The “Break it Down” Blog

Update #1: Confirmed, 3D Realms is dead.

Big thanks to Ted Regulski for sending this one in and Laurence Hartje for the clever post title.

ShackNews is reporting that 3D Realms is currently in a “situation”. The assumption, given that the company hasn’t released a game in 37 years, is that the “situation” is they are “broke” or more notably, that it’s impossible to run a company and meet payroll solely on hot air and “bullshit dollars” — that’s the currency I imagine they use internally.

While companies related to 3D Realms, Apogee and Deep Silver, seem devoid of financial trouble, no one really cares given that they are currently working on “Duke Nukem Trilogy” — a series of Nintendo DS and PSP games. Not to discredit their work, but when you start talking about a closing of 3D Realms, there is likely only 1 thing people think about: Duke Nukem Forever.

The most maddening bit about this and probably the karmatic force that caused this shit-storm to finally come to a head is 3D Realm’s co-founder and unflinching perfectionist (I don’t mean that in a good way) George Broussard. He’s been at the helm of that company since 1987 and in that time been entirely incapable of keeping the DNF project on track. The DNF development team has been through what I think is now 3 complete engine changes (someone with a better memory fill in the blanks, but I think it’s been something like Quake 2 engine to Unreal Engine to a Custom engine to some final mish-mash engine they were building on now with a 3rd party physics system no one ever heard of ).

I had the impression they were spending so much time (enjoying?) working on tools and creating their own engine that they lost sight of the ultimate goal: The Game. I’m sure it was justified with a hand wave and table-pound along the lines of: “The technology is limiting us! We have to have the right tools!”, but under it all anyone that has managed a team successfully before has to recognize this as a Type-A/perfectionist/developer mind set… your focus and enjoyment comes out of problem-solving, not out of actual product delivery.

The part that makes this announcement feel completely deserved is the constant mysterious babble from Broussard over the last 12 years baiting fans with promises amazement and wonder and year after year, decade after half-decade never delivering anything.

I can’t help but imagine that the realm folks suffering here are the developers that have been pouring blood into that title for 10 years. The creative directors, the designers the coders… the folks that truely believed in the title. They will never get a chance to see their creation sing.

I’d be really curious to know what the feelings are internally towards management/etc. about this whole ordeal… are the team members pissed off/relieved/etc… who’s fault was it really? Honestly, after 12 years, you know there is a tell-all book coming out of this. Hell, there was one for the Xbox 360 and the PS3.

Enjoy the teaser trailer from 2007, and the only gameplay you’ll ever see from this title:

… what’s that? You want to remember what it looked like back in 2004 when it’s released was right around the corner? Sure, here’s the first teaser that I still remember being totally pumped about:

P.S.> If you can tell I’m bitter — I absolutely am. I was never a crazy fan of Duke Nukem 3D… it was just as good as every “great” game of it’s time, but the buzz that started occuring around Duke Nukem Forever, even all those years ago got us all thinking that 3D Realms was going to introduce us, single-handedly, to next-gen gaming. When it continued to not happen year after year after year, with the promise that they would introduce us instead to next-next-gen gaming and so on… well it became more of a pie-in-the-sky adventure than it did a real product.

A young gamer inside of me from the 1990s, sitting infront of his 486 with his 3Dfx VoodoExtreme card is really really sad today…