Always Bet on Duke

Duke Nukem Forever is alive. I repeat, this is not a drill, Duke Nukem Forever is alive. Yeah, I know it’s been alive for many years, but just in development limbo at 3D Realms, but this time it’s for real! As in, it’s been played by the public. This past weekend at PAX in Seattle, Duke Nukem Forever had its first playable demo. Now, how it got to PAX is kind of interesting. 3D Realms started development on the Duke Nukem 3D sequel 13 years ago on the Quake 2 engine. A year after, they transitioned to the original Unreal Engine. Then in 2004 they moved over to the Doom 3 engine and worked with that pretty much until now. Now that you know the technical side of things, 3D Realms was kind of involved in a spitting war for many years with the company that owns the rights to publish the game, Take-Two Interactive. Take-Two kept injecting 3D Realms with money to get this game done, but never saw anything. Meanwhile, 3D Realms was losing money left and right and last year asked Take-Two again for more money. They gave 3D Realms less than they wanted and so they decided to shutter the company. A few days later, 3D Realms got sued by Take-Two for failing to deliver their product. That lawsuit was recently settled. Now, a company by the name of Gearbox (developers of last year’s hit, Borderlands) purchased the rights to the Duke Nukem property from 3D Realms. Gearbox is headed by a guy named Randy Pitchford who actually used to work at 3D Realms and did some work on DN3D. They bought the rights and started working on DNF, this time in Unreal Engine 3. Today, the game has been showed off in public and is playable. They haven’t released any official screenshots or trailers yet because they’d rather have PAX visitors take pictures on their cameraphones. However, here’s some footage of the game in action:

You have no idea how excited I am for this! I loved DN3D and I love how Gearbox did Borderlands. EXCITEMENT! OMG! The game ships next year for PC, PS3, and 360.