Well, this came out of nowhere.
And it was starting to look like they would actually finish the game after all this time, too!
I’m not a huge fan of 3D Realms or Duke Nukem, but they did publish a lot of the games I played when I was a kid (not the least of which was Wolfenstein 3-D, aka the great-grandfather of all first-person shooters) so they deserve my respect for that, if nothing else.
That said, you have to admit that something like this was bound to happen given that they’d been working on the same game for 13 years, with the entire process apparently being self-funded. I mean, Half-Life and its sequels were both bankrolled by Gabe Newell and yet those two games’ development cycles combined were still shorter than DNF’s.
Right now I’m wondering if some other studio will buy the DNF assets and finish the game.
This blog entry reveals a little light on why the game took so damn long. Apparently, around 2001, the project was turned into a publicity stunt by 3DR and Epic Games to effectively promote the Unreal Engine for the next decade.
Or maybe not…. looks a little too far-fetched, especially the beat-down with the chair at the end…
This seems to be more on the money:
http://csnation.totalgamingnetwork.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1215273#post1215273