over time, Romero finally started to realize that he was running out of finances. He had no product to show for all the years of development other than a few chaotic demos and useless materials. So he tried to find investors to support the company, so it could push DNF for the last attempt. Unfortunately for Romero, they failed miserably. By this point, investors gave the intellectual property over to another company that could get the game out. And this is where the design house, Gearbox, would come out.
Now it has a current May 6 2011 release date and a trailer that looks like it can at least be playable if it ever comes out. That’s the big question, though. Gamers don’t have high hopes for it to ever come out, let alone think it’ll be a good game. As the trailer itself admits, after 12 years in development, the game had better be damn good.