Gaming’s Eldest Joke Gets One More Punchline

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 first started with It all began John Romero’s development company which earned its money from games like "Doom" and "Duke Nukem 3D". Enough money was earned for the company to continue operations for the next decade without having to release another game. The company’s philosophy was solely focused on the designer. This meant that the developers of the game were given total control over a project without having to argue with game publishers who try to impose their demands on the creation of the product or even its release date.

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.

Every time a newly released game engine was proven to be better that the current one the company was using, they had to drop all the work they’ve done and start anew. Because of this, the game was always nearly completed, however it never got done. .

After that, Romero finally started to notice that his money was running out. He had no product to show for all the years of development other than a few haphazard demos and lots of useless material. Over time, he began to try and find investors to bankroll the company so it can give one last attempt to push "Duke Nukem Forever" onto shelves in an imperfect, but still complete, form. After a while, it just failed dismally. By this point, investors basically gave the intellectual property over to another company – one that would get the game out – with design house Gearbox taking control.

At present, "Duke Nukem Forever" has a release date on May 6, 2011. There’s also a trailer that looks like it can be playable, if it ever comes out. But that remains a question. Gamers have long given up hope. After many years in the working, they don’t really have high hopes for it to ever surface, let alone think it’ll be a great game. But as the trailer itself admits, after 12 years in the making, the game had better be worth all the time and money.